The players spent the next hour exploring the castle.
It wasn’t like there was so much to explore, but curiosity had a way of making the mind see possibilities where there were none. The Tower had already proven it was capable of holding surprises, the egg being the biggest one yet and none of them were ready to assu they’d seen it all.
The first floor was just as they’d left it: dusty stone tiles, faint cracks running like spiderwebs along the walls, and faint shafts of light slipping through the occasional slit in the stone. Their footsteps echoed softly, the only other sound coming from the faint whine of the wind curling around the outside. Every so often, a loose pebble skittered across the ground under soone’s boot, loud in the silence.
The tower reminded Drahon of one of those Victorian-like towers in the horror movies he watched back at the orphanage.
One which usually featured an unsuspecting character that enters a scary tower and then, the door gets shut and he or she can’t seem to get out anymore.
If felt frankly so familiar, especially if a normal human was to enter in a Tower as large and scary as this, he or she would be dead as Drahon and the others had fought against a goblin monster guard who he was sure no regular human would have survived.
"I don’t even know what I’m hoping to find," Devon muttered after they’d circled the sa corridor for the third ti. "Treasure chest? Map to the next level? A whole buffet table?"
"Let’s see, as you said, we don’t know what we might find," Ayvira replied almost flatly.
Drahon trailed behind them, running his hand lightly along the wall as they moved. There was sothing oddly calming about the cold roughness of the stone, even if it didn’t answer the questions buzzing in his mind. If this place could be the source of a mythical dragon egg, who was to say it didn’t have more secrets buried sowhere in its crumbling halls?
They climbed the next staircase, spiraling upward into the second floor. This level was narrower, the hallways more cramped, as though the Tower had grown defensive the higher it went. Devon had already summoned his sword and now, he was tapping the poml of his sword against the wall in a lazy rhythm.
"This place gives the creeps," he said. "Too quiet. Like so monster’s waiting for us to turn our backs."
"Or maybe it’s just a tower," Drahon said. "Not everything’s plotting to kill us."
Ayvira snorted, addressing Devon.
"Your summoned sword is for precautionary asures?
"Obviously," Drahon muttered. "The last ti you guys wondered why I summoned my sword, weren’t we attacked by so Large monstrous Draconic goblin monster?"
Ayvira smiled. "Well, it’s good to be safe I guess."
They moved on. Most rooms they found were empty, save for broken furniture that had long since collapsed into piles of unrecognizable debris. A few contained what might once have been storage crates, but ti and dust had reduced them to splinters. There were no glowing artifacts nor were they mysterious chests. The players only noticed the feeling of age and abandonnt in the Tower.
After nearly forty minutes of searching, Ayvira suddenly stopped, her expression flattening a bit.
"...I’m hungry."
Drahon and Devon both looked over at her.
"I an really hungry," she added, hand resting on her stomach. "We’ve been walking around this place for almost an hour now."
Devon raised an eyebrow and grinned. "You didn’t think to say that earlier?, I an, I’ve been hungry since we woke up but kept it in."
"We were busy I guess," she replied.
Drahon rubbed his own stomach, realizing the ache had been there for a while, it just hadn’t been loud enough to grab his attention until she ntioned it.
"Yeah... sa here," he admitted. "Didn’t bring anything with , either."
Devon sighed, leaning back against the nearest wall. "I’ve got nothing in my inventory, you know, so players’ inventories are full of bread and stuffs like that."
Ayvira groaned. "Well, we’re damned. I see no way for us to get food in this cursed world. We definitely can’t eat goblins, even though the large goblin guard corpse is nowhere to be found."
"Makes miss the barbarian," Drahon said.
"Yeah," Devon snickered. "He has all types of food, even for vegetarians like ."
They lingered there a mont, the conversation drifting into complaints about al quality and the lack of decent in-ga cooking chanics. The Tower seed even quieter now.
Eventually, they pushed onward. The stairs leading to the third floor were partially blocked by a collapsed beam, but the three of them managed to squeeze past one by one. The air up here was cooler, and faint trails of dust drifted lazily in the still air.
Drahon spotted sothing glinting faintly near the far end of the hallway. At first he thought it was just a trick of the light, a bit of sun catching on stone, but no, the shimr stayed even as he moved closer.
"What’s that?" he asked, stepping forward.
Devon followed his gaze. "Probably another chunk of broken glass."
Ayvira didn’t comnt, but she was already moving toward it.
The three approached the corner where the object lay half-hidden under a layer of dust. It was thin, rectangular, and the edges caught the light just enough to give it away. Drahon crouched, brushing the dust aside with the back of his hand.
It wasn’t glass. It wasn’t tal, either. It was a card — smooth, dark, and perfectly intact, as if untouched by ti or the Tower’s decay.
There was writing on it.
A faint glow of golden light rippled across its surface as Drahon lifted it into the air. The letters weren’t carved or printed, they seed to float just above the card’s surface.
He squinted.
[A free portal to the Dragon Shop ]
The words hung there and the light reflecting off the card’s edge seed to throb once, like a heartbeat.
Drahon didn’t move. Devon leaned in to see, brow furrowing.
"What... the hell is that supposed to an?"
Drahon smiled.
"It says it’s a free portal to the Dragon Shop."
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