At the very peak, where the air was cold enough to crack bone, he found the King of Oryn. The monarch was withered, fused to a throne of glass, his eyes glowing with a terrifying, hollow light. He wasn't reaching for the gods; he was feeding the Spire with the "purity" of the stolen children to keep himself immortal. The Spire of Glory was a siphon.

The interior was not stone, but light. Gravity felt thin, like a half-remembered dream. As Kaelen climbed the winding, floating staircases, the Spire tested him. It didn’t use monsters; it used .

For a thousand years, the Spire had been a myth—a needle of white stone said to pierce the heavens, built by a forgotten king to reach the gods. But when the Great Eclipse turned day into eternal twilight, the Spire didn't just appear; it grew. It tore through the earth in the center of the capital, a jagged shard of ivory and gold that hummed with a low, bone-shaking frequency.

Kaelen, a disgraced knight who had traded his sword for a blacksmith’s hammer, stood at the base of the monument. He wasn't there for the treasure rumored to be at the top, nor for the divine favor the priests promised. He was there because his daughter had been "called"—drawn into the Spire’s glowing entrance like a moth to a flame, along with dozens of other children.

In the Chamber of Valor, he saw himself as the hero he had once dreamed of being—untouchable, adored by the masses, his failures erased. To pass, he had to reject the vision, embracing his scars and the quiet, dusty life of a smith. In the Chamber of Wisdom, the Spire offered him the secrets of the stars, but only if he let go of his "mortal attachments."

With every strike, the "Glory" faded. The illusions of grandeur shattered. The white stone turned back into common granite, and the stolen children awoke from their trance.

Kaelen didn’t use a legendary blade to win. He used the heavy, soot-stained hammer from his belt—a tool of creation, not a weapon of war. He struck the glass throne, not with hatred, but with the rhythmic strike of a man shaping iron. Clang. Clang. Clang.

"My daughter is not an attachment," Kaelen roared, his voice echoing against walls that bled starlight.