The Boy on the Tower

“Sir Knight, if I jump, do I land in our world or somewhere else now?”

Korax tightened his grip on Apollo’s reins and looked up.

The old watchtower loomed above the trees, a broken tooth of stone rooted in the hill. High on its crumbling lip, a thin figure stood outlined against a washed-out sky, arms spread a little for balance, hair whipped flat by the wind. A boy. No more than twelve.

“Not the kind of greeting I usually hope for,” Korax muttered.

He swung down from the high saddle. Apollo tossed his head, dark mane rippling.

“Stay,” Korax told him.

The stallion snorted, muscles twitching, his ears and eyes fixed on the tower with unease. He could feel it too, the way the air here had been rubbed thin, like cloth worn smooth by too many hands.

Korax always seemed to find himself where ordinary folk started asking the wrong questions about what lay on the other side of their realm.

The path up the hill was a spiral of worn steps cut long ago by soldiers who were now ghosts. As Korax climbed, the air changed. Sound dulled, as if someone were closing heavy doors one by one. His own heartbeat grew louder in his ears despite the calm, trained rhythm of his breathing. A faint, insect-wing buzzing tickled his teeth.

Another thin place, he thought. Greybeard had marked the towers like this on his maps with a cautious circle and three underlined words: WATCH, DON’T TOUCH.

Of course, the Realm had other plans.

Halfway up, the boy’s voice floated down again, tremulous but clear.

“I mean it,” he called. “I’m not trying to be dramatic. I just… don’t know which side is real anymore.”

“Usually the side with gravity is real,” Korax shouted back. “Let’s stick to that for the moment.”

He heard a choked, surprised laugh.

At the top, the stairs opened onto the tower’s cracked platform. The remaining stones leaned outward slightly, as though tired of holding themselves together. Wind rushed over the open edges, carrying the clean smell of pine from the surrounding forest and something else underneath it, like rust ground into dust and left on the tongue.

The boy stood right at the brink of falling. The toes of his leather shoes peeked over the void below, scuffed and muddy. His clothes hung loose on his frame, as if he’d grown too fast or eaten too little. He held himself very still, every line of him tight, as though any movement might tip a scale he couldn’t see.

Korax stepped onto the platform slowly, both hands open and visible.

“Mind if I share the view?” he asked.

The boy glanced back. His eyes were rimmed red, but they were bright, quick, measuring Korax even as he trembled.

“You’re Korax,” he said, awe and exhaustion braided together in his voice. “The legendary knight.”

“Sometimes,” Korax replied. “Sometimes I’m just a man who can’t control his horse. Titles shift around more than you’d think.”

The boy huffed a small breath that might have been a scoff.

“I’m Jorren,” he said. “My father works the south fields. Well… worked.” His gaze flicked down again, to whatever waited below. “Maybe he still does. Maybe he doesn’t. That’s sort of the problem now.”

Korax moved closer, careful to keep a few paces between them and not crowd him toward the edge.

“What brings you up here, Jorren?” he asked. “It’s a long climb just to give the sky something to listen to.”

Jorren lifted one shaky arm and pointed outward.

“Look,” he said.

Korax followed his finger.

From ground level, the horizon had seemed ordinary: forest rolling into hills, then a smear of distant mountains, including the jagged crown of Mount Llywelyn. But from up here, with the world spread out like a map, the wrongness was impossible to ignore.

Half the sky was rippled.

Not like heat mirage or storm cloud. Like fabric stirred by an invisible hand. Faint lines of light ran through it in a crooked lattice, bending in ways the eye didn’t like. Where those lines crossed one another, tiny dark-edged sparks flared, as though someone were poking holes in the firmament with a hot needle.

Korax’s stomach turned. Another tear, pressing outward from the Veil.

“Have you told anyone about this?” he asked quietly.

“Just my dad.” Jorren swallowed. “He says it’s just clouds, or my imagination. Said I’ve been reading too many old war stories.” He licked his lips. “Yesterday I was up here and I saw a bird fly into it. It… folded.”

He made a twisting motion with his hands, fingers tangling.

“Folded?” Korax echoed.

“Like someone crumpled it mid-flight and tried to smooth it out wrong.” Jorren’s voice shook. “It came out with its wings on backwards. Kept trying to fly the wrong way. It didn’t understand why the air wasn’t working.”

“Where is it now?” Korax asked.

“Forest floor, probably, sir.” Jorren shrugged with one bony shoulder. “It hit a tree. I didn’t see it get up.”

They stood in silence for a moment, staring at the wavering sky. The buzzing in Korax’s teeth deepened, as if someone were plucking invisible wires.

“How long has it been like this, Jorren?” he asked.

“A week,” Jorren said. “Maybe longer. Time feels strange up here. Sometimes the sun jumps a little when I blink.” He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eye, as if to steady it. “I came to check on the sheep at the edge of the trees for the local shepherd. Looked up. Saw… that.” He nodded toward the warped heavens. “It felt like the sky showed me seams. Like in clothes. Stitch lines. Places where it could come apart.” His shoulders hitched. “If the seams come undone, who says this is the drop I think it is?”

Korax took a slow breath and let it out through his nose.

“Let’s assume, just for the sake of your legs,” he said, “that stone and distance still work the way they always have. At least from tower to ground.”

“You can’t know that, can you?” Jorren replied, his mouth twisting.

“Not exactly,” Korax admitted. “But I can tell you the most likely outcome is you breaking something you need and feeling every heartbeat of it.” His tone softened. “And if there were another world you could reach just by throwing yourself off tall things, I doubt it’s a better one than this.”

Jorren’s fingers tightened at his sides.

“You ride the black horse where the tears are,” he said. “Everyone knows that. If there’s anyone who could jump and land somewhere that makes more sense, it’s you.”

“Then let me tell you this, young one.” Korax’s voice went dry. “I’ve never once landed somewhere that made more sense than where I left. Things don’t get simpler out there. Just stranger.”

That earned a real, if brief, laugh.

The lattice in the sky shivered. One intersection flared bright enough to leave a ghost-spot in Korax’s vision. The buzzing climbed the back of his skull.

“Why here?” Jorren whispered. “Why our fields? Our tower? There are bigger places with more important people.”

“The tears don’t care about our maps,” Korax said. “They come wherever the fabric’s worn thin. Where history has pulled too hard for too long.” He nodded toward the trees. “There was a battle here once. Decades before you were born. Hundreds of men died arguing over which duke got to tax your father’s fields. Their anger left bruises in the air.”

“So they did this,” Jorren muttered. “Even now.”

“In a way,” Korax replied, choosing his next words. “The Veil presses where something’s already cracked.”

Another flare. The air tasted like a storm trying to form but failing, pressure without rain.

Jorren shifted his weight, instinctively leaning away from the sky and toward the edge. Pebbles skittered from under his heel, rattling down the tower’s side until silence swallowed them.

“There’s a sound sometimes, too,” he said. “It’s like… like a crowd whispering. Not angry. Just… waiting. Asking me to step forward. It just feels like they expect me to.”

Korax swallowed. He knew that pull too well. He’d felt cousins of it in the Ghostwoods, near the Merfolk Depths, on the frosted cliffs above the Tarred Caverns. It was the universe tilting its hand, offering you the sick, clean simplicity of letting go.

“What do they promise you?” he asked softly.

“That it’ll stop feeling wrong if I go where it is,” Jorren said. “That down isn’t real, so it won’t hurt. That this—” he gestured at the tower, the fields, his own small body “—is a mistake I can fix by falling out of it.”

Korax moved one step closer. The stones under his boot grated, announcing every inch.

“And what do you want?” he asked. “Not them. You.”

Jorren’s jaw clenched hard enough to whiten his knuckles where he’d fisted his hands.

“I want my father to keep complaining about the harvest,” he said. “I want my little sister to steal my boots again and then laugh when I chase her. I want the sky to stay where it belongs.” His voice cracked. “But if it won’t, I don’t want to be the only one who sees it coming apart.”

“You aren’t,” Korax said. “I see it. My friend, the Mystic Greybeard sees it. I have met many people all across the realms who notice the seams.”

“Seeing isn’t helping,” Jorren snapped. His voice bounced off the stone and back down the stairwell, louder than he meant it to be.

“Not yet,” Korax agreed. “But it’s a start.” He lifted both hands slightly, palms down in a calming gesture. “Start with getting off the edge.”

The wind gusted, carrying a faint, far-off murmur. Jorren flinched, shoulders hunching.

“It sounds… tired,” he whispered. “Like it’s been calling a long time and nobody’s answering.”

Korax thought of Greybeard’s lessons. Thin places amplify everything: echoes, fears, temptations. If Jorren had been climbing up here alone, again and again, listening to that murmur coil around him, no wonder the ledge had begun to look like a solution.

“You know what’s on the ground?” Korax asked.

“Stones,” Jorren said after a moment. “Bones, if I jump.”

“My horse,” Korax said. “The road. Your father’s fields, a little walk from here. The shepherd’s flock. The people who have to keep living whether the sky wriggles or not.” He met the boy’s eyes. “And the chance that we can do something about this instead of letting it choose for us.”

“What could I possibly do?” Jorren demanded. “I’m just—”

“—just a boy who saw the seam fray first,” Korax finished for him. “Do you know how many knights and lords would have kept their eyes on their boots and pretended they didn’t see it? You climbed higher to get a better look. That’s braver than half the men who wear steel for a living.”

He held out his bare hand, fingers steady despite the buzzing.

“Come down,” he said. “Tell me exactly when you first saw it. Exactly where you stood, what you heard, what you felt. That’s how we map these things. That’s how we learn where not to step, where to brace, where to repair.”

Jorren stared back at the offered hand. Behind him, the lattice shimmered again, its glow brushing the edges of his hair. For a heartbeat, Korax thought the boy would lean forward into that wrongness and vanish like the bird.

Instead, Jorren took a small step back from the edge.

Then another.

And another.

His knees wobbled. Korax moved, closing the space between them, catching the boy by the arm and pulling him firmly toward the center of the platform. Jorren sagged, breath coming hard, his whole body shaking with the sudden absence of decision.

“I thought if I came up here enough,” he whispered, “it would stop being so scary.”

“It never does,” Korax said. “You just get better at being scared and moving where you need to anyway.”

He kept one hand on Jorren’s shoulder as he guided him toward the stairs. With each step down, the buzzing eased. Sound returned in layers: wind in the trees, a bird calling, Apollo’s impatient snort, the creak of old stone.

At the base of the tower, the world felt solid again. Jorren squinted up, as if surprised.

“It looks smaller from here,” he said.

“Most dangerous things do,” Korax replied.

He walked the boy back toward the scatter of Lowland farmhouses, boots squelching in damp earth. As they went, he asked questions, anchoring Jorren in specifics: the day the sky first rippled, how many times he’d climbed the tower, what the weather had been like, exactly how the bird had twisted.

Jorren answered carefully, almost methodically, the act of remembering pulling him further from the tower’s pull and closer to the ordinary world of fences and furrows.

At the gate to the fields, a man ran toward them, face pale, hands clenched around a hoe as if it were a weapon.

“Jorren!” he shouted. “Where have you—”

He stopped short when he saw Korax’s armor and the stag clasp on his cloak, then bowed awkwardly.

“Sir,” he said, breathless.

“Your son has good eyes,” Korax said. “He noticed something important and had the sense to ask questions.”

The man’s gaze flicked from his boy to the tower, then to the sky. His jaw worked.

“Is it… bad?” he asked.

“The Veil is thinning here,” Korax said. “But nothing is torn. Yet.” He let that sink in. “I’ll send word to the Duke and to Greybeard. They can set wards, place watchers. For now, keep your people away from the tower.”

He met Jorren’s eyes.

“If you hear that whisper again,” he said, “if you feel like you need to go back up there, you’re to tell someone. Preferably someone who doesn’t answer voices from the sky. Your father. The shepherd. The local lord. Me, if I’m within shouting distance.”

Jorren made a face.

“I wasn’t going to go back,” he muttered.

Korax’s mouth twitched.

“Not anymore,” he said.

The boy hesitated, then blurted, “What happens if it does tear?”

Korax thought of contorted backwards animals, grotesque Sentinels from beyond, villages left with neat rows of empty armor, fields where sound fell into holes.

“If that happens,” he said, “I’ll be back, and I won’t be alone. There are people who know how to hold it together for a while, to stitch and brace.” He tapped Jorren lightly on the chest. “You can help by staying on the ground and telling the truth about what you see.”

Jorren swallowed, then nodded hard.

As Korax swung into Apollo’s saddle, the boy called after him.

“Sir Korax?”

He looked back.

“If I hadn’t stepped away,” Jorren said, voice small but steady, “would you have pulled me back anyway?”

“I would have,” Korax said. “The lesson would still have been the same. Just louder.”

Jorren shuddered once, then drew himself up.

“Then I’m glad I walked to you,” he said.

Korax touched two fingers to his brow in acknowledgment, turned Apollo toward the road, and rode off. As soon as the tower dipped below the treeline, he reached for a roll of the southfield map in his saddlebag and, with a bit of charcoal, added a careful mark in the margin:

Tower seam ripples, reported by Jorren of the South Fields. Watch, don’t touch.

Behind him, the boy and the tower shrank to specks against the horizon and the hard line of the mountains. The sky above the watchtower still trembled, seams showing where no one had asked to see them.

But for now, at least, one less soul leaned toward the edge.