The tower of aetherius a.., p.1
The Tower of Aetherius: A Progression Fantasy (Odyssey of the Ethereal Book 1), page 1
THE TOWER OF AETHERIUS
ODYSSEY OF THE ETHEREAL BOOK 1
Jamie Kojola
To my spouse, who believed I could do this when I didn’t believe. You are my best friend and I love you.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Theresa M. Paavola
Cover design by Harry Bui
ISBN: 978-1-0394-4696-0
Published in 2023 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumaudio.com
Contents
CHAPTER 1: Waking Up Sucks
CHAPTER 2: Crossing the City
CHAPTER 3: Climbing to the Sun
CHAPTER 4: The First Fight
CHAPTER 5: Not-So-Sweet Dreams
CHAPTER 6: Breathing Causes So Many Problems
CHAPTER 7: Not Geppetto
CHAPTER 8: The Vault
CHAPTER 9: The Elf Ghost
CHAPTER 10: The Haul
CHAPTER 11: To the Tower
CHAPTER 12: The First Floor
CHAPTER 13: The First Quest
CHAPTER 14: Baldonoff’s Keep
CHAPTER 15: Traitor
CHAPTER 16: Talking Heads
CHAPTER 17: Foggy Banks
CHAPTER 18: The Village of Masters
CHAPTER 19: Master Ascyn
CHAPTER 20: The Soul Witch
CHAPTER 21: Training with the Masters
INTERLUDE: Dragons of a Feather, Flocking Together
CHAPTER 22: Castle of Dread
CHAPTER 23: Life is a Lich
CHAPTER 24: Ice Cascade
CHAPTER 25: Tree and Rock
CHAPTER 26: The Shadow Cat (Dragon)
INTERLUDE: A Market Date
CHAPTER 27: New Life
CHAPTER 28: The Hive Queen
CHAPTER 29: Gleaming the (Ice) Cube
CHAPTER 30: There Can Be Only One
CHAPTER 31: We Didn’t Start the Fire... Promise.
CHAPTER 32: Tier Two
CHAPTER 33: Tedium
CHAPTER 34: Stand Your Ground
CHAPTER 35: Murder Hornets
CHAPTER 36: Ignorance is Bliss
CHAPTER 37: Burning Vermin
CHAPTER 38: Nidhogg’s Bane
CHAPTER 39: You’ve Got a Quest
CHAPTER 40: Domains
CHAPTER 41: Heart Engineering
CHAPTER 42: Nidhogg Strikes
CHAPTER 43: Arkaziel Strikes Back
CHAPTER 44: Fluffy Stuff
CHAPTER 45: Dwarfsketball
CHAPTER 46: Conflict Resolution
CHAPTER 47: Castle Lumley
CHAPTER 48: Evil Rituals of Evil
CHAPTER 49: Ever Upward
CHAPTER 50: Worst Tower Defense Game Ever
CHAPTER 51: The Paw-sitively Hiss-terical Riddler
CHAPTER 52: Chess Match
CHAPTER 53: Trials of a Shifter
CHAPTER 54: Typhera Echidra
CHAPTER 55: Rick the Trapmaster
CHAPTER 56: Loot!
CHAPTER 57: Ride the Dragon
CHAPTER 58: Nivathar, the Silver City
CHAPTER 59: Shopping in Nivathar
CHAPTER 60: The Stagnant Swamp of Sogginess
CHAPTER 61: A Touch of Khaos
CHAPTER 62: Not-So-Secret Garden
CHAPTER 63: Raven’s Hollow
CHAPTER 64: Goblins, Redcaps, and Little More Besides
CHAPTER 65: An End to Sorrow
CHAPTER 66: The Master
CHAPTER 67: The Mechanical Labyrinth
CHAPTER 68: Chamber of Stone
CHAPTER 69: Temptation
CHAPTER 70: Tethorian Terror
CHAPTER 71: Canoroth
CHAPTER 72: Cryostrialis
CHAPTER 73: Point of Origin
CHAPTER 74: Happily Ever After
CHAPTER 75: Floor 44
CHAPTER 76: Dragon’s Roar
CHAPTER 77: Aetheria versus the Train
CHAPTER 78: The Great Depression
CHAPTER 79: Chaos Fragments
CHAPTER 80: Time Loops Bad, Library Good
CHAPTER 81: The Halfway Boss, Pyreheart Emberwing
CHAPTER 82: From the Ashes
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
Waking Up Sucks
Aesca awoke. Reluctant to banish the darkness, she slowly opened her eyes. Her body felt charged like never before. Her pajamas were missing. No underwear, either, and this was unlike her. Aesca maintained a rigid nightly routine of getting into her pajamas after she finished her raiding in Eldest Fantasy Wars Online. What had been different about last night?
The World First boss kill? Yeah, that’s why I went to bed later than usual. Pete and Callie wanted to talk afterward, and I fell into bed, still dressed.
That did not explain why she was naked. Tiny glimpses of memories and images flickered through her mind. Something about EMTs giving her CPR? How could she have watched someone give her CPR?
That isn’t physically possible.
Aesca exhaled in a giant sigh and coughed loudly. Thick dust lay everywhere, choking her and making her throat feel hoarse. Her slow waking was hastened by a fit of coughing, which only disturbed the dust, making it swirl thickly in the air. A mystery beyond being naked scared her mind into rapidly processing her predicament.
Where the hell am I?
The building comprised only a single, expansive room. The exterior walls were taller than a person and curved upward into a dome. No other walls or pillars existed in the building. It made the room feel spacious. The stonework looked ancient, yet the building seemed stable.
It’s like a giant circus tent. What’s holding up the roof?
The sudden thought it would collapse on her wriggled through her mind like a sour taste she couldn’t dispel. The very little she could see of the stone walls showed extremely faded murals. Maybe another building could reveal more about who once lived here.
Besides her and the thick dust, only two other things seemed notable in the building. Next to where she lay, a fire burned. The flames were blue. Two foot-long pieces of wood crossed each other, and a circle of stones surrounded it. Despite the blue flame burning the wood, it did not seem to consume it. The imprint of where she had lain in the dust made clear she had huddled beside the fire for warmth.
Cripes! I don’t remember drinking before bed.
A large wooden chest stood at the edge of the light provided by the blue fire. It looked neither old nor new and had no dust on it. The trunk had a small metal plate on the front. Even with the help of the firelight, Aesca could not make out the writing. She stood and walked over to the chest, brushing at the dust that clung to her. It was futile with how omnipresent it was.
Aetheria. The chest had her EFWO character’s name on it. She pinched herself. “Ow.” She did not wake up.
“Mrrrrrr.” Half groan, half curse at life. She pushed up the lid of the chest. It came up quickly. For a moment, she thought she saw a flicker of teal energy glow around the chest and then vanish. Aesca braced herself for incoming trap damage. Nothing happened. “Me and my overactive imagination while lucid dreaming.”
There’s an idea.
Aesca focused on the idea of the fire getting larger to provide a more intense light to the room. Nothing happened. She tried to will a hot dog into existence in her hands. That didn’t work either. She pinched herself again. Nope.
“Get a grip, Aesca Lampi.” Scolding herself in her best imitation of Sister Bethany, the nun at her Catholic elementary school, she squared her shoulders and set about seeing what was in the chest. Clothes! The cure to nakedness. Naked beggars couldn’t be choosy beggars.
A few different outfits lay in the chest. Aesca found socks, underwear, a sports bra, black canvas-like pants, a sleeveless turtleneck, and a long red coat, really more a duster, that she immediately fell in love with. It all went on right away, along with the front-lace combat boots that matched the coat. Unlike the jacket, the boots’ coloration was hard to discern in the dim firelight. Black or dark red? Who cares? They fit nicely and could crush a lot of peanuts at Texas Roadhouse.
She even gave the empty room a twirl or two. The perfect fit for each piece of clothing blew her mind. Every single piece appeared perfectly tailored to her. Maybe it’s magic? Aesca twirled again, jumped, and stepped side to side. It was all perfect. The calf-length long coat somehow never got in her way. I’m firmly convinced excellent tailoring is magic, and it is magic I can believe in. Man, I need magic bras in the real world.
The side of the chest held a few belts and a knife. It even had a sheath for the blade, so the belt and sheath went on. The edge of the knife looked very sharp.
It must be magic too.
Aesca glimpsed her own eyes reflected on the metal, which showed two bright teal lights. Did her eyes glow now? It was the only thing that made sense to her.
The only other thing still in the chest was a scroll. Straight out of a video game and in a trunk before Aesca. Ugh. I’m firing my subconscious. Tacky gold holder? Bitch, please. You know most scrolls didn’t have a holder.
Annoyed at historical inaccuracies within her dream, Aesca pulled the scroll out and unrolled it. For a moment, the characters on it danced through her mind. Strange glyphs and sigils she couldn’t comprehend covered the scroll. An undecipherable divine script the mortal mind could not understand assaulted her brain. The world turned sideways. Her mind shot through a prism, refracted a million times, and infused with who knew what recombined in another prism with a drop of lemon, and the world turned right side up. Suddenly, the scroll she was looking at made perfect sense. Why did she feel a little dizzy? Oh, well.
Dearest Aetheria,
Welcome to the family. We believe in you. Good luck climbing the tower.
—Aetherius
Why was she getting a scroll from a god in the Eldest Fantasy Wars Online? Stupid. Never had Aesca experienced such a ridiculous dream, and she wanted to wake up now. If this dream had a manager, she would call him to her table and go full Karen on his ass. Why was the message addressed to her video game character?
Just because I have blue-green hair down to my hips, and it sparkles in the darkness with internal illumination, they go and call me Aetheria.
Wait a minute!
Aesca’s hair was brown. Also, it was only shoulder length. It did not glow in the dark. At all. Ordinary people’s hair did not glow in the dark. Not even in dreams.
“Damn. EFWO never really captured the dazzling hair. Good job by my imagination.” Still, hair that long needed a manager. A quick search through the chest turned up some scrunchies. Her glowing hair was in a manageable high ponytail a few seconds later. Magical scrunchies, hopefully.
I wonder what enchantments a scrunchie could hold? Why don’t video games have a scrunchie slot? Some jerks would whine about how men can’t use them, completely ignoring they could if they had long hair, and then the devs would take it away because the loudest idiots get all the attention.
A feeling of sickness in her gut interrupted Aesca’s internal monologue about the unfairness of game developers. Something terrible was about to happen. Uncertain of what it was or even how she knew, she dove back toward the fire and rolled into a fetal position, pulling her arms and hands over her head.
Crrrrrraaack.
A horrible sound filled the air. The earth shook. Rocks fell. Dust rose thickly. Suppose this was what a massive earthquake was like. Aesca felt awful for past jokes about California sinking into the ocean after a Big One. The few minor earthquakes she had experienced on vacations hadn’t seemed so apocalyptic, so this enlightened her about the terror an earthquake produced.
The ground continued to heave. A malicious and suffocating intent fell upon Aesca. It seemed directed at her and everything within a few miles of her. The intensity of the anger and its indiscriminate spread were irrational. No one in her life had ever directed so much spite, hate, and disdain at her. The earth shook. Rocks split and fell around her, and weird sounds like tectonic plates smashing against each other in terrible groans continuously assaulted her ears. Dust and debris fell like rain.
Then something hit the domed ceiling from the outside, and large roof pieces fell. One crashed down onto her legs. She thought she screamed before blackness took her into unconsciousness.
She awoke. It marked the second time she blinked to consciousness, and it sucked far more than the first time. Pain shot through her entire left leg. Aesca could not feel much there, and the massive rock over her leg looked like it weighed thousands of pounds. She struggled to push the large boulder, and in doing so noted a difference in her hand size and arm thickness, a new slenderness she hadn’t possessed. Where the hell am I?
Appearances aside, it seemed like her strength had increased in this dream more than in the real world. She pushed, pulled, prodded, and even kicked with her still-freed right leg. Aesca’s struggle with the rock seemed to take hours; in reality, she freed herself within five minutes.
Another aftershock shook the ground, and a terrible sound, like something breaking, echoed through the foundation of the building. Things quickly went from bad to worse as the earth went from a comfortable horizontal position to teetering violently. The floor stabilized at a sharp incline. The boulder she’d finally got off her leg tumbled down the floor and smashed through the stone wall. The wood of the fire followed.
Acting before thinking, she threw her hand out to catch the logs. Somehow, she grabbed a piece of wood and balanced the other against it, saving the fire. Of course, her hand was in the blue fire now. A rush of excruciating pain and heat flared in her hand, and then the room descended into darkness. No more fire. No more wood either. Had she dropped it in the assault of pain?
In shock, she failed to stabilize herself on the incline and tumbled down to crash into the wall. Her right knee smashed into the rock with an impact that sounded like breaking bones. As if that weren’t bad enough, another series of aftershocks occurred. The chest came tumbling down. It smashed into her torso, rebounded a little, hit her head, then fell to rest against the wall beside her. Flashing lights filled her vision, and pain consumed her.
At length, the tide of pain and flashing lights before her eyes receded. The fire was gone, but with streams of light through the holes in the roof and the dim glow of her hair, she could see. Her left leg no longer hurt. Checking it left her stunned. She had no injuries. Even her clothes had mended. How?
Moving both legs revealed that neither was hurt. The pain had gone entirely. Not even a scratch remained from the giant rock that had crushed her leg. Not even a discolored bruise marked where she’d broken a knee against the wall. Her hands came away with no blood when she ran them over where the chest had impacted her head. No blood remained on the ground. I didn’t imagine getting hit in the head.
“H-e-double hockey sticks. What in the world is going on?” Aesca cringed at how Minnesotan, the polite version of hell, she sounded in her mind.
