Sitting atop a distant hill, the Tower of Githel rose above the forest canopy like a broken spine of stone. Even from afar, its circular upper structure could be seen drifting between the treetops—silent, watchful, and unchanged through the passing cycles. The forest itself seemed to bend around it, as though even nature refused to press too close.

This was the Tower of Githel, a place spoken of only in lowered voices and half-remembered warnings. No roads led cleanly to it anymore. Paths faded long before reaching its shadow, swallowed by overgrowth and time. It was said to hold the final workings and deepest studies of Lord Githel himself, though few agreed on what that truly meant.

Though not the first to wield Encara, Githel became its most devoted scholar. Where others treated the magic as a tool, he treated it as a language to be deciphered. His work extended beyond known limits, pushing Encara into forms and applications no recorded mage had achieved. Some claimed he spoke to it directly. Others believed he simply listened longer than anyone else dared.

In time, the strain of his research bent even his own mortality. Whether through spellcraft, alteration, or something far less understood, Githel endured nearly a full hundred cycles—far beyond the span of ordinary men. The man who had begun as a scholar was, by the end, something closer to a legend than a person.

But such changes did not go unnoticed.

The shifting of the land around the tower, the unnatural persistence of Encara in the soil and air, and the slow corruption of nearby game and water eventually reached the attention of the crown. Reports spoke of animals refusing to enter certain boundaries, of compasses failing, of men who returned from scouting parties with no memory of what they had seen. Fear, once distant, became impossible to ignore.

Fearing the spread of a force they could neither control nor contain, the king issued a single order: the source must be ended.

A dozen soldiers were sent to the tower with no expectation of negotiation. No request for surrender. Only a directive—clear and absolute—to eliminate the origin of the phenomenon by any means necessary.

They entered expecting a man—perhaps a mad scholar, perhaps a dying mage clinging to power.

What answered them was not a man at all.

The interior of the tower erupted in a sudden, violent bloom of light and force. It did not explode outward like ordinary fire or siege magic, but unfolded in layers, as though reality itself had been peeled open from within. Windows shattered in cascading bursts of glass and stone. Walls buckled and vented pressure through every opening. Flame and arcane discharge tore downward through the structure, ripping through floor after floor in a collapsing wave of force.

The heavy doors were blown outward on impact, then snapped shut again as if pulled by invisible hands, their hinges screaming under the strain.

The two sentries outside were thrown from their feet, skidding across broken ground as the shockwave rolled through the treeline.

After this point, Githel was never seen again.

Any attempt to enter the tower was met with the presence of Encara itself—no longer contained within its walls, but radiating outward like a living presence. Those who approached spoke of an overwhelming dread that turned them away before they could even reach the doors. The air grew heavy near its edge, as though the forest itself resisted intrusion.  The few who pushed through and entered regardless never came back outside.

With each failed attempt, the tower’s reputation hardened into warning. The surrounding forest was abandoned to time, left untouched for hundreds of seasons. Nature reclaimed the land in silence, yet never erased the structure itself. Animals still passed through the trees beyond its reach, unbothered by the unseen boundary that marked its domain against all of mankind.

Over time, the presence of Encara did not fade. It settled and lingered in the air, subtle but persistent, as if the tower had become less a place and more a condition of the land itself.

And so the Tower of Githel remained.