Chapter VI: The Legend of the Tower

While the scouts were gathering the story of Zahhak and putting it all together, Meldave'er visited Shirdalepolis’ libraries and talked to a few scholars about the legend of the tower.

The elders were quite excited to share their knowledge with him. They’ve told the whole story from the beginning. They’ve told Meldave'er about the courageous king Nimrod that ruled with passion and charisma. And how his hubris condemned him to eternal life in a prison of his own making.

A long time ago Nimrod was undefeated in battle and unopposed as king. There was nothing that could take him down, and he knew it very well. That knowledge was his downfall. As a powerful leader, he wanted to ascend to the realm of the gods, as nothing else was challenging for him anymore.

Nimrod gathered the smartest architects and wise scholars to plan a tower, which would reach the skies, pierce the clouds and allow him to step into the world of gods. Once the document was finished, the construction began immediately. They’ve built the floors of the tower quickly, but sturdy. It was going well. Nimrod was getting more and more excited, as his monument of ascension was growing floor by floor. Just the thought of being among gods took all sleep away from him.

Yet the deities were not happy with such attempts of mortals, and struck it down, destroying the structure and sending it into the Underworld. The tower was believed to be lost forever, while all engineers and workers building it immediately found out they couldn't understand each other, as all of them started to speak different tongues. It is said that this event created chaos and forced Cuties to scatter across all of Cutieland, founding many new kingdoms and nations. Up until this day, no one knows where exactly the tower stood and what really happened to it, but many speculations exist. Some believe that it was turned into dust and scattered to the winds; some argue that it was struck by lightning and collapsed into thousands of stones that were later used to build common houses around the area; while others believe that it was flipped vertically by divine powers and smashed into the ground, burying it under tonnes of sand. The latter seemed to be more convincing as Meldave'er encountered scrolls with similar stories in the Temple of Voices some time ago. If those scholars were right, the tower should still be accessible from the overworld, only now it goes down, deep into the bedrock – the last tower floor, which once pierced the sky and reached the habitat of gods, now plunges into the depths of the underworld. Same as then, in order to reach the top, the seeker needs to start on the tower’s ground floor.

However, the floor hasn’t been found ever since. It was not due to the lack of trying though. The more Shirdalinid scholars investigated the old writings and carvings, the more precise and confident they felt about their latest dig sites. A rumor was circulating that they had found the first floor of the fabled tower, and what surprised the researchers at first was that they had to dig around a significant amount of foundation to get to the entrance of what they believed to be the first floor of the ancient tower. Trying the hatch in the middle of the floor just led them to more dirt, and bedrock, which left the excavation teams at a dead end.