The Wizard's Tale

At the apex of the world sits the Tower—a spire of glass and stone that pierces the clouds. Within its highest chamber, the Wizard maintains his vigil. The space defies easy description: part archive, part library, part greenhouse. Shelves of ancient texts spiral upward into shadow, their spines whispering forgotten truths. Vines heavy with luminescent fruit wind between reading desks. The air smells of old paper and living things.

He does not sleep. Through crystalline windows that show every corner of the world, he watches the spread of Ignorance—that abyssal force that seeps through the cracks in understanding. It takes many forms: a lie repeated until believed, a question left unasked, a truth discarded for comfort. Where it spreads, communities fracture. Neighbors become strangers. Knowledge turns to ash in mouths that forget how to speak it.

The Wizard has seen civilizations devoured this way. Not through conquest or plague, but through the slow erosion of shared reality. When people cannot agree on what is true, they cannot stand together. Ignorance knows this. It whispers different lies to different ears until no common ground remains.

So he works. His hands move across maps and tomes, tracing patterns in the chaos. He cultivates questions the way others grow wheat—carefully, deliberately, knowing that the right question at the right time can shatter years of comfortable delusion. He sends them out into the world through channels both arcane and mundane, each one a small light against the encroaching dark.

This is not a war that can be won with swords. The enemy has no body to strike, no fortress to breach. It lives in the spaces between knowing and not-knowing, feeding on apathy and fear. The Wizard's weapon is simpler and more dangerous: curiosity. The insistence that truth matters. The radical act of asking "why."

In the Tower's highest chamber, surrounded by the accumulated knowledge of ages, the Wizard tends his garden of questions. Each answer he uncovers plants the seed for ten more inquiries. The work is endless. The work is necessary. Below, in the world that doesn't know his name, humanity stumbles forward—divided, confused, but not yet lost. Not while someone still watches. Not while the questions keep coming.

But the Wizard does not work alone. He cannot. One mind, however vast, cannot counter the entropy of forgetting that spreads across millions. So he reaches out—not with proclamations or prophecy, but with puzzles. Small challenges scattered across the world like breadcrumbs. Those who follow them, who cannot help but seek answers, who feel the pull of knowing—these are the ones he finds.

They come from everywhere. Scholars and skeptics, students and street-corner philosophers. The chronically curious. The constitutionally unable to accept "because I said so" as sufficient explanation. Each one a small bulwark against the dark. The Wizard does not command them—he merely shows them what they already suspected: that questions matter. That the pursuit of understanding is not frivolous but fundamental. That in a world drowning in convenient lies, the simple act of seeking truth is rebellion.

They become his Legion. Not soldiers but seekers. Armed not with weapons but with the stubborn refusal to stop asking why. They carry his questions into places the Tower's light cannot reach— into conversations and classrooms, into moments of doubt and decision. Where Ignorance whispers that truth is too hard, too inconvenient, too dangerous, they answer with another question. And another. And another.

The battle continues. The Tower stands. And the Legion grows.