The Wizard's Tale

At the top of the world sits the Tower. A spire of glass and stone that pierces the clouds. Inside, the Wizard keeps watch. His chamber is part archive, part library, part greenhouse. Shelves of ancient texts spiral upward into shadow. Vines heavy with glowing fruit wind between reading desks. The air smells of old paper and living things, with a hint of dust settling in forgotten corners.

Through crystalline windows that show every corner of the world, the Wizard watches for Drift. That slow entropy that creeps through unattended systems. Maps fall out of alignment with territories. Shared references start to contradict each other. The signal degrades into static. Left alone long enough, any structure returns to noise.

The Wizard has seen archives crumble this way. Not through fire or conquest, but through quiet neglect. When the pages go unturned, the ink fades. When the questions stop, the answers lose their shape. Ignorance isn't an enemy with intent. It's the fog that rolls in when the lanterns burn down. The cracks that widen when no one patches them.

So he works. His hands move across maps and tomes, retracing faded lines, cross-referencing sources before they contradict themselves entirely. He cultivates questions the way others maintain infrastructure. Carefully. Deliberately. Knowing that the right inquiry at the right time can reinforce a structure before it buckles. He sends them out into the world through channels both arcane and mundane.

This isn't a war. There's no enemy to defeat, no final victory to claim. It's maintenance. The endless, necessary work of keeping shared systems legible. The Wizard's tools are simple: clarity, precision, the patient act of checking one thing against another.

The Wizard's Tower

The Wizard's Tower

In the Tower's highest chamber, surrounded by the accumulated patterns of ages, the Wizard tends his signal garden. Each answer he verifies plants the seed for ten more checks. The work compounds. The work never ends. Below, the world continues. Its systems wobbling, its references slowly misaligning, but not yet collapsed. Not while someone still calibrates. Not while the questions keep running.

But the Wizard cannot maintain it alone. One mind, however vast, cannot counter the entropy that spreads across millions of unattended details. So he reaches out with puzzles. Small diagnostic challenges scattered across the world like sensor probes. Those who solve them, who feel the pull of pattern-recognition, who can't resist checking whether the map still matches the territory... these are the ones who find their way to the Tower.

They come from everywhere. The detail-oriented and the pattern-hungry. The ones who notice when something doesn't quite line up. The Wizard shows them the work, and they recognize it. They understand that systems require tending. That clarity degrades without effort. That the simple act of paying attention holds back the fog.

They become the Legion. Maintainers, not soldiers. Calibrators, not crusaders. They carry the Wizard's questions into places the Tower's light cannot reach. Into the cracks and corners where drift accumulates fastest.

The work continues. The Tower holds. The Legion grows.