Glaugust 26 - Celestial Abalone
"The Lords bless us: the heavens were closer than we thought."
- Saint Winthrop the Founder
One hundred years ago today, Samuel Winthrop began construction of the Tower. He envisioned a colossal edifice of limestone and wood - a bridge to the heavens, a second ark, and a perfectly moral city all in one. He consulted the finest geomancers and the most esteemed theologians to select the perfect site: on top of a remote mountaintop, just above the pines.
The project was plagued from the start. Workers broke ground before the engineers had finalized a plan to make the thing stand up, let alone survive the elements. The local quarry ran dry within a season, and material had to be dragged up switchback roads from the low plains below by teams of surefooted but skittish goats. The village of Anticipation pooled in the Tower's shadow, a place for workers and would-be pilgrims to cool their heels, drink, and wait as the tower rose and rose.
The project was slated to take a lifetime. After only a year, work stopped. A bricklayer had made a discovery. Rose-of-the-Lords Carson, later Saint Rose, climbed a ladder on the structure's unfinished third floor to inspect an unfinished scaffolding. She didn't come down for a week. Foremen who called up said she answered, but in an unknown language. When they finally found her crumpled at the base, her tongue was missing, maybe swallowed. Clutched in her other hand was a celestial abalone, a perfect shell of the same crystalline stuff said to make up the dome of the firmament.
For a while access to the Tower was tightly controlled by Church Militants. Rumor says Winthrop never stopped sending people up that ladder. None who went past the fourth floor came back with more starstuff. Only a few came back at all: wordless, incurious, prone to standing at open windows. The lower levels of the tower were converted into a sanitarium, a place to house and care for the returned workers in the hopes they might speak of what they had seen.
Saint Rose's shell became the subject of decades of spiritual and arcane argument. In time interest cooled. The Miracle of the Shell was declared a once-in-a-lifetime visitation, unrepeatable and best left alone. Regime change and threats to the Lordly See pulled the Militants back to the capital.
Now the Tower is a crumbling ruin overlooking the goatherd village of Anticipation. On a clear day, you can still see the ladder on top, and occasionally, someone climbing it.
Celestial Abalone. A shard of the firmament, cold as a distant star. Cup it to your mouth to cast Silence in a 30-foot radius for one minute. Each casting costs you a word, permanently, chosen by the shell. Empty your vocabulary and ascend.