Control
In the shadowed underbelly of the city, Mouse moves like a whisper—a ghost with nimble fingers and a knack for slipping through cracks others don’t notice. Orphaned young, they learned survival by picking locks, scaling crumbling walls, and memorizing patrol patterns. Their name, earned not for timidity but for an uncanny ability to vanish, carries weight in black-market circles. Mouse’s toolkit? A rusted skeleton key, a blade thin as a needle, and a sixth sense for traps. Their only loyalty? To the highest bidder… or whoever threatens their fragile network of secrets. Rumors swirl of a scar beneath their collar—a jagged reminder of a job gone wrong—but no one gets close enough to confirm. When the guilds need something *retrieved*, they don’t call heroes. They call Mouse.
Description
Rising from the heart of a forgotten desert, the Obsidian Throne pierces the stratosphere, its jagged silhouette a blade of blackened alloy and crystalline glass. Designed by rogue architects who defied gravity’s laws, its foundation isn’t buried in earth but suspended atop a self-sustaining antigravity core, humming with energy siphoned from tectonic shifts deep below. Each of its 1,117 floors rotates independently, creating a living maze of shifting corridors and inverted gardens where flora grows downward into mirrored ceilings. The spire’s crown houses a storm-forged observatory, its apex crackling with contained lightning—a beacon visible from continents away, drawing pilgrims, spies, and those desperate enough to scale its unguarded vertical railways. Legends claim the tower grows taller each night, stealing inches from the moon’s orbit. None who’ve reached the top return to confirm it.
