Steampunk Adventure The Dreaming Tower

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It stood where no path led. Between ferns and mist, on a hill of smooth stone – the tower that breathed. No smoke, no sound, but the steam rising from its seams was warm, like a thought remembering itself. Its walls were made of intertwined layers of metal: bronze, copper, black steel, interspersed with veins of light that pulsed in a gentle rhythm. Gears turned silently on the facade, as if they were part of a larger, invisible clockwork. Mollie stopped. His monocle fogged briefly in the damp air.
The tower seemed awake. Not like a place – but like a being, waiting. When he touched the gate – a gate without a handle, without a crack – it slid aside like a curtain of heavy breath. The space beyond was dark and silent. But the darkness was suffused with luminous particles that fell slowly like snow from memory. Inside, everything felt bigger. Gears floated freely in space, slowly circling, connected by lines of light that responded to Mollie's movements. Inscriptions glowed on the walls, changing their language as soon as they were read. He strode on—through halls of floating clocks whose hands moved backward. Through a vault where a host of tiny automatons with golden antennae collected notes of light and combined them into whispering melodies. A small shaft opened in the wall, and out rolled a being no larger than an apple. It consisted of glass lenses, wire arms, and a luminous spiral inside. It looked at Mollie—eyeless—and floated ahead. He followed it. They reached a spiral staircase that stretched across an open depth as if formed from air. The steps moved as soon as Mollie stepped onto them, as if listening to his weight. Above, a domed chamber opened—inside it a sphere of luminous gears, with images floating in its center. Mollie saw... herself. Sitting at a table, his head in his hands. Wandering through a library made up of voices. Falling. Standing. Laughing even though there was nothing left to laugh about. And something inside him realized: This wasn't a storage facility. It was a mirror. A whisper came from the depths of the machine: "You are not here to find answers. You are here to remember that you carry questions." When Mollie left the tower again, nothing had changed. Except for himself. And above the metal walls, a light flickered for a moment that no one saw – as if the tower had smiled briefly.