Of course people told stories about the tower. It was a looming white monolith in a land where hills were rare enough to have names, teetering so high on the horizon that any directions given across long distances used it as the centre of their compass. Every child grew up gazing at it over the fields, making up stories of their own about what it might be like to walk through its marble doors.

Most grew out of telling those stories as anything but cautionary tales. But he had laughed at every tale that ever told him the tower was better left alone. Ever since he’d been a boy, pretending that sticks and pebbles were really brave adventurers climbing the biggest rock he could find, he had known he would stand there someday.

Craning his neck as far as he could and still seeing no end to the tower above. Clouds parted around it, silky grey rivulets like a stream slipping around the trunk of an ancient tree, and still it shone upwards, as if it were rooted as deep in the sky as the earth.

So some of the stories said. Others, that it was where the souls of the dead departed to, and a living person who entered would only join them. Others still, that it was the shaft of time itself, which the great hands of days and centuries ticked around.

But no one ever claimed to have seen the truth of those stories for themselves. He would be the first – if not to climb, then to come back, bringing the one true story to the hills and fields and the children gathering around the largest rocks in them so they could dream of climbing to the sky.