Far below emerald spires, where a king perches upon an opalescent throne, deep within the inner city, behind the marble walls separating the nobles and aristocrats from the have-not peasants without the means to secure themselves a place safe from rising tides of monstrous hordes, a simple stone tower juts up from a center square. From afar, the tower seems entirely unimpressive, an unrefined, dull, blot on the landscape of intricately designed architecture commissioned by generations of old-money families working to out-class and out-gaudy the others.

That’s the first peculiarity one might notice, which would set this apart as an important landmark.

The second thing one might notice about said tower, would be the fact that one is noticing it at all. Entering the city, there are kilometers of buildings; merchants plying their trade, homes, taverns, inns, various city service outposts, and finally the wall. Being able to see the castle from that distance, much less a single unadorned tower, is certainly something to be impressed about.

If one were to manage to get the permits to pass through the wall, after trekking through the tunnel into the inner city they would find their view far less obstructed. An outer court of sorts, clustered up against the wall, is built similarly to the outer city, though with buildings crawling up against the structure of it, as builders had run out of space to expand for those who live within and began building upward. To either side of the tunnel’s mouth, staired pathways wind up layers of roofs, leading to outpost towers atop the wall. Towering far above any of these, the simple tower looms unobtrusively.

One would have to break out from the typical domiciles of the city to get a good look at the tower’s base. At a mere hundred meters in diameter, the structure takes up far less space than even the merest of stately noble manor. Granted, this is primarily due to the inclusion of the lands surrounding said domiciles, and discounting vertical area. The typical chateau would only take itself a few stories high, enough to gaze over the acreage it presided over, but not enough to draw unnecessary attention from the laws of physics.

However, the tower simply decided it was safe enough from reprisal to be more than appropriately proportioned.

A typical tower would stand at a three to one ratio, or thereabouts, of diameter to height, with a quarter meter of supporting wall. This one, however, brought its height up to a four to one ratio, while maintaining the standard support depth, and adding at the top a large sphere, approximately ten percent wider in diameter than the base at its widest point. This adds a good sixty meters to the top, making it a top-heavy wrecking ball on a fairly large stick.

It would be an impressive feat of architectural engineering, if that were what it was. In this case, mathematics was nowhere near the savior of the day. No, it was raw magic. The reason the tower didn’t sway repeatedly in the wind, oscillating back and forth until the forces exerted upon it sent it careening to the ground, was that the tower had been expanded internally, space warped and bent into place until each floor of the building was comparable to the entire estates of some of the more established noble lands. Whereas those who spend money to gain power through prestige invested in style and trappings of power, such as that those who beheld them assume those wearing said trappings did in fact have the power the adornments implied, and thus gain it, the inhabitants of the tower would convert their precious metals into an older, more difficult to understand form of power.

Mana.

With enough of this energy, rules could be bent or broken. Standards of men were shunted aside by a skilled tailor poking holes in the fabric of reality, only to sew on their own patch of how they intend the world to be. Generations of nobles had led to large, ostentatious plots of land capped with eye-catching manors, fortified not against raiding parties but against the scorn of their fellows. Generations of wizards had led to a giant tower that was bigger on the inside.

Starting from the ground floor, mages had started increasing the size of the bottom floors the most, working their way upward. If the extradimensional space contained within this structure were shunted out into the normal three dimensions, it would roughly take a pyramidal shape, though with rounded edges. Lower levels were where lower ranked mages were stored, and as such it needed the most space. The fact that this lead to a stable structure was probably lost on whoever started building this way.

As one might expect, the higher one were to go on the tower, the more spacious the accommodations for the individual mage. Wizards on the lowest floors would be stuffed into a three by six meter room, two per. Going up a few levels, the magic wielders would be given separate spaces, followed by increasing the number of rooms per mage linearly. This would be what led to a fairly uniform distribution of holes in the tower; the density of wizards further up would be lower than that of the levels below, but the increased amount of workspace per mage would lead to a higher incidence of explosions per capita.

Wizards would rarely become such if they didn’t feel the need to poke and prod at every variable of existence. To use magic was to impose your will on the world, but to be a wizard was to do so systematically. Generally speaking, there are far more wrong ways to use magic than there are right ways, and a dedicated wizard will figure out every single one of them, hopefully without dying in the process. Usually though, a wizard that intends to survive will take shortcuts.

Specializing in a particular field of magic can help protect from the inevitable backlash caused by going beyond one's means. Were a mage to experiment on electricity, gravitational fields, light emitters, and botany, all at the same time, there would be far fewer methods for controlling the fallout of each potential disaster without instigating further catastrophes than if one were to focus all of the experiments onto one subject with easily countered fail conditions, such as botany leading to magic-nullifying ambulatory carnivorous plants.

Regardless of the wonder of a magical tower filled with space enough to house an army of soldiers, in any profession there will be competition for scarce resources. Additionally, in any significant gathering of people, there will be tasks deemed ill-suited to the stature of whomever finds themself at the top of the pecking order. The crossing in the Venn diagram of those circles are known by a few names, interns and grad students being a couple of the more notable, and this location is no exception to the rule.

One of the tasks assigned to hopefuls lurking on the outskirts of the tower’s periphery is the removal of waste from the tower, in the form of experiment byproducts and the bodies of dead, or worse, expelled, students. Those who prove adequate at taking advantage of this boon, in the form of being able to see where others have gone wrong, and occasionally pilfer things out of the newly ownerless rooms they are clearing, are able to lay a claim to a coveted half room at the bottom floor. On the other hand, some could be stuck simply taking junk up and down a hundred and forty flights of stairs for years with nothing to show for it but tennis elbow and toned calves.

Sometimes, a mage needs to take matters into their own hands if they want to get ahead in life, and that might mean digging through garbage to try and find something useful.

“Well this is shiny.”

A cracked, drained, lifeless dungeon core is completely worthless to pretty much anybody. After it is rendered inert, a core is unable to produce mana, and the amount contained within the shell is all it will ever hold again. Even trying to use it as a storage medium is pointless, as the energy would seep out over time. It would be much more efficient, and faster, to simply artificially grow a gem to hold excess energy. Time is money, money is mana, and mana is power.

For a penniless necromancer with pilfered botany textbooks and a sack full of trash, it would have to do.