Let it begin.

[XanthVanBokkelen]

Xanth stepped away from the ring area of Twilight Isle after the Keeper of Earth Tournament had concluded, feeling drained, yet elated. He had been forced to duel seven times without a bye, and managed to secure the victory. His goal of gaining a Tower had been put on hold for a time as he focused on his TDL team, King’s Gambit, but when word reached him of the impending Tournament, he felt compelled to enter, even though he had rarely been on the Isle over the last few months.

Walking up towards where the keyhole of the Tower lay far up on the side of a mountain, Xanth held up the Tower Key and watched as rock shelves suddenly shot out of the cliff, forming an earthen stairway. Xanth chuckled in his gravely voice as he stepped up the mountainside, 100 steps, one for every linear foot that the keyhole lay above. The foolish mortals, he thought. It was ludicrous for Artemus Kurgen to think that less than three years of time spent in the Tower of Earth was enough to learn all there was to learn from there. But that was his loss, and Xanth’s gain.

The keyhole was now in front of Xanth, and staring down at the obsidian key with the encrusted emerald, he placed it into the slot and turned. Slowly, where there was no hint of a door, a solid stone slab groaned backwards to reveal an entranceway.

HmmHmmHaHaHaHaHa . . . at last. I can feel the power just standing here, flowing from the entrance. It is only right and natural that I, Xanth, the Terror of Drenthe, and the Scourge of Emmen, should be standing here at this threshold, about to acquire enough knowledge to last a millennium. Centuries of research and experimentation have led to this moment. Let it begin.

Xanth stepped into the entrance. The stone door closed behind him, and the stairs vanished back into the mountainside.

Days later, thick curls of smoke began to pour upwards, some of them black, some of them white, as Xanth began his research deep within the bowels of the earth.

[XanthVanBokkelen]

All throughout the month since Xanth had acquired the Tower of Earth, plumes of smoke had rose from the earth around and above where the Tower lay, as experiments never seemed to cease within its depths. Sometimes a dull, low, booming sound could be heard. Sometimes the earth shook from tremors. Finally one day, a violent explosion could be heard, and a towering plume of fire shot out of the ground, illuminating the twilight sky. Xanth could be seen storming out of the Tower’s entrance and huffing down the steps. He strode out to a point about a hundred yards from the Tower’s entrance and stared up at the plume with his arms folded across his chest. Then he took out an antiquated sextant, and seemed to be making calculations based on the horizon and the plume into a notebook. He then thundered back up the steps and reentered the Tower, where after five minutes the plume subsided, and everything was still again.