FicWad

“Guys, I really think this is a bad idea!” Sidoh complained as the three shinigami landed on the top of the king’s tower.
“It’s too late now, Sidoh. We’re already on the tower, so you can either leave now and get caught by the king by yourself, or come with us and share the blame three ways,” said Zellogi.
“I don’t think getting caught is even a problem,” said Ryuk. “The king didn’t do anything when we landed here, just like I thought. Now let’s go in, before he changes his mind.”
Ryuk and Zellogi walked to the square hole in the top of the tower that was covered by a series of black, jagged arches, and started down the spiral staircase that they found.
“You coming, Sidoh?”
“Uh…I dunno…”
“All right, then. You can just wait here, on the very top of the tower, all by yourself…” Ryuk said as he disappeared from sight.
Sidoh looked around. The tower gradually tapered as it got higher, and while it was absolutely massive at the bottom, it was only big enough for about twenty shinigami to stand on at the top. Sidoh went to stand on the edge of the tower and have a look around. He was so high up, he could see parts of the shinigami realm that he’d never explored before, parts it took days to fly to…but when he looked straight down, everything was so tiny that Sidoh got dizzy and had to step back. Why were heights so much scarier when he was standing instead of flying? The wind made stepping anywhere on purpose, or even standing still, immensely difficult, as strong as it was up there. Sidoh dug his talons into the stone floor and furled his wings tighter around himself. He shivered, but not because of the wind…it was cold, but not so impossibly cold that a shinigami couldn’t handle it. Being on top of this tower, alone, was like being stranded on the tiniest of desert islands in the middle of a violent hurricane; an icy, freezing, arctic hurricane. Stranded…alone…
“Wait for me!” he shouted as he hurried down the staircase after Ryuk and Zellogi.

When Sidoh got to the bottom of the staircase, he found himself in a completely bare room, with no sign of Ryuk or Zellogi anywhere. However, there were twelve doorways; three on each wall, each with a set of stairs leading downward, but it was easy to see that the rest of the tower wasn’t nearly as simply as this room. The stairs led left and right, some steep and some nearly level, with some sets of stairs obviously running underneath other ones. There was no sound coming from any of the doorways; no light footfalls or chatter to give a clue as to where Ryuk and Zellogi might have went; just the sound of the wind blowing across the top of the tower, making a mournful hooting sound as it crossed the hole. Sidoh picked a moderately sloped set of stairs and started down them, hoping for the best.
The stairs came out into a room filled with dust-covered books, with several more sets of stairs leading down from it; Sidoh continued to pick stairs at random, wandering from room to room. Several rooms were filled with books, scrolls, and other bits of paper; some were filled with odd-looking bits of metal and wire and…machines, maybe? Some of them looked kind of like half-completed human world viewing holes... One room was a dead end; that one had a sheet of cloth hanging from the walls spread out like a hammock, it also had a large mirror, and a desk of sorts carved from the same stone as the tower, covered with what might have been all sorts of trinkets before they were smashed or aged beyond recognition. The room was covered in broken fragments of the various items, and a thick coating of dust and sand. It felt as though something had lived in this room once, but whatever that something was, it was long gone now.
Sidoh turned back and continued to stumble from room to room, and continued to find more and more corridors and stairs, leading up and down, sideways, diagonally, some without steps that you had to fly down- now that he thought about it, how was he going to find his way out? He was deep inside the tower by now, and his strategy of just remembering which way he’d gone didn’t seem so foolproof, in retrospect. He walked more quickly, hoping to find some sign of Ryuk or Zellogi. What if they left without him, and he was stuck inside trying to find a way out on his own? Sidoh broke into a jog, trying not to panic. What if it took him years to find his way out of the labyrinthine tower? What if it took him so long to escape, his lifespan ran out before he could find an exit?! Sidoh started sprinting, shouting for Ryuk and Zellogi, barely seeing staircases or passages before he ran mindlessly down them, racing up and down and through rooms and over stairs and along corridors and through more doors and over a balcony…
“AAAAAAAAAAAH!” Sidoh screamed as he tripped headlong over the balcony and plummeted a hundred feet onto a stone floor with a “thud” that echoed off the walls.
Sidoh sat up and gave his head a shake to try and clear it. He’d landed on…some sort of platform, a stage, maybe, inside a room so huge it was really more of a chamber. Hundreds of stone benches rose up around the stage in a manner befitting an opera house, with more doorways leading out from the aisles. For the first time since he’d entered the tower, Sidoh heard movement that wasn’t his own, coming from one of the doorways above the aisles, and getting steadily louder…it was coming his way, and fast. Sidoh gave panicky looks to his surroundings, searching for a place to hide, but it was too late. Two figures burst through the doorway and into the chamber.
“EEEEEK!” Sidoh yelped.
“Geez, Sidoh. Do you think you’re making enough noise? They can probably just barely hear you on the other side of the tower,” said Ryuk.
“Whoa, we haven’t seen anything like this yet, eh, Ryuk?” said Zellogi, looking around the chamber in wonder. “What would you call it?”
“Hmm… it kinda reminds me of an auditorium. Sure is echoey enough for one. HELLO!” Ryuk shouted, enjoying the reverberations that bounced off the perfectly smooth, curved walls.
“Hey, Ryuk, wanna show Sidoh what we found?”
“Sure. Come on, Sidoh.”
All too gladly, Sidoh followed them back through the hallway they’d come from.
“Hey! A way out!” Sidoh exclaimed gleefully, seeing a massive window in the middle of the passage, big enough for five shinigami to jump out of at once.
“Yep. It’s even on the opposite side of the tower from the king. We can leave that way without the old geezer noticing a thing,” said Zellogi.
“Here it is. Check it out, Sidoh,” said Ryuk.
The room they’d come to wasn’t huge, or lavishly decorated, it just had a bunch of…
“Death Notes,” said Ryuk. “I’ll bet this is where the old man keeps all the ones he has left.”
There was space for thousands death notes in the room, but only twelve stacks remained, none of them half as tall as the average shinigami. The stacks were far outnumbered by rectangular patches in the dust where stacks used to be.
“No wonder he doesn’t want to give them away. Looks like he’s running out fast,” said Zellogi.
“You mean, he didn’t want to give them away,” Ryuk corrected. “You know, I might have considered taking a few, if it weren’t so easy to get them lately. What’s with the rush to get rid of them all? I really don’t get it.”
“What’s down there?” asked Sidoh.
“Huh? Where?”
“There,” Sidoh said, pointing to a small hole in the floor in a far corner of the room.
“Oh! Where’d that come from?” said Zellogi.
“Good eye, Sidoh,” Ryuk said. “I didn’t even notice it before. Let’s check out this one last bit before we go.”
“You’ve said that a million times already, Ryuk! Are we going to check out every inch of this tower before you’ve had enough? We’ve gotta go back eventually, you know.”
“I mean it this time. This is really gonna be our last one. Let’s go!”
With a flap of his wings, Ryuk was down the hole, with Zellogi and Sidoh close behind. The passage was barely wide enough for them to spread their wings in. It curved downward at an angle, and tossed them out of a hole in the wall of yet another room.
If the chamber with the stage could have been described as an auditorium, Ryuk might have described this one as a cathedral. Narrow passages near the top of the vaulted ceiling let in beams of dim, grey light. The walls were covered with at least fifty framed pictures, ten by fifteen feet, each one portraying a different shinigami.
“Anyone you know?” Ryuk asked Zellogi.
“Nope. You?”
“No. I wonder who bothered to take so many photos?”
“These aren’t photos. They’re all painted,” said Sidoh.
Ryuk left the group and went to inspect the nearest portrait. “Whoa…he’s right. What’s with the super eyesight all of a sudden, Sidoh? …and how the hell did the king get fifty huge paintings? Either shinigami had a lot more ambition once upon a time, or some artistic human owned a whole lotta death notes.”
“See anything else with your freaky superpower, Sidoh?” said Zellogi jokingly.
Sidoh gave a casual look around, and tilted his head curiously at something at the very end of the long room.
“What’s that?” he asked.
The three shinigami started toward the curious object, but halfway across the room, they stopped cold when it spoke to them.
“N-no. Go…back,” it said in a weak, hoarse, pained whisper.
Sidoh made an odd squeaking noise that sounded something like “gleep!” and started to back up, but Ryuk proceeded forward, cautiously.
“Stop…leave…now! Not…safe…here…”
Ryuk moved closer, and the other two followed behind him, from a distance. When they got close enough to see what it was, Ryuk’s mouth dropped in shock, Zellogi let out a gasping yelp, and Sidoh looked away as he made a strange retching sound.
The thing was bound to the wall and floor by several thick, heavy chains, and it was coated in dry, dusty sand. Wet, heavy sand also oozed from the many gashes that covered what could only be a shinigami.
“R-Rem?” Ryuk stammered.