The Hollow Spire

Atheron Veyl was a reclusive arcanist who dabbled in strange otherworldly drugs and explored worlds and planes that may well have been the direct result of their hallucinations.

The Hollow Spire was once this mad arcanist’s “wizard tower”, collapsed into itself much as Atheron Veyl did themself when astral spiders consumed the wizard from the inside. The spire itself is made of stones either created magically or drawn here from another world. Under the dust of ages, the stones of the tower are a bruised violet shot through with veins of phosphorescent green. At night, the green veins glow faintly, making it seem like the tower is lit from within. If the detritus of time is cleaned away, the stone itself seems to shift shades when viewed from different angles.

Veyl’s great love was Dreamer’s Ash, the powdered remains of extinct star-moths, inhaled through crystal flutes. Through the Ash’s dreams, Veyl saw visions of infinite staircases in impossible geometries – and then used these visions to travel to other places in quest for more dreamer’s ash. However, the ash also causes the user’s mind to fold in on itself, a collapse mirrored by the spire itself.

The spire itself is a round tower that has collapsed into itself, the various levels of which are connected by a spiral staircase extending up the eastern side of the spire. The ground floor of the spire is a mass of jumbled masonry that has fallen down from above, but a path can be found through it to the stairs at the back. From above one can hear the sound of the wind through the broken stone, moaning and almost sounding like a strange voice in lament. But from below, the moaning is definitely not from the wind, but something trapped still within the cellars of the spire.

At the top of the spire, hidden from view of the stairs on the western side of the structure, is a coffer containing the last of Atheron Veyl’s treasures. The Hourglass of Spilled Moments is a palm-sized hourglass, cracked and badly damaged, filled with sand that seems silver on one side, and brilliant green when on the other. When flipped, the hourglass rewinds a single just-spoken sentence made by the user, allowing the speaker to rephrase or unsay it. The potency of this magic strains both time and the hourglass, and with each use it risks being shattered forever.

In the lowest chambers of the spire, in the dungeons on the northwest side, the mourning herald remains a prisoner of Veyl’s. A once-proud messenger of a forgotten god – this being remains chained by silken webs. Its wings are broken, its voice a constant dirge that echoes through the chambers and up the stairs. It begs for release, but the webs that hold it here are the last magics holding the tower from full collapse…

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,800 x 10,800 pixels (36 x 36 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for the recommended 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 2,520 x 2,520 or 5,040 x 5,040, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/10/08/the-hollow-spire/