For now, Nameless said goodbye to the Time Elder.
After coming out, Nameless sat on a nearby railing and began thinking about what to do next.
The Time Elder had already given him the crucial information: the warden had the key to leave. The warden had gone to the top level and never come back down. The only way out was to use that key to open the office—in other words, the Gate of Innocence in the Refuge—and leave the Eternal Silence Prison Tower.
The warden possessed a seal that let him travel freely between the tower's levels, so something had likely happened to him on the top level.
If Nameless wanted to leave, his only option was to climb level by level, find the warden at the top, take the key from him, then return to the bottom of the Refuge.
But according to the Time Elder, the Eternal Silence Prison Tower was effectively the highest-security prison in all the All Heavens and Myriad Realms. The prisoners and monsters locked up here were bound to be the most dangerous of all.
Worse still, after something happened to the warden, the tower seemed to have undergone changes over the long years that even the Time Elder knew nothing about. No one could say what it was like now. Even Pangolin and the others who lived in the Refuge knew only some of what went on at the bottom—and not even all of that.
For instance, they had no idea where the creatures and objects that occasionally appeared out of thin air came from, or what the upper levels were like.
With only those scraps of observation to go on, they clung cautiously to life in the Refuge. When the Black Tide came, they hid. Once it passed, they went out