Crooked Tower

One of the most important landmarks of the Egnazchan Guild in Gyven is the Crooked Tower. True to its name, it rises like all other cylindrical towers until about 65’ from the ground. There it is as though each layer of bricks was placed just a bit off from the brick layer below it. The effect is a slant (to the eye from ground level) that takes the tower about three feet “off-course”. The effect is reversed about ten feet above, where the tower is brought “back on track”.

Most people assume that the tower is held up by magic, because such an unstable design should not be able to stand. There is a belief that the tower began to lean while they were building it, a problem with picking the site for such a tall building. To correct the lean, they put in the shift so the weight of the building would counterbalance the lean. This theory implies that either the shift did counterbalance the lean, making the building rise straight, or there is an optical illusion caused by the shift so that people do not see the lean when they look at it.

The guild does not discuss the building’s design, but other mages have learned that the tower’s shift was placed to disrupt the chaos magic within it. The Crooked Tower is the research center for the entire guild, and the shift is believed to prevent chaos energy from “gathering”. This theory does imply that magic is holding the building up as the chaotic energies that would otherwise gather in the building are being consumed fighting against the physics that might otherwise bring the building down.

There are others who believe the Egnazchan chaos magicians are just in incredibly weird group and wanted their building to be as unusual as they are. The tower is massive:  about 120’ in diameter and over 100’ tall. Perhaps with such a massive building, a 3’ shift to the east may not be enough to unbalance the structure.