Meredith was close enough when it happened to feel the pressure build up.

She was there, in the forest, when everything went still for a brief moment. And she was also there when the quiet turned to roaring sound. She stood still as the animals ran, heading away from the strange phenomenon and, in their fear, not caring that they went near a predator such as herself.

However, her own expression was quite different from terror. It had been too long since something this interesting had last happened.

She began walking closer before the silence finished settling. While she wasn't close enough to see it yet, she could vaguely feel its presence against her flair-sense, excitingly foreign. As her curiosity grew and she moved closer, she began running. The last few animals went past her, desperate to get away.

When the pulse came, Meredith paused. Whatever this was, it was very powerful. Well, that wasn't going to get her to turn back! Instead, she picked her pace up again with a widening smile and a heart that would be pounding with excitement if it hadn't been centuries since it last beat.

Barely holding back her curiosity, she stopped again not far from the edge of the new clearing. A few agile jumps got her to the top of a tree that wasn't being cut down yet, from where she watched the artificial people (constructs? puppets?) at work. Her ears slightly pointed and her eyes flashing silver, she was entirely focused on the tower – well, except for the thought spared to blanket herself in her magic, helping to disguise her presence from the senses of most so she could watch without being watched back.

The red grass. The golden runes. The large doors. She looked from one to another to the next. How could a whole building have appeared from nothing? This was new magic to her and, for a vampire who had dedicated her existence to exploring the supernatural, it was a bait she couldn't resist.

Nothing, not even the promise of a certain death, could have stopped her as she made one last jump. She soared over the lines of automatons and came to a gentle landing right in front of the doors. They still stood open and, despite all the power in the air, she felt no resistance as she came closer to them. 

The golems felt strange, to her senses. They were not enchanted or otherwise animated by magic, nor were they likely to be mobile though mundane means, as she could not smell grease or oil in their joints nor hear servos whirring inside. Instead, they each seemed to be possessed by an unfamiliar spirits, their limbs and hearts bound to straw and iron. The iron golems felt the stronger of the two types, although the straw golems carried tools as strange as they were: axes with heads carved from translucent purple crystal, which seemed to exist in both this lift and the next.

If the golems were strange, however, the tower itself was overwhelming.

It was like a great beast. She could feel the thrum of magic it radiated pulse in her chest like a second heartbeat. When it inhaled, nature spirits ethereal and nameless rushed towards it, leaves and plants bending against the wind towards the tower as their small souls were drawn in through doors and windows into the depths of the tower. When it exhaled, it did so in the spirit of industry, of nature used but not spent, and plant life flourished around the clearing. Hearty, hale, and just as much a part of the tower as its glass or flagstones.

The tower itself was so powerful, so dense with magical energy that it was impossible to tell where one enchantment ended and one began. But it was possible to glean some detail from the outside, and she could see how magical energy seemed to pulse from some hidden heart beneath the earth, stretching upwards through the tower like veins and arteries.

It was, in a word, a wonder.

Meredith leapt over the golems with ease, none of them seeing her or even looking up. The straw golems seemed occupied with their work, and the iron ones seemed occupied shepherding their smaller cousins.

The arc of her jump ended with her in front of the great double doors with nothing but a whisper and the soft crunch of compacted snow. She was barely there for a moment, however, when she felt something impact her legs.

One of the straw golems had been leaving as she landed and had run into her as it walked through the doors. It was, in a word, cute; it was short and squat, about three feet tall, with long arms and a head that seemed too large for its body. It had a button nose and eyeholes but no eyes, which looked up at you in blank confusion.

It tried to walk forward again to no avail, bumping against her legs again, and looked around in confusion. Not seeing the obstruction to its path, it eventually managed to path around her and rejoin its brethren.

The door before her is open. No more golems seem to be coming, and the hallway seems to stretch off into the darkness...

With the way magic flowed through it, the tower seemed almost alive in a way that was unlike anything she'd seen before. (The golems were interesting too but, although cute, it was clear that they were just a small piece in this mechanism and she was more interested in the heart of it.)

The open door had her attention, enough so that she only glanced at the creature that bumped into her for a moment. Despite there having been no actual invitation and knowing that the door was open not for her but for the figures to bring the trees in to feed the tower, there was nothing stopping her from walking in. The invisible wall she would typically meet was absent. Without it in the way, Meredith took one more step, until she had truly crossed the threshold.

She then focused her eyes on the corridor, their gaze cutting through the darkness with ease. Vampires were nocturnal creatures, able to see through any darkness that wasn't powered by magic stronger than their own.

What hid in the depths of the tower?

The tower interior was dark and lightless, but Meredith's vampiric eyes could pierce through the natural darkness with ease.

Just beyond the doorway was a hallway of stone brick, at the end of which was a semicircular room. She could make out chairs and tables, centered around an empty fireplace in the middle. A purple carpet was placed in the center of the hallway, extending down towards that central room.

To either side of the entrance doorway were two large woodne doors, which seemed to be closed. Meredith could see fresh drag marks of some kind leading towards each of the doors from the entrance, likely from the golems dragging their harvests inside. There was little else of note in the hallway that she could see, not even lights. No torches, no gas lamps. Nothing.

At least until she stepped past the threshold.

As she did so, the tower seemed to come to life. Glowing motes of magelight, balls of heatless flame as bright as a modern bulb, ignited on the walls like torches, one after the other, leading down the hallway. As they reached the central room, the fireplace ignited into pale violet flames.

Her pupils narrowed like a cat's at the lighting change, although she didn't react to it in any other way.

The doors were what she was most interested in: they would hopefully lead the way to answers to the many questions she had. They did, however, also present a choice. At a first glance they hadn't seemed different but she examined them closer just in case. If either of them looked more likely to lead to somewhere interesting (perhaps a library? It wasn't very likely given the trails on the floor, but she could hope), she would choose that one but otherwise she was just going to have to pick one at random.

(On a side note, the fact that there were marks on the floor from the golems' work was peculiar. Given that he building was magical and the lights could turn themselves on, why didn't it clean itself? Or have a side entrance to avoid dragging trees through the hall? She'd have to ask if she found anyone not made of metal or straw... or who was sentient despite that.)

The door isn't locked, and opens easily with a gentle creak. Inside seemed to be a workshop of some kind. Fresh pine logs from outside were stacked against one wall, while the other had a handful of worktables lined up against it, complete with saws, awls, and other tools for woodwork and stonecutting.

It seemed to be a normal workshop, if a century or two outdated, but for a marble statue that sat in an alcove located in the far wall. It had no base, and seemed to be that of a greek soldier, roman legionairre, or other warrior of antiquity - it matched no culture that she could recognize.

Having seen no identifying qualities, she’d picked the left door on a whim and was pleased (but unsurprised) to find it unlocked.

Meredith walked closer to the statue, since it was what stood out most. She reached out to touch it, maybe it would react and become animated like the figures outside!

The other thing she found interesting was that the equipment looked older than the tower, which, despite, well, being a tower, certainly wasn’t a century old. Unless it was very well preserved.

The statue was just a statue, as far as she could tell. It practically glowed with magic, but so did just about everything in this tower. It did look out of place in a place like this though...

The work tables looked new in the same way the tower did, archaic but seemingly made within the last decade, frequently used but well-kept. There were chips of wood and a thin layer of sawdust on the tables and floor.

Meredith guessed that the tower’s owner must have old-fashioned tastes. Anyway, it’s nowhere near as big of a mystery as the towers sudden appearance, the legions of animated straw dolls and the fact that, if the tower had  an owner, she shouldn’t have been able to enter it.

Since the extremely magical statue was right in front of her and looked like it could be hiding something, her next decision was trying to trigger it into opening a secret passage or whatever else it might do. To do so, she attempted to push it, pull it, twist it or otherwise manipulate it or one of its parts without applying enough strength to break it.

It's just a statue. With no base, the statue rocked on its feet as Meredith pushed it, but otherwise it didn't move, react, or trigger anything that she could tell.

Well, that was a little bit frustrating. However, Meredith was stubborn and didn’t want to give up on the idea of the statue being important just yet. She also had vampiric strength. And the statue wasn’t attached to the floor.

Which was how Meredith stepped through the other door, back in the entrance hall, while carrying the statue.

Finagling a life-sized marble statue while also trying to open a large door was a bit of a puzzle, but with the size of the doorframe and Meredith's vampiric strength she managed all right. The statue made a scraping noise as she dragged it across the stone floor, but neither it nor the floor seemed to be damaged by it.

The second room seemed much the same as the first. Anvils, forges, and other blacksmithing equipment were set across one wall, while along the other was a series of crates, barrels, chests, and other forms of storage, all closed. Against the far wall was another statue, nearly identical to the first, save for it seeming to be modeled after an entirely different time period and culture.