As prisons went the Tower was, at least, a large one. The Twelve Towers had been built in a time before recorded history. Each of them stood on the seventh moon of the seventh world in a binary system. Quite what they had been built for was a subject of futile if spirited academic debate, but as they existed in, or created, pockets in which magic did not function, they made ideal goals for recalcitrant mages. Kendus Priori, the infamous Butcher of Blenin, had languished in one for over to centuries before finally passing on, penning his famous Gallicus Ultimus in his gilded cage. Prisons were useful because by Assembly Law no wizard could kill another save in a properly constituted duel on pain of death, and the took the command, like most of their petty rules, very seriously indeed. Several wizards had challenged Andromeda to such duels after she had been arrested, young fire eaters looking to make a name for themselves by bringing down a famous, or more accurately infamous wizard. Unfortunately for them, Andromeda, like all the Black family, had been trained to duel from a young age at her family estate on Calperni, a fact that her would be opponents hadn't learned before their smoking corpses littered the dueling square.

Unfortunately the Tower now prevented her from anything more complicated than a card trick. It had taken her several days to explore the tower. There were twelve accessible floors, with rooms ranging from bed rooms to libraries, but they only reached down to something like a quarter of the towers height. The remaining three quarters was inaccessible, stranding an inmate at the top unless a void ship should arrive. Andromeda had of course tried to find material to fashion a rope or other means to scale the side of the tower, but nothing from inside the tower seemed to be able to survive in the rest of the universe. The sheets she had tied together in an improvised rope had flown to dust when she threw them out the window of one of the lower chambers. Even more annoyingly, they appeared to have returned to their proper places afterwards. Even the libraries themselves were of limited use, those books she could read, perhaps a third of the total volumes, seemed to concern themselves with philosophy, natural history and other subject of interest to absolutely nobody that Andromeda wanted to meet.

"There has got to be a way out of here," she muttered, trying not to think of how many mages had spent the entire remendairs of their lives thinking that exact thought.

Food, at least, was no problem. Three times a day a chime would sound and foods in no pattern that Andromeda could discover, appeared on the table of the main hall. Frustratingly she wasn't able to witness this as the chime only sounded when she looked away and seemed to wait till she left the hall if she tried to out wait it. Sometimes at night she though she heard things moving in the lower level of the tower but she was never able to be too sure. The only other way she could thing to escape the tower was to leap from the window and hope that she could travel far enough to escape the anti-magic effect and then hope to cast a spell that would prevent her from being dashed to pieces on the ground below. As with most plans which began with 'first throw yourself from a thirty story tower' she was not much inclined to try it.