Constance and The Tower are based on one of my favourite horror tropes. Architecture. Strange, terrible architecture
A building that's fundamentally built wrong; tilted, looping, with dimensions that make no sense both outside and in. A living, breathing space with a mind of its own - that's what The Tower of Equilibrium is. Fundamentally, it's a liminal space and those tend to be neutral, which it is, geared towards accomodating itself first and foremost. Yes, it moves around, adds and substracts things as it sees fit, makes extra floors and rooms on a whim, then takes them away, it can inconvenience you greatly for its own gain, it holds a whole endless realm within its walls. But all of this isn't necessarily horror. An impossible feat of abstraction may give you pause of disbelief or unnerve you, but the place's shallows limit themselves to fathomable shapes and proportions for the sake of camouflage. An optical illusion isn't inherently scary, it's just confusing. But since it is a being, a breathing thing with its own sentience, The Tower can form opinions on its inhabitants, can judge them and, as follows, its treatment of them varies. And it takes shape accordingly.
One trope that's fun to explore is the Tower as 'the perfect home'. What would you do if you entered a place that liked you? It's overjoyed you're here, it warms and brightens at your presence, and will do anything to make sure you're comfortable. What does your favourite room look like, where do you sleep best, what do you like to eat or listen to. which view would please you more: ocean or mountaintop? Endless sky perhaps? You ask how can a room hug you with its walls and floor, how can it express its affection to you? Imagine you walk into a house and it shapes itself like home around you.
And then there's the polar opposite. The place that hates you. The house that wants you dead. A great big god made up of concrete and anti-matter, whose foyer you've dared tread upon. The door as a mouth. The room as a stomach. The Tower can love, and it can chew. So what is the shape of hatred? Of fear? Is it an endless hallway whose walls narrow as you walk? Is it a door that opens to brick? A window with nothing but the darkest black beyond it? A looping corner? A flooding bathroom? A holed floor? A crumpling ceiling? The unlit maze of The Catacombs or the bottomless pit of the Tower itself? It all bears little importance. If a maw you've willingly walked into wants you dead, you die. It tips its room-head and slides you into its wall-mouth, yawns the mattress open and gnashes its spring-teeth, pinches you with a groan between cracking plaster, metal and wood, pops you like a grape and wipes away the remnants.
The Tower is a dimension unto itself. One whose borders are unknowable. End is beginning in here, time means nothing, the hallways loop and loop and loop. The place exists to store everything from the very dawn of this world to the very end of it, an infinite archive not just for files but for living things, equipped to imprison atrocities that should not die but should not be allowed to live either. Its very architecture allows for exile. There is always a jail cell in the form eternity available, should one trangsress within the Tower's borders. And just as it bends around those it likes, it does the same with those it hates. For some, hell is shaped like a bedroom, for others a kitchen, a living room, a porch. Mostly, the jail cells rarely ask for personal preferences, nor bother with proper geometry. They have no one to impress or fool, unless you've earned some intimate torture. The walls and floors are softer down here, less trustworthy, the slopes steeper, stairs less linear. The rooms collapse on themselves if they are even whole to begin with. From whence you've come, you often return. There is nothing but darkness and solitude. You are all alone.
Constance is not the god of equilibrium. He's a small, replaceable piece of human geometry who can walk, talk and blend in, allowed a measly chunk of the vast consciousness of entropy itself, meant to serve as its surrogate. And as its diversion. Because humans are vain things who always look for gods in human faces, who will walk in and look at the bellboy, unaware they stand atop the tongue of a behemoth. Within the cavity of a mouth. Still, Equilibrium is not a body. It is a Tower. It is an angler. It is a house.
