They say grief comes in stages. The Tower doesnât care.
It doesn't care how you got here. It doesn't care who you lost. It doesn't even care who you are.
All that matters is that you climb. Ascend.
Five floors. Five chances to break. Or to become something else entirely.
Bishop was born without power in a world that worships strength. But when the Tower took him, it didnât ask for his permission. It asked a different question:
What are you willing to become?
This is not a tale of heroes. This is a story of grief sharpened into resolve, of pain turned into purposeâand of whatâs left when the fight is over, and youâre still breathing.
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Chapter 1 â You Have Died
[Divine Notice][Bureau of Bad Decisions & Brave Idiots]
CONGRATULATIONS! You have died. Donât panicâthis is a perfectly normal part of existence. Happens all the time.
Although most people donât check out by being forcibly ejected from a city through an ancient artifact like a rag doll launched from the Divine Rejection Cannon.
But not you. No, you ticked off the wrong noble, got framed, kicked through a force field powered by forgotten gods, and managed to die of stubbornness somewhere deeply inconvenient.
Inspiring. Tragic. Spectacularly dumb.
The paperworkâs still smoking â on fire, and sentient. Which wouldnât be a problem if it didnât now have opinions about your last thoughts.
Please hold while your soul is reassigned. Your incompetence has been noted. Your defiance has been filed. Your death has been deemed⦠narratively interesting.
Note: Narratively Interesting deaths are flagged for further processing. Possible fates include: mythologization, recursive immortality, ironic resurrection, or eternal rerun.
Carry on.
âManagement
[System Message Detected]
[Level: NULL]
[Access: Unauthorized. Audit Flag Triggered.]
The Bureau of Bad Decisions & Brave Idiots
Bishop stumbledânot physically, but mentally. A system message. For him? That had never happened before. Ever.
Most people knew their level by twelve. You got your stats, a Class notification, maybe even a perk from your patron god if you were lucky. Bishop? He got silence.
He stared at the message, heart pounding. It felt... wrong. Like someone had finally noticed him after a lifetime of being overlooked.
âNarratively interesting?â He muttered the words aloud. His throat felt dry. âGreat. I die. And now the divine bureaucracy decides I exist.â
The Bureau of Bad Decisions & Brave Idiots. Heâd heard whispersâhalf rumor, half drunken cautionary tale. A joke among guards. A superstition among the half-mad. Supposedly, they tracked the most ridiculous deaths and filed them awayâeither for a laugh, or so the gods could make an example out of you.
And the Unifier Rings? No one truly knew how they workedâuntil now, maybe. Powered by forgotten gods? That detail slipped through like an accidental confession. It was the kind of revelation that shouldâve changed everything.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
But Bishop had just died. Burned alive. Erased like a typo in reality. That kind of pain didnât leave room for divine epiphanies.
He never thought any of it was real. Now? He wasnât so sure. Still... did it even matter anymore?
The first thing Bishop noticed was that he wasnât on fire anymore. This felt like an improvement. A huge one.
Because he had been on fire. In that blinding instant when the Ring judged him unworthy, he remembered the searing agonyâhis nerves flaring one by one, his thoughts turning to static. It wasnât a metaphor. It wasnât poetic. He burned. And thenâgone. No body. No scream. Just absence.
The second thing was the grass. Tall, gold-green blades swayed above him, whispering in the hush between breeze and breath. A warm wind brushed his cheeks, carrying the faint scent of wild thyme and something faintly metallic. Birds chirped far too melodically to be real.
He sat up slowly, expecting pain. Found none. Touched his sideâno blood. No burns. No pain. Which made no sense. He'd been vaporized. There shouldnât be anything left to feel.
But his skin was smooth. Pale. Untouchedâlike nothing had ever happened.â...Huh.â
He blinked at the open field. The sky curved overhead like a painted dome. The sun was too perfect. The clouds, too symmetrical. He half-expected to find a price tag on the sky.
Bishop shook his head. âSo⦠am I gone, or just lost inside my own mind?â
He waited. No clarity came with the stillness. Just a quiet invitation to move forward, or fade away.
The dream-coloured field stretched endlessly in every directionâexcept one. Behind him stood a wall of fog, thick and unmoving. Ahead, a spire of black stone reached toward the heavens like a splinter stabbed into the dome. Surrounding the Tower, the terrain looked devastatedâlike it had been dropped into a reality it didnât belong to. Jagged, shattered stone jutted upward like broken teeth.
âWell,â Bishop said, standing. âThat doesnât look ominous at all. Definitely not the kind of thing I ascend or die inside.â
He patted himself down. Same worn trousers. Same patched jacket. Same boots, one sole still flapping like a lazy tongue. No weapons. No tools. No clue what the hell was going on.
And yet... he felt fine. No hunger. No thirst. No exhaustion. Just a prickling along his spine, like someone was watching. Or waiting.
He started toward the tower.
He remembered the goat first.
Back on the day of his deathâthough he hadnât known it at the timeâBishop had woken up late, stepped in goat shit, and gotten himself exiled.
Arguably in ascending order of severity. Though the goat might disagree.
The goat wasnât the problem. At worst, it was an accomplice. At best, a witness. The problem was a nobleman. And shit. And scandal. And one very ill-timed laugh.
The nobleâs name was something like Sir Haldrin Valeâor maybe Valdrin Hale? Bishop had only caught it in passing, murmured by the guards during sentencing. He hadnât cared enough to clarify. He probably shouldâve.
It started when Bishop, the only one tending the outer courtyard that morning, watched a finely dressed nobleman sprinting around a corner in a panicâonly to slip on a fresh pile of goat shit and land face-first in the dirt.
The nobleâs silks were ruined. His eyes, wild. He came from the direction of the northern wingâwhere important people schemed.
No one else was around. Just Bishop. Holding a shovel.
And Bishop laughed.
Heâd never seen a noble covered in filth before. It was glorious. His ribs still hurt from the first laugh, but it was the second chuckleâthe soft, involuntary snortâthat sealed it.
The noble glared at him through a mask of filth. And in that moment, something shiftedânot in anger. Not in shame. In calculation.
By sunset, Bishop had been accused of theft. Or espionage. Or plotting with insurgents. The charge changed three times before lunch.
Whatever the crime, no one said it outright. Vague whispers of âtreason,â âsecurity breaches,â and âconspiracyâ swirled through the halls. Bishop wasnât given a chargeâjust a name he knew all too well. Jarid, the other stablehand, vanished soon after. Conveniently.
The scandal erupted a week later but quickly fizzled out. Someone had to be blamed. Someone expendable.
Bishop fit the role perfectly.
No one asked questions. No one ever did.
The Unifier Ringsâmassive floating constructs that pulsed with ancient powerâencircled the city like dormant gods. Half-machine, half-artifact. Relics of the Unification War. Not walls, exactly, but nothing passed through them without permission.
Automated defences. Scanning beams. Pulses of light that could vaporize monstersâor armiesâin a blink. They werenât maintained. They werenât understood. They just were.
Older than the city itself. Older than the Kingdom, maybe even the gods. Things too old to understand, and too powerful to ignore.
Bishop had always thought of them as silent sentinels. Reassuring. Uncaring. He never imagined heâd be thrown through one.
But when the guards hauled him to the cityâs edge, one of the Rings had stirredâhumming like it recognized a threat, or maybe just a name on a list.
It parted like a curtain. Let him through. And then it reacted.
A flash of light. A pulse of unimaginable energy. Not a sound, not a screamâjust silence, and the unmistakable finality of unbeing. The Ring vaporized him without hesitation.
No trial. No warning. Just obliteration.
Heâd had one last thought before the light: Maybe laughing at a noble wasnât the mistake. Maybe laughing while fate held the pen was.
The end of his old life. The end of life, period.
And thenâ
The Tower already waitingâtall, dark, and watching.