The Lower World had never been kind to anyone.
Eran knew that before he knew anything else. Before he learned to read, before he learned to fight, before he learned that smiling at the wrong person could get you killed in the alleys of Duskmar City. The sky here was always grey. The soil was always hard. And the people, every last one of them, were always hungry.
Not hungry for food. Hungry for something larger. Something that couldn't be bought or stolen or begged for at the side of a road.
Answers.
And the only place in the world that promised answers stood at the center of everything, rising from the earth like a bone piercing the sky.
The Tower of Absal.
Eran had been standing in front of the Entrance Gate since before dawn. He was not alone. Hundreds of people pressed around him, all carrying the same expression split between two extremes: eyes lit with wild hope, or eyes dulled by the weight of having nothing left to lose. Street vendors sold cheap talismans along the road. An old woman sobbed into the shoulder of a young man who would not look back at her. A large fellow in a red coat was shouting to no one in particular that he would reach the summit, that he would become a god, that all of them would bow to him one day.
Nobody was paying attention to Eran.
Good. He preferred it that way.
He pulled his hood lower and reached into his jacket, fingers finding the one item he had brought with him. A worn notebook, its leather cover cracked and soft from years of handling. Inside were no maps, no battle strategies, no lists of enemies to defeat. Only a single sentence, written in handwriting that was not his own, by a hand that had long since gone still.
The truth is at the summit. Trust nothing that lies between.
He closed the notebook. Tucked it back against his chest. Looked up at the gate.
It was enormous. Black metal, seamless, cold-looking even from twenty meters away. It rose twice the height of the tallest building in Duskmar, and its surface had no handles, no hinges, no visible mechanism of any kind. It simply stood there, as if it had grown from the ground like a tooth.
Then, as the first light of morning touched the horizon, it opened.
Not because of gears or chains. Not because a Gatekeeper pulled a lever somewhere. The gate simply parted, slowly and silently, the way a sleeping creature opens its eyes. Something inside the Tower had decided the time had come. That was all.
The crowd surged forward.
Eran was carried with them into a long corridor, dark and cold, the light from outside swallowing itself behind the mass of bodies until there was nothing left but the pale glow of the Tower walls pulsing faintly on their own. The air tasted different in here. Thicker. Like breathing near deep water.
The corridor opened into a vast white chamber.
No ceiling that Eran could see. No windows. No doors except the one they had entered from, which was already gone. The walls curved inward at impossible angles, and the floor beneath their feet was smooth and faintly warm, like stone that had been sitting in sunlight for hours. Two hundred people stood scattered across the space, all of them turning slowly, all of them realizing the same thing at the same time.
There was no way back.
A voice filled the chamber. It did not come from speakers or from a person standing at a podium. It came from everywhere, low and even, neither male nor female, neither warm nor cold.
"Welcome to the Tower of Absal. You are now Climbers. You have entered of your own will, and you will ascend by your own strength. The Tower does not invite. The Tower does not beg. The Tower simply exists, and those who are worthy will rise. Those who are not will be forgotten."
A pause.
"Your first Trial begins in one hour. Survive it, and you proceed to Floor Two. Fail it, and you will be removed."
Removed. Not killed. Not sent home. Removed.
Eran filed that word away carefully.
Around him, people were already reacting. Some clustered together in groups, whispering fast. Others stood rigid with fear. The man in the red coat who had been shouting outside was laughing, loud and sharp, cracking his knuckles like he had been waiting for this his whole life.
Eran moved to the far edge of the chamber and leaned against the wall, watching.
He had learned early that the most dangerous moments were not the ones that looked dangerous. Danger announced itself sometimes, yes, but the kind that truly killed you arrived quietly, wearing a friendly face.
So he watched.
He noticed a girl standing alone near the center of the room, arms crossed, yellow scarf around her neck, eyes moving across the crowd the same way his were. Calculating. She caught him looking and did not look away. She smiled instead, small and unreadable, then turned her attention elsewhere.
Eran looked away too.
He noticed a large young man sitting cross-legged on the floor a few meters away, eyes closed, breathing slow and deliberate. The red coat. Up close he was broader than he had seemed outside, with a jaw like a stone ledge and hands that had clearly broken things before. But the breathing was controlled. Practiced. Not as reckless as the shouting had suggested.
He noticed a girl sitting with her back against the opposite wall, knees pulled to her chest, eyes open but unfocused. Young. Younger than most people here. She had a faint pattern on the back of her left hand that Eran recognized after a moment.
An Ukiran. Already carved. On someone that young.
He made a note of that too.
The hour passed in near silence.
When the voice returned, it said only four words.
"The Trial has begun."
The floor vanished beneath all of them at once, and Eran dropped into darkness.