Entry 1:

Of the beasts manifold that inhabited the lands before I ascended the tower, no sound may be heard. Not of their steps, not of their breaths. From the mayfly to the youngest of turtles, barely any remains of them, or even several generations of their descendants, may be found. A tree or three, the last pines older than literature itself, may have been seeds or perhaps just saplings back then. I am the last speaker of the tongue of the people that considered me a brother, a son. I don’t remember where my mother was once buried, and twisted is the memory of my father’s last words. Yet they made me seek the tower, and not time, not men and definitively not gods can tear it down like it may deserve.

The tower is eternal. And so are we who reached the top.

I have lived every life a man can live. Beggar, farmer, engineer, architect, scientist, soldier, gigolo, waiter, dramaturge, thief, hitman. Name a profession, and odds are I have a lifetime of experience on it. I have been a promiscuous lover and an ascetic monk. I have searched for fossils I deemed precious and grinded them to make cure-all potions that didn’t work, too. I have been a loving father; I have been a child murderer. Every life a man can live, with not a single death a man can earn. And woman, too. We gods can modify our body. I fathered a million children and mothered ten thousand more. Twins, triplets, even sextuplets, I gave birth to. I raised them with love or I raised them with hate, I drowned some in the tub or choked them in their sleep or crushed their heads with a brick. I have been a model, a prostitute, a scholar, a businesswoman, a religious idol. I don’t even remember if I were a man or a woman for some of the events on my life so long.

And I could keep this list going on forever, because eternity is on the side of the children of the tower, because I did things I’d need to help coin a term for, and because writing this diary bores me.

Everything does. Boring me. Everything does.

I have done everything a man can do. Except for one thing.

Dying.

The blood I have shed trying to kill myself could fill every clepsydra in the world to the brim. All of it mine, the blood. Cut my veins and the wounds heal almost instantly. Pierce my heart and the result is not much different. Tear it out from my own chest, still beating, with my bare hands, and crush it: I could do it now, and when I’d be done, a new one would beat inside my healed ribcage. Not even a scar remains from my countless suicide attempts. Use my powers to obliterate myself, to pulverize the smallest trace of my being and burn it with the heat of a star… and from dust I will be reformed.

But the tower gives immortality, and hopefully it can take it away. Here, in my celestial chambers, at a golden table engraved with rivulets of mercury, sitting on a luxurious chair upholstered with the scales of an animal that existed just once, born out of my whim, and with the sole purpose of dying by my hand, I manifested a diary and a pen. And now, on them, I write for you. Whoever you are or will be, I know not. Mortal or disgraced, one or several, barely educated or an intellectual. I don’t care. I wish to get rid of my immortality; I have lived enough. Yet I still yearn for some sort of afterlife. Not a literal one, mind you. I wish for my words to outlive me. Of all the men I have been, i suppose this is the ember that survives. A wish to transcend, to be more than we are, despite knowing that being more is this despicable monotony that surrounds me.

I am a god. I will be until the tower gifts me freedom from my powers. And I won’t kill myself if I reach the last (For those who ascend, the first) floor. If I descend the tower, giving back all of their gifts to each guardian, I will emerge and breathe the desert, plain or jungle air once again as a man. Then, if the scorching sun, a wild cat or a blood-poisoning mosquito-borne disease take me, I’ll go with a smile. These hands that now obliterate planets, I want them to hold a spear they need once again. Or a gun, as weaponry marched on since last time I had any need of it.

Finding the tower is an issue even from the top, despite the plain of the divine seemingly converging on it. As a mortal, it took me years to attain the mindset that would make the way appear before me. To lose all fear of and reverence for death, to think like a child or an animal would. To live, even if for a second, without a concept of it. And when I did, the next blink threw me into the sands of the desert, where, from atop a dune, I beheld a building unlike anyone I had ever seen. My people lived in houses of mud with thatched rooves. The tower appeared as an unmelting column of ice, with elaborate balconies and twisted like a corkscrew —a tool that didn’t exist back then. It frightened me, the contrast, the impossibility. I returned to my home in the next blink, rejected due to my altered state of mind.

I remember I laughed like a madman. The tower existed! My father had told me the truth before passing. A woman stared at me with a bit of apprehension and bit of fear. My sister? My wife? My friend? My lover? I cannot recall. Not even her face comes to me. It may have been a man with long hair, too. I didn’t care, that I remember. The tower was real. And I was an idiot.

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I won’t say I should have stopped seeking it then, that I should have lived and died just one life, because that would be spitting on the face of all the other men and women I took on as personas over the millennia. Immortality had its novelty, long ago, and the power to make and unmake, to know it all, also did.

I don’t regret seeking immortality. But I regret attaining it. So, as previously stated, I will seek the tower, and with it, a mortal’s gift.

Yet that won’t be an easy task. There’s a known path to the tower for deities: those who genuinely wish to test or observe the climbers of the last floors can find it. It’s a path I cannot walk: the tower knows one’s true intentions. I cannot lie to it. Nobody can. I’d need to convince myself that to observe climbers is what I want, and once I do, returning to the current mindset could prove impossible while remaining inside the tower. It’s true that I have nothing to lose with trying, but that’s the default state of my existence. It would be another meaningless failure, like self-decapitation or obliteration were.

No, what I am going to try will be to reverse the initial state of mind, the one I used to find the tower as a man. It stands to reason that if to stop fearing death is necessary to attain immortality, I’d need to either fear and revere death while being unable to die, or to stop despising my eternal existence while still seeking the tower, while still seeking to end it. And that poses the main problem: one can seek immortality while not fearing death, as there are countless benefits one could ascribe to an extended lifespan. Such pragmatic justifications are nowhere to be found in my current situation.

If I succeed, I will write again. Until I make the slightest of breakthroughs, though, this diary is on hold.

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Entry 2:

A fraction of a second! I glimpsed it, if only for an instant I couldn’t retain. Once again, the sight of the tower pulled me out of the necessary state of mind. I stood on a hill of cotton-like clouds, flowers composed of thunderbolts sprouting left and right. In the distance the tower, charred bricks and pointed stakes, like an insect with countless legs, pierced upward though the cloud. And on its roof, perched haughty and curious, Karerak The Endless spotted me. The old dragon, the only deity that, until today, I had not seen since I left the tower. But now, after eight years of restless meditation and self-examination, I exchanged glances with her. She knows more than anyone about the tower, but I had thought her gone. Now, I need to drive her away from the tower, I need to convince her to meet me in neutral territory. As long as she is perched up there I am afraid I won’t be able to keep the memories of my ascension from interfering.

Furthermore, I cannot die without having some questions answered. I have a theory. I believe the tower, so intimately related to men’s states of mind and so reflective of a part of the self in its outer aspect, is a sort of egregore. I am referring to a construct of the collective minds of men, not necessarily a conscious effort. Our fear of death, our desire for transcendence, both given form in unity; to be found only by those that shouldn’t be seeking it.

But that’s only conjectures. What I know for certain is that I can reach the tower again, and that I need Karerak’s cooperation if I aim to enter it.

This is the thing about Karerak: according to the other gods, she doesn’t like being named in vain. Not even in writing. To pen down her name with the intent of referring to her is to rapture her attention. So if I spin my glass of whiskey slowly, if I find the right angle…

Hello there, Karerak. Her image refracts on a little imperfection of the glass that wasn’t there yesterday. Golden, pulsing wounds surround her deep violet eye. I will record my conversation with her as I have it, to get the details down to a T. My memory as a god may be prodigious compared to that of the average mortal, but it’s still far from perfect.

“Karerak, acquaintance of my early days, I have questions for you. Would you mind providing me some answers?”

The eye opened further, asking the question without using words. The conical teeth rimming said eye chittered.

“I wish to recover my mortality, and I suspect the tower may give it back to me if I let go of all of its gifts. Are my assumptions correct?”

Like broken glass, the voice of the dragon came through, making me curl my hand into a fist to avoid telling her to close her damned snout.

“If you plan to turn her gift into a loan, know that Ilucaris is a usurer. I have no issue in letting you descend through my sister, and neither has she, provided you can find her. But to think you will come out the bottom a man, with eyes, hair, and hearing the wind howl… you would need to try hard to be more wrong.”

I had forgot she referred to the tower as her sister, or maybe never learned about it.

I am tempted to ask another question. I will. “Do you remember my name? The one I had when I first ascended the Tower?”

“Useless artifact. Ilucaris knows you without need of a name, and so do I. I will hide next time you come, such that I don’t stir your memories. But remember you won’t come out the bottom a man. You will be a bag of bones, old and weak. Blind, most likely.”

“I have seen all there is to see a thousand and one times. I won’t fall into despair if I go blind for a few years.”

“Don’t leave my sister waiting, then. Come, Unnamed One, come and show us the depths of your ingratitude. “

Her image disappeared from the glass a second ago, her presence gone with the flaw on the material. I should not name her again.

I should consider the price I am asked to pay, however. Over a drink. I wonder which one. Tea with wine, like that old man in a bar during a south-hemisphere winter told me long ago? Whatever. Anything I drink, nothing will change. Anything I may drink, I don’t need to yet. I hope I feel real thirst soon, for what could very well be considered the first time.

Next time I write I hope to be standing before the tower.