I’m going to enter the Tower today. That was the thought that echoed in my mind as I marched through town, shoulder to shoulder with fifty-two other hopefuls. We had graduated that very morning from the Crim – part school, part home, teachers acting as our parents for as long as any of us could remember. Everyone around me counted as a brother or sister, and I prayed we’d all make it through the first test of the spire: simply entering its arched doorway.

Our town was bedecked in dingy white streamers linked between leaning homes, hand-sized rusted bells had been hung on hooks set into walls or posts for just this occasion, and across many doors, twigs bleached, wetted, woven, and then dried into the shape of the high tower were nailed in place. But what gave Misfell its sense of exuberance was not the decoration but the number of people who were out to see us pass. Nearly all of the farmers had come in from their temperamental fields to watch our progression, and they were joined by bakers and smiths, cartwrights and brewers, sewers and carpenters – anyone and everyone who kept the town running, all for this very day, for it was the chosen among us who would help win the Everwar that raged in the heavens.

I tilted my head up, away from the streamers and sallow faces stretched into smiles. The roiling gray cloud of Limness, the Floor of Heaven, seemed a little lower than I remembered it, though with something so vast it was hard to say. There were breaks in it where the sun shone through in thick shafts of light, primarily over the fields and far off places where none of us from the Crim had ever been. Closer to the center of town, which was where we marched, was a different story: the town circled the spire, and the dark mass was always thickest there. The Tower itself was bone white and stretched forever skyward, piercing through the clouds that encircled it two hundred meters up and then beyond, all the way to Sharell, the Celestial Realm. I had never made the journey myself of course – no one my age was prepared for that climb – but unlike many of my brothers and sisters, I actually listened in our history classes.

“If I get in,” the boy in front of me named Aldric said, “I’ll never have gotten to know Hemras. Really know her, you catch what I mean? Shame, that.”

I dropped my gaze from the Tower, glancing over to why my bunkmate was looking longingly. Sure enough, there was a pretty, lithe girl in the watching crowd with hair so blonde it seemed silver. She stood behind her thickset father, watching us pass with wide eyes. Few children were raised outside the Crim and fewer still knew who their parents were, but some folk had special dispensations. Her father, I knew, served among a hard group known as foragers, whose job it was to find those living outside of Misfell and bring them into the fold. It was a duty that was rewarded well, and wholly necessary, because if we didn’t send enough people into the Tower to ascend and help fight the War Above, the ever-lowering cloud of the Limness would smother the land, letting the victorious demons come ravening in. Misfell would be no different than the accursed lands of Sheol beyond the border of civilization, and humans would be a thing of the past.

Tamra, a girl with a fiery red mane next to us huffed a laugh, wholly at odds with the dark vein of my thoughts. “As if you’ve ever known any of the girls in town, Aldy. And you can leave the Tower once you enter. Any fool with eyes knows that.” She pointed up and over, and he and I both followed her straight finger.

There, circling high above the city, was a man in green-tinged armor with huge-bat like wings stretched out on either side of him. His bond beast was nowhere to be seen, probably off scouting for fallen celestial knights who sometimes crashed down from the sky, or perhaps eating, but it had to be a wyvern or similar to grant him that type of form. I had spoken to many of our teachers over the years, finding out as much as I could about the seven sacred orders we could follow after entering the spire, so I could be ready to follow any they deemed me worthy to pursue.

“Of course,” Aldric said, “but how long will it be before we look like that? We’ll be Neophytes, and they don’t ever leave. As any fool knows.” He threw a lazy fist at her ribs, clearly wanting to give as well as he was getting.

“You might be a Neophyte for years,” Tamra answered with a snort, easily deflecting his offhand blow, “but you’re hopeless. I don’t plan to stay at that rank for long. You think anyone tells a Devout who they can and can’t bed, or an Elder? An Apostle?”

The Headmaster of the Tower might, I thought, but I didn’t bother putting voice to it. The Prophet was a legendary figure, much whispered about but never seen outside the Tower. I knew Tamra had an idle fancy for one of the stable boys who cared for the foragers’ lanky mounts and didn’t wish to start an argument with her. I was wider than her, but from many practice yard bouts and our yearly tourney, I also knew her limbs possessed a surprising quickness I couldn’t match and wouldn’t want to today. The march to our goal was a time for togetherness, not division. Similar friendly bickering was happening up and down the line of us, and the reason could be seen just as clearly as the sacred warrior in the sky: our collective excitement, which shone so brightly it nearly disguised the fear beneath.

While I fervently wished that those I had grown up with would all join me in the Tower, I knew it would not be so. If previous graduating classes were any indication – and our history teacher Frey had emphasized on many occasions that they most certainly were – perhaps half of us would be able to walk all the way through the portal; certainly less than two-thirds. The rest would take up in the town, supporting it just as all those who could not fight did. There was a nobility of purpose to that life, the same as the final sacrifice that came on the thirty-fifth birthday of all non-Tower folk, but it wasn’t what I desired, nor did my brothers and sisters who walked with me today. Those who wanted an easier life had left the Crim well before now.

We rounded the barrel shaped inn, which finally put us in view of the base of the Tower. The structure was massive, more than a kilometer in circumference and said to somehow be even larger than that once you were within. My eyes immediately found the huge, arched entryway, which was at least five meters wide and twice that tall – so big, a full grown wyvern or griffon would have no trouble entering. The portal lacked hinges or doors of wood and yet it was impossible to see within. Instead, a hazy whiteness distorted the view of anything beyond, a barrier to the secrets that the Tower held.

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Most years we were only allowed out of the Crim a scant few times, but on nearly all of those occasions I had found my way to this part of Misfell, to the Tower that dominated all of our lives and promised salvation if we could but win the War Above. I had walked around the spire on some of those visits, trailing my fingers along its etched surface, but more often I ended up staring at its ephemeral doorway, sometimes for hours it seemed, wondering what exactly I would discover beyond.

And today I would finally find out.

“Time for the gauntlet,” Aldric said, sounding grim.

I nodded absently, having expected the sight just as much as the Tower itself. It was a lesser test of sorts and as much a part of the celebration as the twig-made spire effigies. While the watchful crowd had mostly moved with us, and even more waited in the town circle around the Tower, two lines of people stood closer than the rest, making a narrow lane with their bodies to the massive doorway. As tradition dictated, we were to walk between them single file, so that was what we did, Tamra in front of Aldric, him ahead of me, and the twins Oph and Orm behind whispering to themselves as they often did.

Instead of shouting encouragement, the people to either side of us offered us futures to partake in. They spun tales of warm beds beside the fire, fresh bread every day, shaping wood to our wish, standing out in the light instead of the half-dark under the Limness, or the joy of riding into the Wilds and finding that which lay beyond. They pressed us to leave the dream of the Tower behind, spending the next decade and a half living the lives we had, marrying, having children to give to the Crim, and in so doing, knowing that we had left something of ourselves behind beyond a memory and a name chipped into the base of the Tower.

Their offers didn’t tempt me. I believed deeply, based on private conversations with Frey and other teachers like him, that we were losing the War Above against the greater demons. If things kept on as they were, no one in Misfell would survive, or anywhere else. Still, I didn’t begrudge the townsfolk their attempts to convert us. I spent very little time outside of the Crim, but it was obvious that Misfell was struggling. It seemed worse for wear each time I stepped out into it. Most of the inhabitants were only given a fraction of the food and education that we received in the Crim; the town’s first priorities were sustaining the Tower and then preparing us. This too spurred me forward: if Misfell did end up failing, our group might be one of the last to ascend, making our choice today all the more important.

“My daughter,” a man ahead said. “I see you looking, boy. You can be married this very night if you join the foragers. We could use someone of your size.”

Shifting to locate the voice, I saw it was the same thick father as before, his willowy daughter standing beside him now, her eyes firm and jaw resolute, willing to do her part, just as we were all trying to. It wasn’t Aldric her father was talking to; it was that big ox Dumel, who was up at the very front of our line. The father must have pulled the poor girl into a run soon after we saw them to have reached their position now by the Tower’s doorway.

“Shit on a saint,” Aldric sighed. “Dumel will absolutely ruin that girl. Should have been me.”

Tamra flicked him hard on the ear, and he clapped his hand to his head, snickering and cursing at the same time. He hadn’t meant it, of course. Aldric and Tamra were both dead set on getting into the Tower… but if they could annoy each other along the way, so much the better.

I watched Dumel hesitate, look to his Crim siblings, and then leave the line. There was a collective murmur among our ranks and Aldric groaned theatrically. In contrast, the father seemed quite pleased, grasping Dumel’s equally thick forearm in his hand, and I noticed the girl smiling coquettishly up at her newly betrothed. Perhaps she had been the one making her father do the running rather than the other way ‘round.

That sort of offer was one of the most likely to diminish our numbers. Abstinence was strictly enforced in the Crim, and the restriction weighed more heavily on some than others. Our fellows in the Crim were off limits, of course, since we were all raised as brothers and sisters. As for the townspeople…the townspeople were gormek, asleep, as many of our instructors called them, unwilling to awaken their soul to heights it could achieve, and so not for us either unless we should choose to join them.

For my part, while I could certainly appreciate the beauty of the girl Dumel had just agreed to wed and Aldric pined after, with her gently curved nose and lips, staring at her overlong turned her into a skeleton in my mind, for that was surely what the Limness would leave in its wake if we allowed it to descend any farther.

Distracted as I was, I bumped into Aldric’s back when he stopped.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, but he didn’t bother to respond. Looking forward, I could see why: we were there, standing in front of the spire’s great door. It seemed a few others ahead of us had decided to depart in the final moments, putting me only fifth in line from the entrance. I swallowed, my body having never felt so alive.

“You will enter one at a time,” Turplane told us. He was the Headmaster of the Crim and one of the oldest people I had seen, with specks of gray in his dark hair, probably only a year or two away from when he would need to climb the Tower. He wore a white robe for the occasion, even more dingy than the ribbons on the buildings. He also sported a tall hat that had perhaps been white in the years before I was born and was surely meant to evoke imagery of the Tower but now looked only like a long, yellow tooth propped atop his head.

The boy in the lead, Chrisser, a serious lad I liked well enough when he wasn’t complaining, started forward. Being as close as I was, and with Turplane standing off to the side of the doorway, I could watch his approach easily. I could also see an awakened on the other side of the entrance. He was a head taller than anyone else in town, larger of frame, and had skin that shimmered with a soft light. His yellow robes and the pin on his chest in the form of a cup marked him as a member of the Healer Order, and the four points that radiated out from the cup meant that his soul had reached Deacon rank. One such person was always present to aid those who fled what they faced in the doorway, or so we had been told in the Crim since none of us had been allowed to attend this trial until it was our time to experience it.

Chrisser hesitated in front of the drifting milky whiteness of the doorway and then he plunged into it, his body vanishing in the fog-like substance.

Turplane began counting down from the ten, the time given between Tower candidates. He had just reached six, when Chrisser stumbled back out of the entrance, screaming frantically and holding a hand that was missing fingers, the shorn flesh sprouting bright red blood.