I slipped on a bar of soap.
That's it. That's the whole story. Twenty-two years of surviving traffic, bad food, and three consecutive all-nighters during exam season, and what finally got me was a fifty-cent bar of generic lavender soap I bought because it was on sale.
The fall lasted maybe half a second. The back of my head hit the ceramic edge of the bathtub with a sound I won't describe. Then nothing.
Then this.
The first thing I noticed was the sky. It was the wrong color. Not black, not blue, not the sickly orange of a city night bleeding through cheap curtains. It was a deep, layered violet, shot through with something that pulsed like light trapped inside fog. No stars. No clouds. Just that color, pressing down from a height that made my stomach drop when I looked up too long.
The second thing I noticed was the tower.
It rose from a floor of pale stone that extended in every direction without edges, without walls, without anything to anchor it to a landscape. The tower itself had no visible top. It climbed until the violet swallowed it whole, and whatever was up there stayed hidden. Its surface was smooth and dark, not black exactly, closer to the color of deep water at night. Along its face, at irregular intervals, were windows emitting light of different colors. Warm amber. Cold blue. A green that flickered like a flame.
I was sitting at its base with no memory of arriving.
My name is Stan. I'm twenty-two. I own four thousand dollars in student debt, a collection of anime figurines that would embarrass me in front of any woman I ever wanted to impress, and apparently, I'm dead.
I sat with that thought for about thirty seconds.
Then I stood up, because sitting on the floor of wherever this was didn't seem like it was going to help.
My body felt normal. No pain, which was disorienting given that I distinctly remembered the sound my skull had made. I was wearing what I'd died in: old sweatpants, a faded Attack on Titan shirt with a small bleach stain near the collar that I'd been meaning to throw out for eight months. Bare feet on cold stone.
I looked at my hands. They looked like my hands.
"You're taking this better than most."
The voice came from my left. I turned.
She was leaning against the tower's base with her arms crossed, watching me with the particular expression of someone who has done this exact thing too many times to find it interesting anymore. She looked around my age, maybe slightly older. Her hair was silver, cut short on one side, longer on the other, and her eyes were the same violet as the sky above us, which I clocked immediately as either significant or decorative. She wore something that landed between a uniform and a coat, dark fabric, minimal design, with a single insignia on the left shoulder I couldn't read from here.
She was, objectively, extremely attractive. I filed that information away under "currently irrelevant."
"How long do people usually take?" I asked.
"The record is eleven minutes of sitting completely still." She tilted her head. "You made it off the floor in under a minute."
"I had time to think on the way down."
Something shifted in her expression. Not a smile exactly. An acknowledgment. "I'm the Tower's Warden," she said. "You can call me Lyra, for now."
"For now."
"Names here have weight. You'll understand that later." She pushed off the wall and walked toward me with the unhurried movement of someone who owned the space they occupied. "You died. You're here. The Tower accepted your entry, which means it found something in you worth running through its floors."
"What does it look for?"
"Nobody knows. It chooses who it chooses." She stopped a few feet away. "What matters is the terms."
She gestured toward the tower's surface, and a section of the wall illuminated. Not a screen exactly, more like light organizing itself into readable shapes.
I read it twice.
The rules were straightforward, which should have been the first warning sign. The Tower contained floors. Each floor was a world. Each world had a secret condition. Complete the condition, claim the floor's reward, ascend to the next. Reach the top, and the Tower granted one wish. No limitations specified on the wish. That absence of limitations was either generous or a trap, and given everything so far, I was already placing my bets.
"What's on the top floor?" I asked.
"Nobody who has started from the bottom has ever reached it."
"Great."
"You're allowed to find that motivating rather than discouraging."
I looked at the tower. I thought about my apartment, the soap, the bathtub, the four thousand dollars I would never finish paying back. I thought about twenty-two years of watching other people's stories unfold on a screen while mine didn't move.
"What are the worlds?" I asked.
Lyra looked at me with an expression that was careful in a way I couldn't yet parse. "You'll recognize them," she said. "Most people don't. You will."
That landed differently than she probably intended it to. Or exactly as she intended it. I couldn't tell yet.
"One more question," I said. "The secret conditions. How secret are we talking?"
"The Tower tells you the floor's world when you enter. It tells you nothing else. You find the condition by living inside it."
"And if I fail?"
"You don't want to find out."
She said it without drama, without the theatrical weight people use when they want to sound threatening. She said it the way you tell someone not to touch a hot stove. Factual. Final.
I nodded slowly. I looked up at the tower again, at the colored lights bleeding from windows that climbed higher than I could follow.
Here is what I knew, and what I was not going to tell Lyra yet.
I had watched, read, or rewatched to completion forty-seven different anime series. I had opinions about power systems, arc structures, and which fights were narrative mistakes. I had spent an embarrassing number of hours on wikis and forums arguing about things that didn't exist. I knew how the stories were supposed to go. I knew the characters, the events, the turning points, the deaths.
If the worlds in that tower were what I thought they were, then I wasn't walking in blind.
I was walking in with a map.
The problem with maps, I reminded myself, is that they're drawn from someone else's journey. And Lyra had said it clearly. She said I would recognize the worlds.
She hadn't said the worlds would recognize me back.
"First floor," I said. "When do I go up?"
Lyra studied me for a moment. There was something behind her eyes that I couldn't name yet, not suspicion exactly. Something closer to interest, the specific kind that comes with a question attached.
"Whenever you're ready," she said.
I looked down at my bare feet, my bleach-stained shirt, my empty hands.
"I need shoes," I said.
For the first time, something crossed her face that was almost a smile.
She turned toward the tower's entrance without answering, and the door opened on its own.
I followed her in.