He landed on a plain of black glass that stretched forever.
Above him, the sky swarmed with scaffolds of light, half-built towers rising and collapsing in slow motion.
Every motion of his thought made a new one grow.
Every doubt cracked another apart.
"This is the third gate," said God.
"Creation's fever. Each belief becomes a god, each god a gravity well. Build, and see what holds."
The scholar exhaled; dust lifted from his hands, glowing as if it remembered being stars.
He imagined courage, and a tower shot upward—iron, red, humming with the sound of heartbeats.
He imagined reason, and a second tower spiraled from logic's lattice, perfect angles of cold blue.
He imagined mercy, and a third grew softer, porous, its stones breathing.
Around him, the towers multiplied, each the echo of a thought: justice, hunger, love, war, art, despair.
Soon the plain was crowded with a skyline of mind.
The air vibrated from their competing songs.
At first he felt proud, then afraid.
The towers began to bend toward one another, pulling with invisible cords.
Their foundations screamed in frequencies he could feel behind his teeth.
Flames of idea-matter licked the sky; sparks fell like meteors.
"You've built pantheons from passing moods," God said.
"Every mind does. Watch what happens when they pray to each other."
The towers began to worship.
Courage knelt to Pride.
Mercy bled for Guilt.
Reason wrote scriptures for Control.
Within minutes the horizon was a civil war of light.
He tried to shout above the roar, but the wind carried only fragments of his voice.
He swung the sword-pen, cutting through beams of fire; each stroke erased a structure, yet with every erasure another sprang up, more elaborate than before.
The ground heaved.
The air itself cracked.
He saw the skyline topple in a single, slow-motion collapse, dust and brilliance fusing into a single column that rose again as one tower: a spiral of shadow shot through with veins of flame.
On its door, written in script that seemed older than matter, were the words:
Pain Draws the Path.
He understood.
Every tower had been a rehearsal for this one.
Every ruin, a draft of truth.
"Never bleed for a dull edge," God said.
"Belief is a tool. You've forged the sharpest now. Enter, and let it cut you clean."
He pressed his palm to the door.
Heat seared his skin but did not harm him; the burn etched a sigil that pulsed like a second heartbeat.
The door opened inward onto darkness filled with distant singing—voices of his fallen towers mourning their own necessity.
He stepped inside.
The door closed behind him with the sound of a page turning.