Read the companion story: The College on the Hill
There was once a student who lived between ruins and promises.
He had seen what uniforms did to people. His father came home from guarding cages a little more armored each year. Later, in cheap paperbacks and ebooks, the student met consultants and security engineers who sold their genius to empires and woke up one day as villains in their own memoirs.
He hated them because they felt too easy to become.
One day, a messenger from the Tower arrived with an offer:
“Take the Ring of Service. Wear it for a handful of years, and you will never worry about work again. You will study at the finest schools, touch secret libraries, sit where the Empire whispers its plans.
Prove you belong with a Five-Year Plan.”
The demand was meant as a hoop. But the student’s mind didn’t do hoops. It did coherence or collapse; nothing between. So he took the task literally.
He mapped the Ring’s road in painful detail.
He traced the path from scholarship to service, from service to clearance, from clearance to a life spent tending the Tower’s machines. He sketched possible postings: glittering cities in the imperial core, and “hardship tours” in deserts and jungles where contractors lived behind walls and the locals lived with the consequences.
On one page he wrote his secret old dream:
“Work abroad. Learn languages. Help communities keep the power on.”
On the next, he wrote what the Ring actually offered:
“Work abroad. Learn security. Keep the Empire’s outposts running while everything around them burns.”
Same skills. Different client.
As he wrote, something sat down beside him: his Shadow.
The Shadow loved the Ring. It whispered of Ivy towers, badges, gated compounds with generators humming while the rest of the city flickered. It reminded him of climate collapse, of how good it would feel to be the safest person in the most dangerous place.
“With the Ring,” it said, “we are set for life anywhere on Earth. Why die in some Orchard no one protects?”
The student kept drawing lines.
He followed them all the way to forty-year-old him: credentialed, cleared, globally mobile—and structurally necessary to systems he no longer believed should exist. Not a cartoon villain. Not a helpless victim. Just another smart expat maintaining other people’s cages, this time with air conditioning.
He realized something awful:
If he wrote a vague plan, he could still wear the Ring. Because he wrote a true one, he no longer could.
When the application was finished, it glowed with competence. Anyone in the Tower would see a perfect Ring-bearer.
But the author saw a bad ending he would believe in too much to escape.
On the day he was meant to send it, he set the plan down. The Ring felt suddenly heavy.
“If safety means standing in a lit compound while the world outside darkens,” he thought, “maybe safety isn’t what I’m here for.”
He did not mail the plan.
He walked away from the gate: grieving the life he might have had, and strangely relieved to have proof, in his own handwriting, that he did not want it.
His Shadow followed, still hungry for rings, but with a new job: to remember how convincing the last one had sounded.
In time, the student found a different craft—learning to keep ordinary people’s systems alive, tending open tools instead of secret weapons, helping Orchards hold light without permission.
The irony remained:
The Tower asked him for a Five-Year Plan to prove he deserved their Ring. By honoring that request completely, he proved to himself that he didn’t.
Insight
Sometimes the only way to see a Ring clearly is to plan, in detail, what wearing it would actually do to you and to everyone outside the walls.
If drawing the path honestly makes you less willing to walk it, that isn’t failure. That’s your Shadow and your conscience finally agreeing that some kinds of safety are just exile in advance.
⛩️🖥️
