This particular town had no name.

It existed between places, stitched into the folds of an old map by a cartographer who had long since hung himself in the bell tower. A memory left fermenting in the cellar of the world. And at its center, where the air throbbed like a migraine and time molted in strips off the rusted street signs, there stood a scaffold.

Not built but grown. Like a tumor.

It rose from the meat of the earth, a lattice of jointed femurs and rusted screws, creaking with every breath of wind that didn’t blow. The bones were warm. The marrow wept. It didn’t reach heaven, heaven was a dead language here. It just rose. Thirty feet, maybe more, high enough to kill the body, low enough to make the soul hesitate.

And below it, the townspeople gathered. Not people. Not really. Shadows of choices unmade. Regrets in hats. They shuffled forward, each carrying their own dream in a burlap sack, a title, a crown, a name in lights, and they climbed. One by one. By instinct. By need. The scaffold called to them like an old hymn sung by dying mothers.

Some looked up and saw salvation. Others saw a mirror. One saw nothing at all and kept climbing anyway.

That’s the trick of faith, isn’t it? You don’t leap because you know. You leap because you can’t. You leap because something inside your chest keeps whispering, “maybe this time.”

But the scaffold doesn’t care what you believe.

It doesn’t care that your name used to matter. That your daddy didn’t love you. That you’re undefeated or unloved or just tired of being overlooked. The scaffold only asks one question:

How much blood will you spend to be remembered?

And once the spine cracks and the flesh splits, they’ll all leap. Some in desperation. Some in hope. Some in agony.

And one in absolute clarity.



Black sky. No stars. No moon. Just a canopy stretched over an arena of meat, devoid of light.

The scaffold rises. Not bolted to the arena floor, but grown from it. The ring is gone. Replaced by pulsing red flesh that twitches when stepped on. Blood runs uphill.

Seven figures surround me. Each a butchered caricature of their waking selves:

Keeton is made of IV bags and stitched chemo ports, eyes replaced with the hands of a broken clock. He hunches like time’s puppet.

Dickie is skin and tape and hollow laughter, jaw unhinged, eyes bleeding bookmarks.

King walks barefoot through shards of stained glass, his fists wrapped in childhood screams. His chest etched with gangland tattoos that morph into crucifixes as he climbs.

Sebastian is made of broken mirrors, stitched together with Sloane’s handwriting. Every step he takes slices deeper. His mouth sewn shut with Clemence’s voice.

Scoops is dust held together by nicotine and guilt, he reeks of wet rot and old apologies. One arm ends in a splintered shovel, he digs a grave with every motion.

Shark wears his own face like a mask stretched too thin beneath. Nothing but static and search results. Flashes of old sex tapes and title wins flicker in the hollow of his skull.

Blizzard is made of winter coats filled with nothing. No body. No voice. Just shivering memory. He moves like static, vanishing between frames.

They climb.

Not to escape. Not to win.

They climb because something hungers.

The briefcases chime like tumors beneath the platforms, steel growing veins, twitching like they know who will touch them. I climb with them. Graceful. Detached. Laughing like a lit cigarette tossed on gasoline.

One by one, they reach the top. One by one, they open their boxes.

Keeton’s holds his mother’s ashes, still warm. He tries to speak, but chokes on bone dust.

Dickie’s holds a wedding ring in a jar of acid. The note reads, "You’ll never be enough."

King’s opens to a loaded gun and a cracked photograph of the boy he used to be. He puts it to his head. Nothing happens. It only clicks.

Sebastian’s bursts open, paperbacks spill out, all blank, all bleeding. A child’s drawing of Sloane with a knife in her back flutters down. Clemence’s voice reads every page out loud.

Scoops’ plays audio: his grandkids calling someone else "grandpa." He screams, and dirt pours from his mouth.

Shark’s contains a TV screen playing his greatest hits on loop. But no one’s watching. The screen slowly fizzles out into liveleak static.

Blizzard’s is empty. He stares in confusion. Then forgets where he is. A voice says, “You never existed.”

They scream. Some fall. Others beg.

I watch. Eyes like black oil.

Then my case appears.

It breathes. It weeps. I open it.

Inside: a single organ. Still beating. A heart that isn’t mine. Familiar. Tender. It whispers:

Say my name and make it end.

I grip it in one hand. Tight. The scaffold groans. Cracks. The world shakes like it's having a seizure.

I look down at the others. They’re not competitors. They’re offerings.

And Matthias Syn-

I am the altar.

With a visceral scream that cracks the sky like a wound, I leap, not for glory, not for gold.

I leap to erase.

I plummet. Forever. Laughing. Clutching that heart like a grenade with no pin.

The world goes dark.

A voice, feminine, familiar, detached:

"Matthias? Wake up. You’re still falling."





4:04 am - Syn’s hotel bathroom mirror - Cincinnati, Ohio

Smoke coils like nooses in reverse. The towel’s soaked red, blood or warning, unclear. In the glass, the scaffold grows behind him, twitching like it’s alive. The camera sways, drunk, dreaming, or both.


The heart in my briefcase wasn’t mine, but it sure as hell ain’t yours either. Every one of you came to Leap of Faith hoping for gold, for greatness, but you forgot: every altar needs sacrifice, and I’m the knife with a god complex.

You climbed thinking you’d grab salvation. A shot at immortality.

Keeton, your body’s a library of scar tissue. You opened your case and found your mom’s ashes. You tried to scream “I do this for her!” but all that came out was bone dust and regret. You’re not fighting for a future, you’re dragging a corpse uphill, praying it smells less than last week.

Dickie, you want to be the martyr. Mr. Trauma Porn. Mr. Broken In All The Right Ways. But the ring doesn't love you like your fan fiction does. The acid ring in your briefcase? That’s your conscience dissolving what’s left of it. You could’ve been a hero, Dickie. But you’re just a poem no one wants to finish.

King. You walk like vengeance but talk like scripture. And when you opened that case? There wasn’t salvation. Just a pistol and a picture of the boy you used to be, before the streets owned your name. Click. Click. No bang. Because even the devil doesn't want you back. You ain’t a monster. You’re a warning label.

Sebastian, pretty prince of paper cuts. You built your throne from soft spine fiction and women who keep leaving you. When you opened your case, the blank pages bled, didn’t they? Because the truth is, your life ain’t a novel, it’s a eulogy. And Sloane? She’s the final chapter you’ll never get to read. You're not a king, Seb. You’re an epilogue.

Scoops. You old bitch. You came crawling up that scaffold hoping it was a ladder back to relevance. But when the briefcase opened and your grandkids were calling someone else Grandpa? That wasn’t fiction. That was the legacy you traded for blood and barbed wire. They don't remember your name, Scoops, they remember your screams.

Shark. The punchline to a joke no one's telling anymore. When your box opened, it showed you your greatest hits. Problem is, there’s no audience left. You’re a TikTok highlight with brain damage. A pornstar with stage fright. You’re the scream in the porn theater when the lights come on.

Blizz. You opened your case and it was empty. You know what that means? Nothing. Because that’s what you are. A memory stuttering in real time. The “Who was that again?” backstage. You are the static. The white noise. The muffled gasp before the hangman pulls the lever. They gave you the wrong name, Aiden. You’re not “Blizzard.” You’re frostbite on a corpse. You don’t kill. You decay.

You all climbed for a future. I climbed for a funeral.





The taste of copper in his mouth. Burnt ozone in the lungs. This is where we begin.

They say nothing grows on scorched earth, but I like it that way. The stench of gasoline lingers in the corners of his mind. Sweet, toxic, almost divine. From the ash of better men rises the last bastard left standing.

Leap of Faith. What a fucking joke.

This isn’t faith. It’s famine.

Sebastian Everett-Bryce. You smell like antique cologne and generational decay. You dress like a man trying to outrun the hand me downs of ghosts, but even your shadow’s too fucking refined to betray you.

And I’ve seen you, Sebastian. Sitting there all poetic in your ruined suits, scribbling your trauma on the backs of your enemies’ inheritance checks. You’re a prince who never earned his crown, a puppet who mistook the strings for veins. I see right through your bibliophile chic and that whisper thin moral compass you keep polishing between betrayals. You thought you were the story. But you're the spine cracked in the middle.

Sloane? Saoirse? Daddy? The whole rotisserie of women you orbit around like a satellite of shame. It’s a long list of graves you’re digging with the dull end of your guilt. The white knight bends the knee because he can’t bear the weight of his own reflection.

I watched you in that feminist fortress you called Page Turner. Like a moth in a firework factory, trying so hard to prove you belong. Fingering the spines of romances like they’re switches you can flip. Quoting booktok like scripture. “You could rattle the stars…”

Fuck your paperback poetry. Fuck your curated trauma.

You’re a weak man dressing his guilt in hardback. You want to sell me on this idea that you’re doing it all to protect people? Nah. You’re just a coward with a thesaurus. You don’t protect the people you love, you write eulogies while they bleed out. And I can fucking see you.

Clemence owns your little pet, and she still crawled into your lap to feel something resembling safety. That’s not loyalty, that’s addiction. And it’s going to cost her. Cost you.

Your white knight complex is a kink for catastrophe, and I’ll make damn sure you finish this story the way you were always meant to, face down, spine snapped. You’re not just fighting me at Leap of Faith. You’re fighting the idea of failure, and that’s funny, because it already hollowed you out and wore your body like a meat coat.


Isaiah King. Prince Adeyemi. Whatever the fuck you're calling yourself today. You ain't royalty. You're a paper crown soaked in gasoline. I thought you were all crown and ash. I thought maybe the streets raised a king. But you're just another war dog licking boots for camera time. The ghost of Brooklyn. You’ve spent your whole life outrunning your past and building yourself into a monument of solitude. But you don't stand alone out of pride, you stand alone because everyone who’s ever loved you gave up.

You are abandonment incarnate. A weapon with no cause. A boxer with no corner. You’ve traded family for fists, and fists for silence, but I don't need to beat you, young King. I just need to talk loud enough that your demons hear me. They'll do the rest. At Leap of Faith, I'm not stepping in the ring with a warrior. I’m stepping into the ring with a gravestone that punches back.

Dickie Watson.The chaotic conscience. The broken mirror no one dares to look too long at. The almost champion. You beat Aurora, and before your name was even etched in gold, Kline turned it into a joke. They don't want you to win, Dickie. They want you to almost win. Because your pain makes better content.

I like you though, Dickie. Not because we’re the same. Because you’re what happens when hope refuses to die. Even when it should've been strangled in its sleep years ago. You want this to mean something. You beg for this to be real. No shortcuts. No lies. No cheating. Good Guy Dickie. But here's the truth, the system isn't broken, it's rigged. And every time that you try to fight with honor, you become the easiest one to break.

You fight like you still think it matters. Like pain is proof. Like the scars are gospel. But when you’re up there, slipping on blood, falling toward oblivion, I’ll be the one whispering, It never mattered at all. You, never mattered at all.

JC Keeton? Mr. Shepherd of the Exiled. I should’ve known your gimmick came with a warning label and a half off coupon for group therapy. You’ve turned concussions into character development. That’s cute. But you can’t manifest destiny with a brain full of static and a mother shaped hole in your chest. Listen close, Miracle boy. You beat cancer, sure. But cancer never climbed scaffolding with a box cutter and hate in its veins. I'll finish what the tumors started. Because I don't care what you survived. I care how fast your body folds when I reintroduce you to the chemo ghost that lives in your lungs.

You climb to be remembered. I climb to make people forget that you ever existed.

Scoops. You’re not a legend. You’re a leftover. A retirement plan gone wrong. Your joints pop like bubble wrap, and your best days were broadcast in 4:3 resolution. Stay on the ground, Scoops. Because if you climb that scaffold, the only thing falling faster than you is your hip integrity.

You're 63 years old, Scoops. You bleed nostalgia. A monument to concussions and stubberness. I'm going to euthanize you on live tv and piss on the decade you were relevant. You're not chasing one last title, you're trying to prove your divorce was worth it.

It wasn't.


And Aiden Collins. The frozen echo of a comeback that no one asked for. You shine in the moment, they say. Clutch. You rise. But what happens when you rise for the last time? When your spine finally gives and the lights go black? The crowd loves watching you rise, don't they? But only because they know that the falls coming. And this match? This match was designed for you to finally not get up.

You joined a Tribe to feel young again. But Solomon Kline? That kids a tumor and you're feeding it with your own blood. You're not rising to the moment anymore, you're just trying to die on your feet instead of on your knees.

I’m not here to leap. I’m here to burn the scaffolds down with all of you on them.

Let the briefcases fall like false idols. Let them burst open and spill your last hopes into the sewage you crawled from. The real prize isn’t the contract, it’s survival. And I don’t give a fuck who wins the game when I’m the one setting the rules on fire.

Leap of Faith isn’t a match. It’s a funeral pyre.

And I’m the one lighting the goddamn match.

I want your pain. I want your secrets. I want your endings.

You leap for hope. I climb to crucify it.




Somewhere between a dream and a waking seizure.

It grows out of nowhere. No architects. No blueprints. No god to bless its construction. Just a shuddering mutation of steel and suffering, arcing across a sky like cracked porcelain stretched over the mouth of Hell.

The Bridge.

Held together by rusted bolts and the prayers of addicts. Planks made from asylum doors and splintered altars. Nails still scream if you lean too hard. There are signs every twenty feet in a language no one remembers, but they all say the same thing:




Below it? A thousand foot freefall into memory loss. A gorge paved with the names of better men who fell before you. Some jumped. Most slipped.

Matthias Syn stands where the sky coughs blood and the wind tastes like chewed aspirin. The briefcases hang like severed heads above the center scaffold. And seven rats to chase them.

He watches the others cross their  planks, tightropes made of delusion. Shark. Collins. Seb. Scoops. King. Dickie. Keeton. Pilgrims of ego. Martyrs of myth.

They don’t know yet. But none of them are walking off this thing clean.


They call this a Leap of Faith. But what they never say is who built the bridge. Or why the fall feels so familiar.


I’ve seen this place before.

In a fever dream behind a broken urinal in Detroit. In a cracked mirror backstage at Warfare. In the way the light bends around a man’s skull just before you cave it in. This isn’t a match. This isn’t a scaffold.

It’s a goddamn confession booth.

And you seven? You’re not competitors. You’re confessions waiting to be carved into skin. Your sins are leaking out of you with every step, every breath, every bullshit post you drop on Twitter pretending this matters to anyone but yourselves.

You all still believe in the fall meaning something.

I’m here to remind you what the fall costs.

This match isn’t about a title shot. It’s about peeling back the layers and finding out what’s left underneath the costume. No audience. No music. No legacy.

Just the bridge, the fall, and me, waiting at the bottom, holding a scalpel made of every lie you’ve ever told yourselves.





James Shark. The ghost of locker rooms past. Daddy James, Twitter fingers, “bitches and belts” bravado. But your crown is plastic, and your throne is built on rap lyrics you barely understood. You used to matter. You're a punchline with a podcast. You’re the guy still quoting himself from 2012 and calling it evolution. You won’t leap because you’re scared of silence. Scared the crowd’s cheer might be the echo of a career that already died. When you fall, it won’t be dramatic. Just… sad. Like watching an aging porn star try to cum one more time for the camera.

Blizz. Your Tribe podcast? A geriatric bachelor party skit where you fake snort Pixy Stix because the real vices quit returning your calls. You drape half awake OnlyFans decor around your corpse and purr about temptation like a deacon in a strip mall chapel. Then brag that you’d never touch them. Of course you wouldn’t. Even your libido checked your pulse and called an Uber.

You tell the world you’re a family man while your kid rots at voicemail, but you still have time to sprinkle day glow sugar on Solomon Kline’s baby teeth and call it mentorship. He’s not your protege, he’s a scarecrow you jammed into your hollow legacy so no one notices the crows already nesting in your ribs. And spare me the “Truth Until Death” tagline. Your truth died the first time you signed alimony checks with blood money and convinced yourself that counted as parenting. Now you’re reduced to cosplay Tommy Lee, huffing nostalgia and calling it oxygen.

No redemption. No encore. Just the echo of your failure and the stink of cold sweat desperation.

Welcome to temptation, Aidan. I’m its final, choking dose. And I'm going to cut your fucking throat.

SEB. Oh, how the mighty have mommy and daddy issues. You walk like you’re allergic to guilt but wear it like cologne. You fucked a spy, got burned, and now you’re acting like it’s Shakespeare. Saoirse didn’t betray you. She reflected you. You loved the damsel because it made you feel like a knight. And when she showed you she was made of razor blades instead of velvet? You wanted to bleed for her. That's not love. That’s addiction. You’re not tragic, Seb. You’re pathetic. A rich boy who never learned to stop setting himself on fire for applause.


Scoops. This one’s easy. You're the fossil. The stiff. A Vietnam War flashback in sweatpants. Your whole legacy smells like mothballs and Marlboros. You’re not a threat anymore. You’re a fucking retirement gift that still walks. I don’t respect your era. I don’t respect your pain tolerance. I don’t care how many barbed wire matches you survived with duct tape and a whiskey chaser. You should’ve died in '04, but you’re here instead, slow, winded, half blind, and I will show you why we shoot horses when they can’t run anymore.


King. You ever seen a dog fight itself in the mirror? That’s you. Scarred, bitter, alone. You think being hard makes you untouchable? You think being friendless makes you free? It just makes you a caged animal nobody mourns when it’s finally put down. You lost everything and turned into stone so no one could hurt you again. But stone cracks. And when I drop you from the scaffold, the pieces are going to spell “should’ve trusted someone.”

Dickie. Little, tired Dickie. You call it integrity, I call it terminal idealism. You still play the game like it matters who cheats and who doesn’t. Like there’s honor in this ring. Like it’s not all just claws in the dark. You want to be seen as the realest one in the room? Newsflash: no one cares. We’re all monsters. Some of us are just honest about it. You refuse to cheat because you think it keeps you clean. But the truth is, you’re just too scared of what you’d become if you stopped pretending.

JC Keeton. Second gen silver spoon syndrome. Talent with a fuse. Gifted with a soft skull. You see visions because your head’s been dented like a soda can, and now you hallucinate greatness. You’ve got a body built for gold but a brain wired for breakdowns. Every concussion rewrites the story you’re trying to tell, and I promise, I’ll write the final chapter. Spoiler: you fall.

And the only thing waiting at the bottom is your father’s disappointment and a cold steel plate in your neck.




They call it the Leap of Faith.

But faith is for cowards.

Faith is what you whisper when the noose tightens and you still think someone’s coming to save you. Faith is the lullaby you sing when your teeth hit the mat and your friends look the other way.

This isn’t faith.

It’s a trap.

And I’m the bastard who set it.

So go ahead. Leap.

Climb the scaffold. Reach for your lies. Scream your legacy to the crowd like they haven’t already turned away. Try to be something more than meat.

But know this…

The bridge does not forget.

And neither do I.




So here it is, the Last Gospel.

Read it in blood. Chant it through broken teeth. And know that this is your burial hymn.

When I climb the scaffold, I’m not reaching for hope. I’m not playing make believe with legacy or respect or whatever filthy romantic bullshit you nerds still jerk off to in your hotel bathtubs. I’m climbing with rotted knuckles and a crowbar in my soul, because that briefcase doesn't crown a king.

It coronates a plague.

And I am the motherfucking contagion.

And when the smoke clears? When all your bones are soup and your careers are chalk outlines? I’ll still be standing. With blood on my knuckles, piss on your prayers, and that 24/7 contract clutched like a throat in my palm.

I am the bridge, the burning, and the fall.

And tonight?