This is just something which is bothering me, and I need to get it out of my head.

What is up with this Tower?

It's obviously the culmination of a lot of work. Magic or not, towers like that don't just pop out of the ground, filled with teleporters and captive godlings. Who in their right mind would go through all that effort just to give some criminals the chance to set themselves loose on society again? And if that was their goal, why wouldn't they just, you know, try to pull strings and get a presidential pardon (or whatever the equivalent is in this world)?

We know that someone is arranging for all the prisoners to acquire a “Mark” in the form of an odd amulet. It isn't clear why these “Marks” apparently need to be ripped out of the eyeballs of godlings. Perhaps only M'aar was interested in going at this voluntarily and the others had to be forced into it.

The other thing that's interesting is how Aisha ended up with an amulet before even going to jail (or at least, so she claims). Plus, Winley seems to know something about the amulets and about some organization with a connection to Aisha.

Is M'aar in charge here? He seems to claim as much when confronting Ktjuul (aka big blue doggy), and the other spirit-thing, Mah'tei (aka big orange serpent), seems to corroborate this. Mah'tei also calls the whole mess “M'aar's Game”, but I don't think he literally means that this is a game. It's more like he's angry and annoyed at M'aar.

It's pretty obvious that whatever the ‘godlings’ are, they don't all get along. Before getting his face crushed by M'aar/Cai, Ktjuul mentioned “Accursed demons, masquerading as gods,” referring to the smell of M'aar. My best guess is that this tower is part of some sort of supernatural power-play on M'aar's part, perhaps to recover from whatever event forced him to fuse with Cai (assuming that it was involuntary on M'aar's part, and not part of some even more complicated plan). Even that brings up the question of how the heck M'aar could arrange something like this while apparently being dormant inside Cai most of the time.

When you get right down to it, we really don't know enough to decide what's going on here. But I think it's a pretty safe bet that this whole thing is not just a big ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card for anyone who survives. I'm curious to see what else we learn about M'aar as the story moves on, since he seems to be the driving force behind all this.