Not truly, I know this, but my eyes track details they should not: the way dust motes spiral in nonexistent air currents, the microscopic cracks spreading through stone walls, the heat signatures of things living in the darkness. I see too much.
My body responds before threats materialize, muscles twitching into defensive positions before danger arrives, as if I can taste violence on the air before it happens. This is not training, not skill or the Skathrith's power. This is something other.
The chambers stretch endlessly, each one more foreign than the last. Metal walls give way to strange, organic surfaces that pulse with an inner light, and my footsteps echo differently in each space. Sometimes sharp and metallic. Other times muted, as if walking on flesh.
The Skathrith's song lingers at the edge of my consciousness, a quiet hum that never fully fades. Its hunger seems dulled now, but I feel its attention drift whenever we pass through shadows, searching for threats, for opportunities to feed.
I try to focus on Penelope, to piece together the fragments I have of her. Her voice comes easily. Precise. Measured. Carrying authority beyond her years:
I am glad you survived.
Flashes surface: her watching me during the Festival of Retrospection, her analytical gaze taking in every movement. But when I reach for our first meeting, there is nothing. A void where memory should be.
The gap feels wrong, like a missing tooth I cannot stop probing with my tongue. Her brother Castor's brash glare during our first meeting comes easily, the way he stared at me in the Mere's dining hall, her presence beside me in the Temple of Loss. But that first moment with Penelope?
Gone.
I already knew her name in the Dularch-Temple. How?
My steps slow as I turn to Binah. She walks beside me, her movements silent, her white hair seeming to catch light that is not there. Her violet eyes meet mine, and I know she sees the question forming.
"Our first meeting," I say. "Penelope and I. You were there, were you not?"
Binah's gaze holds steady, but she offers no response. Her silence feels deliberate, heavy with meaning I cannot decipher. She turns away, continuing down the corridor as if I had not spoken.
I shake my head.
That was a stupid question. I only started seeing Binah recently. Yet even so, something tells me she is the one with the answers I seek.
The Skathrith's hum shifts slightly, a discordant note threading through its usual rhythm. I press my palm against the wall, feeling its alien texture as I try to ground myself in the present. But the blank space in my memory pulls at me, a wound that will not heal.
The next chamber is smaller. The walls here are darker, their organic texture giving way to something that resembles stone. My boots sound louder against this surface. Each step announces my presence.
Binah pauses ahead, her form outlined against a faint glow spilling from an opening in the corridor wall. She tilts her head, listening to something I cannot hear.
I slow my approach. The opening is a doorway, carved from the same organic-metallic material as the surrounding walls, its frame perfectly rectangular despite the labyrinth's usual chaos. The edges are smooth, deliberate, shaped by intention rather than erosion or violence.
Beyond it, I glimpse light, not the bioluminescence of the organic chambers. Something warmer.
Natural light.
The realization stops me. After endless hours in shadow-filled chambers, the thought of sunlight feels impossible. A trick. But Binah stands at the threshold, her form solid and unearthly. She does not enter. She simply waits, watching me with those violet eyes that see too much.
I cross the threshold, and I know without looking back that she will not follow. Whatever waits inside this chamber, I will face it alone.
The chamber opens before me: a jagged hole splits the ceiling, and golden light pours through like liquid metal. The sight locks me in place.
Dust motes dance in the sunlight, each one precious and perfect. The beam cuts through the chamber's gloom, illuminating a circle of floor perhaps ten feet across, and the stone there radiates warmth, heat shimmering above its surface in visible waves. I step into the light's embrace, tilting my face upward.
The sunlight feels wrong against my skin, not the warmth, which is welcome after the Labyrinth's chill, but the way it sits there, like it touches something that should not exist.
I raise my hands, turning them in the golden light. My skin tone is off, not dramatically, not obviously, but I know my own hands, have seen them every day of my life, and these are darker, warmer, the color someone might have who spent their childhood under a different sun. I flex my fingers: two hands, five fingers each. Of course.
But when I close my eyes, I feel four arms stretching, the memory of chitinous limbs that never existed settling into place like they have always been there. I open my eyes. Two arms. Still two. The Skathrith hums its satisfaction.
I tell myself that is all this is, the bond deepening, my body remembering shapes it never held, the usual strangeness that has become almost familiar.
Warmth seeps deeper into my skin, spreading through my chest and down my arms. For a moment, I let the sensation carry me away from thought, away from the Skathrith's constant hunger, away from everything except this simple comfort.
Then I lower my hands and truly see the chamber.
Circular. The realization arrives with quiet certainty as I turn slowly, tracing the walls with my gaze, watching them curve in perfect geometry, stone shaped into an arc that returns to itself with mathematical precision. The diameter is perhaps thirty feet, large enough to fight in, small enough that there would be no escape from whatever occupied the space with you.
Above me, the opening: jagged and irregular, as though torn rather than cut, but positioned directly at the apex of the chamber's dome. Sunlight falls through it in a concentrated column, illuminating the exact center of the floor.
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Four doorways, equidistant around the circle's perimeter, each one identical in design. Three of them are sealed. Stone melted smooth over what were once openings, the barriers old enough that moss has grown over them, integrating them into the chamber's structure as though they were always meant to be closed.
The fourth doorway, the one behind me, remains open.
I stare at it. At the darkness of the corridor beyond. At the perfect rectangle of shadow that represents the only visible exit from this place.
It should not still be open. Most doorways in the Labyrinth seal themselves the moment I pass through them, the organic walls flowing shut like wounds closing. But this one waits, patient and ominous, a mouth held open in invitation or threat.
The pattern is familiar, and my breath catches, not from fear, not yet, but from recognition that arrives too slowly, crawling up from memory like something rising from deep water.
I have seen this before, carved in flesh-walls in corridors I walked hours or days ago, time has lost meaning in this place. Palm-sized reliefs covering every surface. Thousands of them. Each showing the same scene with subtle variations.
Two figures in a circular chamber. Light from above. Four doorways. The moment frozen before resolution.
The moment before violence or embrace.
My chest tightens. This is not a carving, not a record pressed into organic matter by alien hands that wanted to preserve what they had witnessed. This is the actual space, one of the chambers where those choices were made, where figures stood in the positions I now occupy and decided whether to destroy or spare whatever stood opposite them.
How many of those palm-sized reliefs depicted this exact chamber? How many different pairs entered through those doorways, feeling this same warmth against skin that was about to be opened by claws or blades or powers I cannot name? How many left this chamber alive?
I should move. Walk back through that open doorway, retrace my steps through the Labyrinth's twisting corridors, refuse whatever script this chamber wants me to perform.
The thought is rational. Simple. But my feet remain planted in the circle of light, and I cannot fully articulate why.
I close my eyes and lift my gaze to the light.
The darkness behind my eyelids is red-gold, alive with dancing shapes that could be memory or hallucination or simply the afterimage of staring too long at the sun.
A scuff of leather on stone.
My eyes snap open. The afterimages make the chamber's shadows seem deeper, impenetrable, and I blink, trying to clear my vision against the gold-red shapes dancing behind my eyelids.
Movement at the chamber's edge. Not from the open doorway behind me, but from across the circle. One of the sealed doorways.
Except it is not sealed anymore.
The stone surface ripples, flowing aside like water, and the opening reveals itself: another rectangle of darkness, a mirror to the one at my back. The labyrinth's geometry reasserting itself. Four doorways. Two open. Two figures.
A figure steps through, broad-shouldered, platinum hair catching hints of the golden light. My breath catches.
Castor.
The second figure has arrived, like the carvings promised, like it always happens: two figures in a circular chamber.
Behind me, stone grinds against stone. I do not need to turn to know what is happening. The doorway through which I entered is closing, the organic-metallic walls flowing together, sealing the opening as if it never existed.
The sound echoes off the curved walls, resonating in the dome above. Metallic and final. Like a tomb being sealed.
I turn anyway, confirming what I already know. Smooth stone where the doorway was. The same melted texture as the other sealed entrances, though without the moss, without the integration that comes with age. Fresh. New. Mine.
Across the chamber, another grinding sound. I look back just as the doorway behind Castor flows shut, stone rippling and reforming until only unmarked wall remains.
Four doorways. All sealed now. The pattern complete.
A low hum fills the air, resonating from Castor's direction. I look up, above his head, to something I cannot quite see at first, but feel it gowned in skirts of folded space. The air ripples, revealing a dark star of pulsing light.
His Skathrith.
It responds to my presence, its tone different from mine. Deeper. More guttural. The sound sets my teeth on edge, makes my own Skathrith stir restlessly in response.
Beside me, I sense Binah. Her presence manifests without announcement, without the sound of footsteps or the whisper of displaced air. She simply exists now where she did not before, standing at the edge of the sunlight's circle. Her silence feels different now, not her usual watchful patience, but something heavier. Sadder.
I glance at her. Her violet gaze is fixed on me, wide and unblinking. Her lips part, but no words come. Just a single step back, her figure blending into the shadows as if retreating from what she knows is inevitable.
Castor's lip curls. Not a sneer. Something worse. Joy.
"Good." His voice is steady. Controlled. "I was hoping it would be you."
I blink. "You were? Why?"
"Do not." The word is sharp. Final. "Do not play the fool, demon. You know why we are here."
His eyes sweep the chamber, the circle, the sealed doors, the light from above.
"You have seen the carvings. You know what this place is." He pauses, letting the words settle. "Only one can leave this place alive."
The Skathrith's hum grows louder, its resonance shifting from a steady tone to something discordant. Almost mocking. I try to quiet it, but its energy feeds off my rising pulse.
"Mother was certain." Castor steps forward, just to the edge of the sunlight. "Certain you would be the knife."
I watch the muscle in his jaw jump again.
"She said Titus Ragnos never lets a slight go unpunished."
"I do not understand." I start.
Castor laughs. The sound is hollow, devoid of humor. His Skathrith pulses brighter, a black star radiating nothingness etched with shadows. "Of course you do not. The Great Demon Janus Ragnos, always forgetting what he should know. Always remembering nothing."
He takes another step. His boots cross into the circle of sunlight.
"But let me enlighten you."
His features soften for a brief moment. The anger giving way to something sharper. Something raw. Then the mask returns, harder than before.
"This trial. What do you know of it?"
I say nothing.
"It is meant for Virtuants. Third-years." He pauses, letting the words settle. "Students with awakened Semblances, who have trained for years to face horrors like this. This is their test."
The muscle in his jaw works.
"Tell me, demon. Do you think it was an accident that we are here? First-years. Untrained. Unprepared."
My chest tightens. The pieces begin to fall into place, but I do not want to see the shape they make.
"They sent us in blind." His voice drops lower. "Sent us to die. And for what?"
He waits. Watching me.
"Your uncle's orders."
The words hit like a physical blow. I stare at Castor, the weight of them settling heavily in my chest. The implications slam into me. My own uncle setting us on this path of slaughter.
We will go back to the old ways, Titus had proclaimed in the Stratarchy. No longer will our young be protected. No longer will weakness find shelter within our walls.
I thought he meant the trials would be harder, not that he meant us to kill each other.
"They sent us into the labyrinth." Castor's voice hardens. "Knowing most of us would not come out. Knowing we would die fighting alien horrors."
He pauses.
"Or each other."
The shadows writhe at the periphery of my vision. The metal-stone walls seem to press closer, squeezing the air from the chamber.
I can smell it now. The tang of fear beneath the dust and stone.
"And now here we stand." Castor raises his arms slightly, a gesture encompassing the sealed chamber. "You and me. The culmination of their sick little game."
His eyes flash.
"The demon of House Azure against the golden boy of House Vermillion. They will feast on this, you know. The Exarchs, the Eidolons. It is exactly what they wanted."
"We do not have to." My voice cracks. The words barely audible over the rising hum of our Skathriths. I force them out anyway. "The carvings, they show the moment before choice. Before. We can choose differently. Do something they did not."
Castor's expression does not change. As if I never spoke.
"I am glad it is you, Janus." He tilts his head slightly. "If it was Penelope, I would slit my own throat to let her pass."
Moisture stings my eyes.
"But I always hated you." His voice remains steady. Calm. "Hated the way you mooned after my sister."
He raises his arms higher.
"It was all I could do not to rip out your eyes."
My Skathrith senses the threat and roars within me, its surge of energy electrifying my nerves. I clench my hands, feeling the alien power thrumming through my veins. Ready to lash out.
"We do not have to." My voice is a whisper against the rising crescendo of tension.
The words crack mid-sentence.
But Castor does not respond; his body is already moving.
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Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
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Ablations (ongoing)