The Labyrinth unfolds before me in organic passages that curve and branch according to logic I cannot parse. Each turn looks identical to the last: walls pulsing with bioluminescent veins, floors that yield slightly beneath my boots, air thick with that pervasive organic smell of flesh neither living nor dead. The sameness should be maddening. Perhaps it is. I have lost the capacity to measure my own sanity against any reliable standard.
Binah moves ahead of me.
Always just beyond arm's reach. Her white hair drifts in currents that do not exist, catching light that has no source, smoke made solid and set in motion by winds that blow only for her. She does not look back, but I feel her awareness of me. Constant and unwavering. The weight of observation from someone who exists outside the rules that govern my own presence in this place.
My wounds ache less with each step.
The pain simply recedes, as though distance from the chamber where I fought dilutes its reality, transforms visceral agony into something more theoretical. The torn muscle in my thigh still pulls with each stride, but the sensation feels muted now. Like remembering pain rather than experiencing it. Like reading about suffering in a text rather than feeling it carved into my own flesh.
I do not trust this recession, yet neither do I look, too fearful of what I might find. The Labyrinth has demonstrated too clearly that it operates according to its own logic, that what seems like mercy might be preparation for something worse. But I cannot manufacture pain I no longer feel, cannot force my body to acknowledge damage it has decided no longer exists.
The Skathrith hovers at above me, its ethereal form casting false light that illuminates nothing. Its song has settled into a quiet hum that has become as familiar as breathing, as constant as the pulse that beats beneath my skin. Through our bond, I sense its attention split between me and something else. The walls, perhaps. The way they shift and breathe around us. Or Binah herself, that pale figure walking paths I cannot see.
She glances over her shoulder.
The movement is slight. Just her head turning, violet eyes finding mine for a heartbeat before facing forward again. But it breaks my contemplation like stone thrown through glass, shattering the careful distance I have been maintaining from the questions that circle like carrion birds.
She heard my thoughts.
Whatever mechanism allows her existence also grants her access to my inner world in ways I cannot prevent or control. The realization should alarm me more than it does. Perhaps exhaustion has dulled my capacity for outrage. Perhaps I have simply accepted that privacy is another luxury the Labyrinth has stripped away.
I focus on her footsteps instead.
Sometimes they make no sound. Her feet touch the organic floor in perfect silence, each step a ghost's passage through the world, leaving no impression, disturbing no air, existing only in my perception without affecting the physical substrate of reality. Other times I hear them: soft impacts, the faint compression of flesh-walls beneath ethereal weight, the subtle sound of presence asserting itself against emptiness.
The inconsistency gnaws at me.
If she exists only in my perception, a manifestation of my fractured psyche or the Skathrith's influence or something stranger still, then she should be silent always. Hallucinations do not affect the physical world. They do not disturb air or compress surfaces or cast shadows that fall at wrong angles to the light.
But if she is real, if she is truly present in some form I lack framework to understand, then why the variance? Why does she flicker between corporeal and incorporeal states with no pattern I can discern? What determines when she leaves footprints and when she passes like wind through water?
What governs her presence?
The question circles through my thoughts like vulture over carrion, patient and persistent and utterly unwilling to leave me in peace. I catalogue evidence with the same methodical approach I would apply to studying an opponent's fighting style, building a profile from fragments even when the whole refuses to coalesce into comprehensible shape.
Evidence of incorporeality: She appears and disappears without warning or sound, materializing from shadows and dissolving back into them with equal ease. She passes through spaces too narrow for physical form, corridors that would require her to turn sideways somehow accommodating her straight passage. She casts no reflection in the few smooth surfaces I have encountered, as though light refuses to acknowledge her existence. She makes no sound when she chooses not to, her footsteps vanishing like they never existed.
Evidence of physical presence: The warrior's eyes tracked her position. Not mine. Not some general direction. Her specific location in the chamber, responding to her movement with the precision of a predator tracking prey. Her footsteps sometimes compress the floor, leaving impressions I can see before they fade. She disturbs air currents. I have felt them, faint displacements that brush my skin when she moves. The Skathrith acknowledges her existence, its attention shifting to track her presence in ways that suggest awareness of something beyond my own perception.
The contradiction defies resolution.
Perhaps the question itself is wrong. Perhaps asking what she is matters less than understanding why she appears. What function does her presence serve? What purpose drives this silent, ethereal guide through passages that seem designed to strip sanity from those who walk them?
Binah glances back again.
This time her eyes hold mine longer. Three heartbeats. Four. The violet depths reflect nothing, reveal nothing, simply observe with an intensity that makes my skin prickle beneath my torn clothing. She sees me. All of me. Every thought I have just catalogued, every question I have asked, every fear I have not yet admitted to myself.
Then she faces forward and continues walking.
The gesture feels like acknowledgment. Or warning. Or something else entirely, some communication in a language I do not speak and may never learn.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
I shake my head, forcing attention back to my surroundings.
The corridors have changed.
The transformation is absolute.
Gone are the smooth, featureless passages that curved through the Labyrinth's depths like veins through flesh. The walls now crawl with engravings, thousands upon thousands of them, each the size of my palm, covering every surface from floor to the ceiling lost in darkness above. The organic matter has been carved away in precise detail, creating reliefs that cluster so densely they form a second skin over the Labyrinth's living architecture.
I slow. Stop.
The sheer number overwhelms. Everywhere I look, more engravings. They follow no obvious organization, no hierarchical arrangement that might suggest narrative sequence or categorical division. Simply coverage, complete and obsessive. As though whoever created them could not bear to leave any surface unmarked, could not tolerate blank flesh when it might hold another record of whatever they sought to preserve.
Binah stands motionless ahead, her pale form stark against the carved walls. She does not turn. Does not gesture. Simply waits, patient as stone, watching me absorb this new impossibility with the same silent attention she has maintained since I first saw her in the Temple of Hope.
The Skathrith's light catches the engravings' edges, throwing shadows that shift as I move. Each relief becomes three-dimensional in the uncertain illumination, figures seeming to move as light plays across carved surfaces. The effect is disorienting. Beautiful. Wrong.
I move closer to the nearest wall.
Each engraving shows the same scene with subtle variations.
Two tall figures face each other in a circular chamber. Young, I think, though I have no reference for aging the alien physiology I have come to associate with this place. Their proportions match the four-armed figure from previous reliefs: elongated skulls that stretch the concept of humanoid, pale skin rendered in carved flesh, bodies that suggest classical beauty twisted into something fundamentally other.
But these have only two arms each.
The realization arrives with quiet significance. The towering figure I encountered before, that ancient presence recorded in the Labyrinth's depths, possessed four arms. These figures, younger somehow though I cannot explain how I know this, have only two. Evolution, perhaps. Or status markers I cannot interpret. Or simply different stages of the same beings, recorded at different points in their existence.
The chamber they occupy is precise in its geometry. Perfect circle. Smooth walls that curve upward to a ceiling pierced by a single circular opening. Through this aperture, light descends, sometimes rendered as sharp rays suggesting sunlight, other times as diffuse glow implying moonlight or artificial illumination. The variation seems deliberate. Different conditions for different pairs.
The two figures stand equidistant from the chamber's center, their postures mirror-perfect. Hands raised. Bodies tensed. The engravings capture them mid-motion, frozen at the instant before violence or embrace.
I cannot tell which.
The ambiguity troubles me more than certainty would. If these reliefs depicted clear combat, I could categorize them, understand their purpose within the Labyrinth's apparent function as testing ground. If they showed clear ritual, some ceremony of bonding or recognition, I could slot them into the cultural framework the torq bearing aliens seem to have left behind.
But this space between, this moment before resolution, this frozen instant where outcome remains undetermined: it suggests something more complex than simple violence or simple ritual.
It suggests choice.
I study the figures more closely.
Despite the repetitive composition, each engraving shows different individuals. I know this with the same unearned certainty that told me the previous chamber's sky was false, that hollow recognition that bypasses evidence to deliver truth directly to consciousness. The figures look identical to my human perception: same height, same build, same alien features that my mind struggles to parse as faces rather than masks.
But they are different. Each pair unique. Distinct.
Individual histories compressed into palm-sized records of a single moment.
Hundreds of pairs. Thousands, perhaps, if the engravings continue beyond what I can see in the Skathrith's limited light. The walls stretch up into darkness, and for all I know, they continue for miles, covered in these small monuments to confrontations I will never understand.
How many died in those circular chambers?
The thought arrives cold. Clinical. This is a record of ritual combat, of testing, of selection through violence that left only the strongest standing. The Labyrinth's purpose made manifest in ancient art, preserved in organic walls that may have witnessed these scenes firsthand.
Or perhaps something else entirely. Something I lack the cultural context to interpret.
Perhaps not every confrontation ended in death. Perhaps some pairs found resolution without destruction. Perhaps the ambiguity of the engravings is deliberate, a reminder that the moment before choice holds all possibilities, that violence and embrace remain equidistant until the instant of commitment.
I think of Cyra.
The memory surfaces unexpected, unwanted: my sister's face as she watched me fall unconscious in the Mere's dining hall, the complex mixture of sadness and fear and something else I could never quite name. We gazed at each other across distances that had nothing to do with physical space. Her lips trembled in a gesture that might have been a malformed smile or repressed weeping.
We never resolved the ambiguity the First Baptism placed between us.
Perhaps we never will.
I shake off the memory, forcing attention back to the walls, to the evidence before me rather than the ghosts behind.
I reach out without thinking.
My fingertip touches one engraving, pressing against the raised surface of a figure's carved face. The organic matter is warm beneath my touch, blood-temperature, the same unsettling warmth that permeates all of the Labyrinth's flesh-walls. The texture is smoother than I expected, polished by time or intention until the relief feels almost like skin stretched taut over bone.
The flesh writhes.
Movement ripples through the carving, not the whole wall, just that single palm-sized relief. The figure's form twitches beneath my touch, muscles contracting, limbs shifting in their frozen positions. The carved face turns, eyes that were motionless suddenly seeking, mouth that was simple suggestion suddenly opening as though to speak.
As though my contact awakened something dormant in the organic matter.
As though it is alive.
I fling my hand away.
The motion is pure reflex, animal response to wrongness that bypasses conscious thought. My heart slams against my ribs, each beat a percussion of alarm. The Skathrith's song spikes sharp in my awareness, a discordant note that mirrors my own shock.
The engraving goes still.
Frozen again. The figure's face returns to its original position, eyes dead, mouth closed, body captured mid-motion in whatever confrontation it once faced. Just flesh-wall carved into ancient record of alien ritual.
Just carved relief in organic material.
Nothing more.
I swallow. Force breath into lungs that have forgotten their function. Watch the carving for any sign of continued movement.
Nothing. Stillness absolute.
It moved.
I cannot deny what I sa—
My ear catches something. Clicking. Faint and distant, but unmistakable.
The sound echoes through the passage, rhythmic and organic, rising and falling like the pulse of some vast unseen heart. Not mechanical, not the percussion of stone on stone or metal on metal that might suggest construction or machinery.
Chitinous. Insectoid.
The clicking of mandibles. Or joints. Or something else I have no framework to name, some biological mechanism evolved for purposes I cannot imagine serving functions I do not want to understand.
The sound pulls something from deep within me.
A memory. No, deeper than that. Pre-verbal. The kind of terror that lives in the hindbrain, in the ancient parts of consciousness that governed survival before language gave names to fear. The kind of recognition that predates individual experience, that speaks to patterns encoded in flesh itself.
I know this sound.
My body responds before my mind can intervene.
I stumble forward.
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Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
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Ablations (ongoing)