"The Labyrinth is not made of stone or steel. It is built from every answer you thought you could live with."
– Manual of the Crimson Script, Section 3.1
---
The corridor wasn't supposed to breathe.
But it did.
Not with lungs, not with rhythm - but with a pressure that felt like sound trapped behind drywall, a low hum working its way beneath Ren's skin.
He moved carefully. Not because he feared falling, but because the ground didn't seem entirely committed to staying solid. Every few steps, he passed a hairline crack or a shallow fissure where the wall seemed to pulse faintly, as though something inside had a heartbeat.
He didn't speak.
Neither did the Labyrinth.
Not yet.
But both of them were listening.
---
The pen in his pocket gave a slow, deliberate throb of heat. The ink inside it was still fluid - impossible, considering how long it had been since he last used it. But then again, the Labyrinth seemed to have little patience for the rules of time.
His hand stayed close to it, thumb brushing the barrel like a priest keeping a ceremonial knife near at hand. Writing here felt different. He hadn't put words to page since the entry chamber, yet an unease was beginning to gather in him, pulling insistently at his attention. As if the story of his own movement might begin to unravel unless he set it down in ink.
He slowed when the corridor forked. Two paths. No markings. No signs. No hint.
But the walls...
They were whispering.
---
At first, it was nothing more than static, like the background hiss of a radio tuned to somewhere between stations. Then it began to shift. Not words - not yet - but the raw shape of syllables, as if the Labyrinth was remembering how to speak.
Ren closed his eyes. Not to shut it out, but to hear it better.
Behind his eyelids: brief, vivid fragments. Paper. Blood. A room almost like this one, but not quite.
And then a voice.
Not loud.
Not urgent.
Just patient.
Why did you come here?
---
Ren's eyes opened to silence.
The sound had not come from the corridor. It had come from behind his ribs.
He reached for the pen. Uncapped it.
The path to the left dimmed slightly.
The right brightened.
His lips curved faintly. Not quite a smile - more an acknowledgment.
So, the Labyrinth could be persuaded.
Not commanded. Not controlled. But tilted.
On the inside of his palm, he wrote:
The right path welcomes me.
The moment the ink touched skin, the air changed. The walls tensed, as if resisting the sentence. Something unseen pressed back - not to attack, but to remind him of its own authorship.
At the base of the wall, a word surfaced in thin red lines before fading.
Permission denied.
And yet, the air shifted toward the right corridor anyway.
The smell of dust and copper rose, and the wall beside the opening gave a faint twitch, like a muscle beneath flesh.
Ren stepped forward.
---
The passage narrowed.
Overhead lights flickered in an oddly measured rhythm. Three blinks. Pause. Three blinks. Pause.
Heartbeat. Signal. Or something else entirely.
The deeper he went, the more he saw the writing. Not etched - grown. Pale, vein-like lines that formed sentences, as though they had been written from the inside of the wall outward.
Do not follow voices you recognize.
He wrote me out. I think I was real.
The more I write, the less I remember why.
Ren stopped.
Not from fear.
But because something was moving inside the wall.
It wasn't shadow. Not air. Presence.
He could feel the outline of it in his teeth.
Then a whisper:
Ren.
No greeting. No warning. Just acknowledgment.
---
He took a slow step back. The walls didn't follow.
He pressed his palm to the surface. Cold. Beneath it - warmth.
"Say it again," he murmured.
A single pulse answered. Then silence.
Of course.
Ren breathed out through his nose. "Noted. The Labyrinth has a memory."
---
The corridor bent too sharply to be natural, as though the hallway had been folded rather than built.
It opened into a round chamber.
Ten mirrors stood inside, facing inward to form a perfect circle.
No doors. No exit.
And in each reflection - Ren.
But not the same Ren.
One younger.
One with blood across his shirt.
One grinning far too wide.
One without eyes.
Ren stepped into the circle. The air sealed behind him like a sprung trap.
A line of text bled down the central mirror:
Choose the version of yourself that deserves to leave.
Ren's breath caught, then escaped in a humorless laugh. "A morality test dressed in aesthetics."
The mirrors stayed silent.
The pen in his grip warmed. Urged.
This was a writing room.
But should he write himself out - or in?
---
He walked first to the mirror with the too-wide grin. There was something off in it. Too staged, too eager, like a counterfeit signature.
The next held the Ren with blood on his shirt. His eyes were empty, but they didn't flinch. They waited.
Ren looked back at the others - and froze.
The bloodied Ren's reflection began to split. Not the glass, but the image itself. Fine black-red cracks bled across his face like a wound in thought.
The reflection twitched. Glitched. And then its eyes fixed on him - not like a mirror's, but like a living thing seeing past the surface.
It lifted its hand. Slowly, deliberately, it traced letters across its own chest, reversed for him to read:
WATCH ME.
Ren's expression didn't change.
The other mirrors went opaque, as if frost had claimed them. Now it was just the two of them - him, and the thing pretending to be him.
A warning disguised as an invitation.
---
He glanced around. No seams. No exits.
Something in the air felt... paused. Like the Labyrinth was holding its breath, waiting to see what story he would write.
So he knelt, pressed the pen to the floor, and wrote:
Only the truth can lie its way through.
The ink vanished into the stone.
The reflection's eyes filled with thick black tears. Its hands clawed at the glass in silence, mouth forming the same two words again and again.
Ren leaned in to read them.
Kill me.
He did not flinch.
Was this guilt made visible, or something worse - a failure in a version of himself he had already forgotten?
The air tasted heavier.
This wasn't a test of choice. It was a tomb for memory.
One of these would bury him.
And if he chose wrong, he'd never know what part had died.
---
A voice whispered into his right ear.
You've been here before, Ren.
His spine stiffened. He turned.
No one.
Just his breath fogging in the cold.
From somewhere behind the glass:
If you lie here, the Labyrinth will write it down.
The chamber began to tremble.
One mirror shattered.
Nine remained.
And he hadn't chosen yet.
---