"The first truth a writer must learn: not everything written must be read. Some words are meant to bleed alone."
— Manual of the Crimson Script, Appendix I, Margin Note (redacted)
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The door closed behind him without a sound.
Not the slam of finality.
Worse. Consent.
Ren stood still for three breaths, letting the quiet settle. Not because the room was safe — the Labyrinth never was — but because it had been loud only moments before. This was the kind of silence that feels as though a scream has only just finished breathing.
---
Low, weary voices drifted from deeper inside. He followed them down a short, dim corridor where the walls pulsed like slow heartbeats trapped under concrete. The passage opened into a square chamber, wider than it needed to be, its ceiling swallowed in shadow. The floor lay bare except for the dark stain in the center — long dried, its color faded, but its intention untouched.
Six people formed a loose ring around it. Some argued in tight, tired bursts. One woman sat with her head in her hands. In the middle of the room stood a metal pedestal bearing a brass scale, balanced so precisely it seemed frozen. Beside it, a card waited in severe black type.
Ren stepped close enough to read.
---
SACRIFICE ROOM – GATE 2
One must be left behind.
The doors will not open until the scale tips.
Weight is determined by intention.
You may not sacrifice yourself.
---
He did not laugh, though something bitter rose in his throat. Of course you couldn't offer yourself. Too clean. Too easy. This was not a martyr's riddle — it was one that forced you to live with what you chose to carry forward. Or what you left behind.
They noticed him then. Eyes flicked toward him and away again. A man with a bandaged hand stared openly. A short-haired woman gave a nod that could have been greeting or warning.
"You're late," a measured voice said.
Ren turned. She stood apart from the rest, arms loose, spine straight. Not afraid. Not performing. Watching. She might have been his age, perhaps older by a year the Labyrinth would never confess. Her face recorded causes, not time.
"You're the last one," she added, tipping her chin toward the scale. "We've voted. Everyone's made a case."
"For whom to leave?" he asked, voice flat.
"For who deserves to stay."
A faint smile touched his mouth. "Democracy. My favorite kind of sacrifice."
The bandaged man cut in. "We've been here for hours. It won't budge. We think it's reading us. Intent, not words."
"The card says as much," the short-haired woman replied. "One guy tried to fake it — claimed he wanted to sacrifice someone. Nothing. Then he tried to offer himself. Still nothing."
Ren circled the pedestal. The brass plates were scarred, honest. No gears. No trick. Just gravity — and guilt pretending to be a mechanism.
"Name?" he asked the woman who had spoken first. Not because he needed it, but because she expected him to.
"Ava," she said after a beat.
The sound struck him like a memory misplaced in time. He said nothing. She didn't notice the way the room tilted in him.
The bandaged man gestured toward a seventh figure hunched against the wall — thin, shaking, barely twenty by the look of him, lips moving in a stream of whispered numbers. "He won't speak. We were going to vote him out."
Not mad, Ren thought. Broken. There is a difference.
Ava stepped closer. "We need a real vote. One person decides. We're deadlocked." Her eyes stayed on him — not aggressive, simply measuring the parts of him that refused to flinch. "We're out of time."
"Out of time?" he asked.
She studied him in silence, the way a surgeon examines a cut before deciding whether to stitch or keep going. Suspicion without heat. You see too much, her gaze almost said. Or you're hiding the cost of seeing it.
Finally she spoke. "The Labyrinth doesn't wait. We've been here for hours, but something changed a few minutes ago. Time started… feeling shorter."
"You keep track," he said.
"I try."
"You're not the leader."
"No one is. Someone has to remember what's happening."
The others murmured — some in dissent, some in agreement. Ava hadn't seized control; she had simply filled the empty space fear had left behind. Ren could respect that. When terror gets abstract, people invent shapes. Authority is only a story told together.
Ava. The echo behind glass. The tilt of the head. And here she was, unaware of the memory wearing her outline inside him.
He moved to the scale. The others withdrew, as if the metal might explode from proximity. One plate bore a faint smear, the ghost of a decision flinched from.
"Let me guess," he said. "Each of you imagined someone heavy enough in your mind, hoping the room would listen."
"Yes," the bandaged man said.
"And now," Ava added, "we are out of time to talk it to death."
No one seemed ready for another round of ethics.
Ren crouched, listening to the hush that brass holds between its molecules. The Labyrinth did not run on cogs — it ran on conviction. The test wasn't aimed at the group. It hunted the one person who could admit what they were willing to lose.
Which meant the printed rule was the polite version.
"Let me try something," he said.
No one stopped him.
He drew the pen from his coat. The air shifted — the way it always did when the room recognized what he carried, undecided whether to tolerate it. He didn't write on the card, nor on the plate. He only set the pen lightly on the edge of the scale. A gram, at most. But symbolic weight has a habit of shouting.
Nothing happened.
Ava's mouth tightened. "What are you doing?"
Ren didn't answer — not aloud.
He lifted his sleeve, turned his wrist from view, and wrote against his skin, small and sure:
The scale tips for the one no one thinks about.
A hollowness bloomed in his chest, the peculiar vacuum of being copied or reduced. Across the room, the whispering boy spasmed once, then went still — as if some internal metronome had lost count.
The scale sighed, old metal remembering its purpose. It tipped. Right. Barely. Enough.
Ava pointed upward. Red numerals had appeared on the ceiling.
00:26:51
00:26:50
"Of course," Ren murmured.
A countdown is only a story that thinks it can force urgency to behave.
---
The room found its voice again. Argument returned, frayed and weary. The short-haired woman suggested rotations, the bandaged man swore at mathematics, someone else listed reasons like a prayer.
Ava didn't join them. Her eyes stayed on Ren — not on any single move, but on the way the air seemed to behave around him. She had seen the scale twitch twice. The others had not. She had felt the floor wince.
"What did you just do?" she asked.
Ren met her gaze. A question moved between them like a blade on a table neither wanted to touch.
He could have lied. The Labyrinth would have written it down.
Instead, he let the pen rest again where brass met breath. The room leaned closer, curious, annoyed, alive. It heard you, a thought rose — not his voice, not the walls'. And it didn't like being made to.
A crack feathered through the concrete under their feet, silent as a thought splitting. Not structural — metaphorical. The floor admitting it couldn't carry every version of the truth.
Ava flinched. No one else noticed.
Her gaze flicked from the fracture to his hand. I saw that, her eyes said. I saw you.
The boy drew a ragged breath. The countdown kept falling. 00:25:37. 00:25:36.
"Pick," the short-haired woman demanded, consonants sharp with impatience. "Someone pick."
Ren's fingertips brushed the pen. Ink hummed against bone, eager. Not yet, he told it — or himself. He couldn't tell which. Not until I have to.
"Fine," the bandaged man said, stepping forward with a swagger that belonged to martyrs. "I'll do it. I'll choose. We can't sit here waiting to rot."
"You can't choose yourself," Ava reminded him.
His grin bared teeth. "Who said I would?"
Ren watched faces shift — the subtle recalibrations of people deciding whether to be remembered well or simply remembered. The scale didn't care for performances if the intention beneath didn't bleed. Weight is determined by intention. The card had not lied. It simply hadn't warned them how loud intention can be when it whispers.
The pen warmed. He ignored it. He kept his eyes on Ava — too still, not with fear but with the discipline of committing the shape of a fracture to memory.
He almost spoke her name.
Instead: "You're wasting time, and the room knows it."
"Then move it," the bandaged man snapped.
Ren looked down at the crack — a decision etched into stone. The Labyrinth had winced. It could be made to do so again.
He didn't write.
He thought: The scale tips for the one already leaving.
The plate answered with a faint tap. The boy in the corner exhaled, long and relieved.
Ava tilted her head — the familiar angle of a key turning. "You're changing it."
"Am I?" Ren asked.
"You didn't touch anything."
He lifted his hand from the pen, proof he could. The countdown blinked. The ceiling light flickered with the arrogance of pretending to be random.
00:24:04.
00:24:03.
He smiled without warmth. "Maybe it's changing me."
Ava studied him as though the words had been carved inside her skull. Then she nodded once — a reluctant concession to a truth neither of them liked.
"All right," she said, low. "Then do it on purpose."
The room leaned in, listening for his answer.
Ren drew a breath he didn't trust. And for the first time since entering the Labyrinth, he wasn't sure if he was still writing the story —
or if it had already written him.
---