The air beyond the cavern was thicker, heavier. Alpha had grown used to the sound of rushing water, to the dim but steady light reflecting from its spray. The moment he left, the Labyrinth swallowed him whole again.
The walls twisted like scar tissue, stone slick with moisture. Shadows writhed at the edges of his sight, yet his grip on the hilt of his sword felt steadier than before.
The Knight's training weighed on him—not as burden, but as anchor. Strike, parry, anticipate. Read the body before the blade. Hear the silence between steps.
The Labyrinth waited to test him.
And it did not wait long.
---
A brittle rattle rose in the gloom. The scrape of bone on stone, uneven and hungry. Alpha's breath slowed. His ears twitched to the sound, and he pictured the creature before it even appeared.
When the skeleton lunged from the dark, sword dragging like a broken fang, Alpha was already moving. He sidestepped, raising his blade just enough. The clash came, sparks briefly illuminating the hollow sockets of his foe.
It was not as clean as with the Knight. His parry wavered, his wrist burned, but he remained standing. The skeleton staggered, unprepared for resistance.
Alpha struck once, twice, blade biting through ribs and spine until the bones scattered across the stone. Dust rose and faded, leaving only silence behind.
He stood panting, chest heaving. His arms shook from the clash, sweat dripping down his brow. Yet a grim smile pulled at his lips.
"I knew you," he whispered, almost to himself. "I knew you before you struck."
---
The fight gave him no glory, only truth: he was changing.
But the Labyrinth had no patience for reflection. More rattles echoed down the corridor. More hollow steps, more hunger. The ruins bent around him, twisted into familiar shapes—the outlines of the slave pens, the overseer's whip carved into the wall's cracks, even the smell of the yard where he once broke his back for another man's wealth.
The Labyrinth was adapting, dragging his past into its stone heart.
He pressed on anyway.
---
The second skeleton came faster, its blade sharper. Alpha nearly misread the movement—a stagger that was not weakness, but bait. The strike came high, sudden.
He barely deflected it, the edge kissing his cheek. Blood dripped, warm and startling in the cold dark. His scar burned faintly, a low pulse at the base of his spine.
'Feylith.'
The whisper rose unbidden in his mind, and he snarled, twisting his body and countering with a strike across the skeleton's jaw. Bone snapped. He pressed the attack until the thing collapsed into dust.
Breathless, he stared at his bloodied reflection in a fragment of cracked armor the creature had carried. His face was gaunt, hollow-eyed, yet sharper than he remembered.
He pressed forward.
---
The third skeleton nearly ended him.
It waited in silence, tucked into a crevice of the ruin-wall, striking only when his guard dropped. Its rusted spear punched toward his chest, faster than his tired body could react.
Only the faint shift of air saved him. He twisted at the last second, the spear tearing across his shoulder instead of piercing his heart. The pain was blinding, the smell of blood sharp.
He roared and charged, instincts taking over. His blade slammed against bone, sparks raining down until the skeleton shattered beneath his fury.
The spear clattered to the ground. Alpha fell to one knee, clutching his wound.
He should have died.
And yet, in the silence that followed, he laughed. A raw, broken sound.
He was learning.
Not enough. Never enough. But still—learning.
---
Hours—or what felt like hours—dragged by. Alpha fought through corridors that shifted with his memories. Overseers' shadows clung to the walls, chains rattled in the distance where no chains existed. The Labyrinth's cruelty was in its precision: it used his scars against him.
But every time a skeleton rose from the dark, he met it.
His body broke again and again, but something within him refused to yield.
---
When at last he stumbled into a chamber wider than the others, his breath caught.
At the center of the room, faint light shimmered around a shard of crystalline stone lodged in a broken ribcage. It pulsed faintly, like a heart.
Alpha staggered forward, blade raised, half-expecting another ambush. But no skeleton moved. Only the corpse, long unmoving, clutching the strange light.
He reached for it with trembling fingers.
The moment his skin touched the shard, heat surged into his chest. A voice—no, not a voice, a thrum—echoed through his bones.
[ Dreamstone Acquired. ]
The words burned faintly before his eyes, incomplete, flickering. The Veyres window again—ghostly, fractured, yet undeniable.
Alpha gasped, stumbling back as the glow sank into his body. He felt no stronger. No lighter. And yet… not the same.
His scar pulsed.
He clutched it, whispering through gritted teeth. "What… are you making me into?"
The Labyrinth offered no answer. Only silence, waiting for his next step.
---
He sat in the dust, body shaking, blood seeping from his shoulder wound. His sword lay across his knees, coated with the ash of fallen bones.
Dreamstone. Power hidden in death. Power he could take for himself.
He thought of the others who had left the slave yard, scattered like leaves. How many of them had survived this long? How many would have the will to keep walking into the dark?
He clenched the sword tighter.
"I'll keep walking."
The echo of his voice filled the chamber.
The scar pulsed again. And for the first time, Alpha didn't try to push the name away when it surfaced.
Feylith.