My name. It shouldn't have known my name.
The dorm moves slow, deliberate, the kind of sound that drags
every ounce of fear into your bones.
The figure stepped into the light, or maybe it was the
light, I couldn't tell. My vision blurred, sweat burned
my eyes, the air tasted like metal and blood.
It stood there, still, silent, but the room wasn't still
anymore. The walls felt alive, queering
with anticipation. And then that, that sound, it
proved through my head like a saw.
My teeth ache, my brain rattled. Meal jumped forward, fists
raised, jaw tied like a vaults, body jerking like an electric
current ran through me. Sarah screamed, caught on her
throat, her eyes rolling white. Arts, Oh my God.
I tried to cover my ears, but the noise was inside me,
bouncing between bone and thought.
Then silence. A voice followed, low,
distorted, human, but wrong. It knew me.
John, Sir. Froze, not breathing, not
blinking. I wanted to shake her awake.
My my body wouldn't move. The fingers stepped closer.
I caught the gleam of something in its hand, A sharp reflection.
Gold Mimi. Then came the blue.
A golden flare exploded outward. The heat hit my face like a
furnace blast. I stumbled backward, hitting the
wall. Light poured into my eyes,
blinding, beautiful. And then nothing.
When I opened my eyes again, we were somewhere else.
There was thick, mossy, wet, like breathing through fog.
The walls shimmered faintly, pulsing to a rhythm I couldn't
feel in my chest. Age, pulse was a heartbeat.
Not mine, not human. A head, a door, still wide,
etched with glowing cymbals that seemed to crawl as we watched
them. We didn't belong here.
Her jaw tightened. Then we make, Then we make a
choke and something watched us. This place gives me the creeps,
Sarah said. Every step deeper, the air
pressed heavier against our skin, as if we were walking into
someone's lungs. We spread out.
Each of us were lying on instinct, and whatever psychic
edge we had left after everything has happened, That's
when it started. A faint vibration through the
floor, a hum that made my skull ache.
I felt a pull, something Cowling.
Not aloud, not even in my head. It was deeper, older.
I felt a pull, something Cowling.
It was deeper, older. A gravity that tugged at the
marrow of my bones. I stopped cold.
A mule didn't. The air went thinner, like
someone had unzipped the world around us.
My breath hitched and then stalled.
The hum under foot swelled, not loud, but low enough to make my
teeth ache. Somewhere far off, water kept
dripping, steady and obscene, as if marking time for our
heartbeat. That wasn't ours, Sir.
Wait. Emil's voice cracked through the
dark. He froze mid step, inches from
invisible edge, but Sarah's scream split the silence.
Help me. Her screen tore out of her and
then split. One thread was raw and human.
Another slid behind it, warped and older like a memory playing
on a damaged tape. The two sounds didn't line up.
They staggered past one another, creating a gap that smelled of
rust and ozone. Sarah's foot slipped first, then
her body followed, a blur of motion and turn.
She took forward in a way that felt slower than motion should
be, as if gravity had found another rhythm and we were all
slightly out of step with it. The world lengthened.
A single second stretched into a dozen small depths.
A meal dove, his finger tips brushing hers.
Time condensed around his reach. Fingers, hips, knuckles.
The flash of skin against skin. For a heartbeat I could see the
fine hairs on Sarah's wrist, the way her nails were white at the
tips, the Fleck of light in her eye.
She was real, too real. So let me go.
Her voice doubled again, but this time the second strand was
digital, unfrayed, a thin crackle of static threaded
through vowels, as if something invisible was trying to
translate her into a frequency if it could swallow.
The static stole the edges of words, carving away consonants
until one Only the raw plea remained.
The fall wasn't a single motion. It was a sequence of small
betrayals, a toe sliding, A calf losing purchase muscles for
getting the command to hold on. We felt each betrayal as its own
cold shock. The floor grown below us, a
structural whisper protesting iron.
Emil's fingers closed on hers for half breath.
The world narrowed to two hands, nails digging, skin slick.
The desperate negotiation. Wait.
I could hear blood moving in his ears, the ragged hitch of his
inhale. I heard his teeth click when he
pushed. I heard the faint sound of
something behind Sarah, an echoed cadence that matched the
rhythm of her pulse and then didn't.
Emil said I've got you, Amelia, pull her up.
Help me. Amelia's voice snapped.
It was thin, sharp with terror, the kind of small sound that
reveals how much space there is for fear.
Her hands slipped again, slower this time, as if it were pulled,
pulled the world down. Also unspoilt Time, the psychic
strand that had overlapped her voice now threaded through the
air like a second presence, a whisper that set her name and
then rewounded, folding meaning back into itself.
The sound bent toward the void and came back hollow.
My stomach dropped, I could see the top of her curly brown hair.
She was falling into nothingness.
Emil lunged, catching her fingertips just before she
slipped completely into the void.
He looked at me, eyes wide. I didn't see it.
He said you weren't meant to help me pull her up.
He shouted, voice ragged, Emilia dropping to the ground beside
him, arms stretched out, body sliding dangerously close to the
edge. The air whipped around us, cold
wind from nowhere smelling of rust and rain.
I hit the ground next to them, gripping Emil's arm as he
strained against gravity. Sarah's face flickered in the
half light, tears suspended in midair.
Told Enrico she sobbed. Her voice cycled, splintering
through the chamber. 1 reel 1, psychic 1 already fading.
The final syllable fractured like glass.
The room swallowed the rest for an instant, too quick to measure
and too long to forget. I felt the loss as a physical
tug and my sternum, as if something had reached in and
unlatched a rib. Emil's fingers clung, fingertips
grazing flesh, tendon screaming. He leaned with everything in
him. Amelia jammed her heels down,
her toes in, palms white with effort.
Soil on or dust flaked onto our clothes like tiny funerary
confetti. Then her hand slipped.
The sound of those fingers was not cinematic.
It was small and intimate. The soft slide, the breaths
worth the friction, paper thin tearing.
It sounded like a promise. I'm done.
Her voice flared one last time, 3 notes that weren't quite in
tune, then folded into a silence that felt intentionally kept.
The hum under foot fell away like the closing of a lid there,
cleared as if nothing had been done to it at all.
We stood over a shimmer, not dipping, not solid, but a place
where light bent wrong and memory stuck to itself like wet
fabric. Emil stared into it, lips moving
without producing sound. Amelia's hands clawed at the
edge until her knuckles shone white.
I couldn't tell if she was gone or taken.
The difference in that instant felt meaningless or remained,
was a hollow in the world shaped exactly like her.
Time fractured into frames. And then, gasping, Mia's fingers
caught at the edge, trembling. Neil stared into nothing, lips
moving, but no sound came. She's gone.
I whispered, but even as I said it, I wasn't sure if I meant
gone or taken. No, no, she can't be gone.
Sarah, Emiles, calm down. I turned towards the sound, but
there was nothing, only the shadows bringing around us.
That's what I realized. The labyrinth wasn't built to
keep people out, it was built to learn us.
The silence after ho fall was unbearable.
It was the kind that eat, sound, thought, hope.
None of us knew what to say. Every breath heard, every word
felt pointless. Amelia, cold and dry, said we
have to keep moving. The longer we stay, the more it
takes from us. Emil replied We're not leaving
her. You saw what happened.
They say the void devours, but a thing that eats, digests,
absorbs it doesn't echo. And this place is full of her
echoes. So maybe Sarah, maybe she just
became part of the menu. Then next week to the Awakening,
The psychic Odyssey, the Trappist Enigma.