There was no sun in this place.
The sky had long forgotten the warmth of daylight. The world lay blanketed in shadows—long, slow-moving, and cold. No electricity buzzed, no lights flickered in homes, no machines hummed quietly in the distance. Only the faintest signs of habitation dotted the land, scattered specks of settlement half-swallowed by the dusk. Enough to fool the eye. But never the mind.
I had walked for hours. And in all that time, I had seen nothing that felt alive—at least, not in the way I once knew life to be.
Still, the people I'd encountered… they were human. I was sure of it. Their faces carried the same softness, the same creases of confusion, the same worn-down fear as the ones I once passed on the street. Their eyes didn't glow, their skin didn't shift. Their words—when they spoke—were human. Measured, weary, real.
And yet... they lived here.
A place with no sun. No green trees. No flowing rivers. No morning breeze. A place carved from shadow and silence.
So why, in the middle of all that, did I see children smile? Why did I hear laughter echo faintly between crumbling homes? Why did something in this dying world still feel... warm?
The answer burned quietly at the far edge of my vision.
The tree.
That impossible, golden monolith—its glow untouched by the decay it rose from. The Aurean Spire. A warmth unlike anything else in this world. A beacon not just of light, but of meaning. Its massive boughs stretched high, as if reaching for something no hand had ever touched. Its glow, divine and surreal, seemed to wrap itself around everything. It gave heat. It gave rhythm. It gave hope.
And though I never heard its voice, it spoke.
Not with words, but with a quiet pressure on the back of my mind. A presence behind my thoughts.
"Are you satisfied?"
"Is this the life you wanted?"
"Have you lived well?"
"Or do you wish there had been... something else?"
No. I didn't hear those words. But they existed in me. As real as any spoken thought. The tree wasn't calling. It was asking. Inviting. Enticing.
My feet carried me forward.
Toward the home of the old man. Toward the only person who might understand what this place was. What I was doing here. What this all meant.
The flowers I had taken earlier kept my mind clear—enough, at least, to walk without question. But some part of me still knew. Something had been watching me.
Always from the same place. My far right.
Where the tree stood.
It wasn't paranoia. It wasn't a trick of light. It was a presence. Watching. Judging. Waiting.
And yet, I could not approach it. Not yet. There were questions. Ones that had echoed since the moment I awoke on that pile of vegetables, staring at a ceiling I did not know.
I would get answers.
The old man was going to tell me the truth.
A couple of rocks and loose stones tested my steps as I pushed forward. My boots—if they could still be called that—were worn thin, their soles biting the jagged terrain. Bones, brittle and discolored, lay scattered like forgotten warnings. The smell of death lingered, constant now. A companion.
And as I've said before—there were no green trees.
Plenty of trees, yes. Some old and knotted, some spindly and brittle, but none bore the familiar color of life. Leaves of dull brown, ash black, and even stranger hues—silvery grey, bruised purple—shivered on branches that creaked under no wind.
Above it all, ever present, the golden spire loomed. Still watching. Or so it felt. I tried not to look directly at it for too long. But every time I did, I was reminded—there was something in that glow that didn't just light the world. It pierced it.
Climbing back up the mountain was nothing like the descent. My body ached. My throat was dry, my stomach hollow. I had no water, no food. Nothing to sustain me but the stubborn will to return. To speak. To know.
Whenever I tried to rest—even for a moment—the dizziness would take me. A soft, creeping pull behind my eyes. If I gave in, I would collapse. And I did not trust these mountains enough to collapse.
So I walked. Or more accurately, I climbed. Slowly, over time that felt endless, I forced myself up to the higher tropes of the hills. Just beneath the peak.
I passed forests—whole stretches of trees gnarled and motionless. Not a sound. Not a single creature stirred. It was like walking through a painting left to rot in its frame.
And then, finally, I saw it. The house.
That modest shape tucked against the rise of the mountain. Familiar now. The only thing in this place that gave any sense of continuity.
But something was off.
The carriage wasn't there.
For the first time, I noticed its absence—not just as a missing object, but as a quiet shift in balance. That old, weather-beaten cart that always stood out front was nowhere in sight. The man must've gone somewhere. A short trip, perhaps. Or longer.
Still, I didn't hesitate. I needed shelter. Answers. Rest.
I made my way forward, legs dragging, head light.
I didn't head toward the main house.
It stood quiet, its presence inert, distant, with nothing inviting about it. The mountain winds had settled into silence, and the sky above it remained that same flat black, dotted only by the glare of the golden spire opposite it in the far distance. The Aurean Spire was nowhere near this house. It loomed on the other side of the landscape, a godless monument on the horizon, not close enough to be warm, yet never far enough to ignore.
The old man wasn't home. That much was obvious. His strange, creaking carriage wasn't anywhere in sight. No sign of smoke from a hearth or light behind wooden windows. I didn't dare enter his home—something in me refused. If this place ever held comfort, it was only because of the man, not the building. Without him, it just felt… dormant. Watching.
So instead, I turned toward the smaller cabin. The place I'd first opened my eyes in. The room with vegetable sacks and dry air, the space where someone—something—had chosen to leave me.
The door yielded without much protest, letting out a low wooden sigh. The interior had the same faint scent I remembered—something between wilted flowers and old dust. But now I wasn't just surviving in this space. I was searching.
I stepped in and let the door fall shut behind me.
The dim ambient glow from the Aurean Spire filtered faintly through the cracks in the wooden slats, casting everything in a pale, diluted gold. Not warm. Just enough to see. I moved slowly, this time examining the clutter that before I'd only vaguely noticed.
A dozen small things sat strewn across the shelves and corners. Handmade toys—little animals, simple dolls, strange figures with elongated arms and holes for eyes. Some were painted, though the colors had long since faded to ghostly echoes of themselves.
Nearby sat what looked like bundles of drawings, hastily bound together with strips of thin leather. I knelt and picked one up.
Childlike sketches. Not crude, not careless—there was intention in them, even if they were done by unskilled hands. A massive tree featured in many of them. Always central. Always radiant. Sometimes it bore fruit—round, glowing orbs with intricate markings etched into them. Symbols I recognized faintly. A spiral resembling wind, a jagged tear like a bolt of lightning, and one that looked like fire breaking free from a circle. But others… were less clear. Symbols that didn't seem natural at all, as if they didn't belong to this world—or any world.
In one drawing, the tree stood high while people below clashed in chaos—stick-figures fighting over the fruit, some reaching with desperate hands, others pulling each other down. It was violent. Desperate. But not without meaning.
There was something sacred in the struggle.
I flipped through more pages. One showed a home—a small house, with a single line of smoke curling from it. Another, a mountain range, with small figures ascending. But none of them showed the Aurean Spire close. Always distant. Always too far to touch.
Then I found a small wooden box beneath the bedrolls, tucked carefully against the wall.
I brought it out, ran my fingers along the smooth grain. No carvings. No lock. Just a box.
I opened it slowly.
Empty.
But it didn't feel discarded. It felt preserved. Like it had once carried something precious. Like the absence inside was intentional. A ritual, maybe. Or mourning.
I held it for a while, staring into its hollow frame. Nothing inside… yet it carried weight.
Then I placed it back where I found it.
I didn't know what I was piecing together, but it was something. This place wasn't just a resting spot. It was a memory. Someone's past. A history never spoken aloud.
I let my gaze drift once more toward the slats of the cabin, where that distant golden light still bled through.
Something about the Aurean Spire… it wasn't just light anymore. It watched. I was sure of it.
And as I stepped outside, I realized the stillness around the home hadn't changed—but I had.
Everything I found in that small, cluttered cabin—those drawings, the toys, the empty box—shifted something in me. Subtly, but enough. Enough to make me pause, to reconsider how I'd been looking at this place.
This world hadn't started existing the moment I died. That much was clear now. It wasn't a fabricated dreamscape summoned to greet me upon death, or some private corner of the afterlife curated just for my arrival. No. This place had history. It had been lived in. Scarred. Written into, over time. It had weight.
And the more I thought about the old man's words—the way he spoke in half-truths and quiet pauses—the more certain I became: I wasn't the first.
Maybe he was one of them. One of the people who had come before me. Maybe once, long ago, someone else had woken up on that same bag of vegetables, blinking at the dark wooden ceiling. Maybe someone else had walked toward that golden tree thinking it would offer them something more than silence.
I took a few slow steps outside and lowered myself by the firepit, sitting where I assumed he had sat countless times. The earth here was cold, but not dead. It still remembered warmth.
My eyes drifted up to the Aurean Spire, towering in the distance. Its light had lost its brilliance; not because it dimmed, but because I had stopped seeing it as divine. Now, it felt more like a question than an answer. A challenge.
I had planned to run.
I'll admit it now. My first thought after entering the cabin had been simple: find what I could, steal what might help, and leave before the man returned. Head to the tree. It had been calling to me since the moment I arrived. I could feel it—something beneath my skin, something inside my skull. Not words, not voices. Just a pull. A gravity.
But that plan… it's done.
The things I've seen, the things I've begun to understand—half-formed though they may be—made one thing clear: there's more to this place than the tree. And the man knows something. Enough to save me. Enough to feed me, clothe me, and leave without fear I'd take from him. He didn't owe me that, but he did it anyway.
And what did I do?
Ran. Without a word. Like a coward too afraid to speak to the only person who might have answers.
Not anymore.
This place isn't some eternal limbo. I've seen bones. Decay. Abandonment. People die here, no matter how long they wander. No gods descend to collect them. No judgement. Just time.
And I'm not going to waste mine hiding from the one man who might tell me what this world really is.
So I sit by the fire. I watch the tree in the distance. I keep my silence, not out of fear, but patience.
He'll return.
And this time, I won't be running.
A long time passed.
The kind of time that folds over itself—quiet, slow, without landmarks to anchor it. I had stopped checking the horizon. There was nothing left to check. The sky hadn't shifted. No sun to track. No stars to move. Just that same oppressive blanket of darkness overhead, and the tree, ever-watching, ever-glowing, far behind me.
I sat by the dying fire, adding a piece of wood here and there just to have something to do. The warmth barely reached my fingers anymore, but it kept me tethered. I'd spent a while fiddling with the small trinkets I'd taken from the cabin—wooden carvings, some stone with odd markings, a bent nail someone had tried to straighten. Nothing important. But it passed the time.
Eventually, even thought became a chore. I leaned back against the wall of the house, arms folded, and let my eyes close just enough to drift. I didn't fall fully asleep. It was more like floating on the edge of it, hovering in that soft, weightless space where the mind loosens its grip.
And then I heard it—the faint crunch of hooves against packed dirt. The low, steady groan of wooden wheels, accompanied by the unmistakable grunt of oxen. My eyes opened, slowly. Dust stirred in the distance, and through it, the old man appeared—his cart lumbering behind him, heavy with sacks.
He looked like he always did: same grim expression, same weather-worn face carved in furrows and silence. He didn't look surprised to see me, didn't ask where I'd gone or why I came back. He simply trudged forward, passing me without so much as a glance.
I stood. Got up to my feet, still stiff from hours of sitting and half-sleeping. I watched him. Quietly.
He led the oxen around the side of the smaller cabin, his pace measured and slow. Then he stopped, unlatched the cart, and began unloading the sacks. One by one. Methodical. Like he'd done it a thousand times before.
I followed a few steps behind, not close enough to be in his way, but near enough that he must've felt my presence. Still, he didn't say anything. I just stood there—watching him. Listening to the sound of the fabric shifting, the dull thuds of the sacks hitting the wooden floor.
He finished after a while. Brushed off his hands. And then, finally, he turned his head toward me. His voice came flat, tired, and tinged with dry amusement.
"Well," he said, "how'd your little walk go?"
I didn't answer.
He looked at me more fully this time, eyes narrowing just slightly as if measuring something invisible.
"You look in great shape," he added. "I guess you can go on your own now."
My eyebrows shifted. Just a twitch—barely noticeable, but enough to betray what I was feeling.
He was trying to bait me. Stir the pot. That much was obvious.
He knew why I was still here. Knew I hadn't come all the way back just to sit around his fire and share stew. But instead of pressing, he let his gaze slide down to my hands. He saw what I was holding. The small, hand-carved toy. The sketch. The smooth stone with its faded etchings. His eyes flicked past me to the fire, where more of those trinkets lay strewn around. Things I hadn't been careful enough to hide.
His expression shifted.
"Ah," he said after a moment, his tone somewhere between dry and resigned. "So I guess you found a few toys from the shithouse."
I didn't say anything at first, but I could feel the blood creeping up my neck. He hadn't raised his voice. He didn't sound angry. But there was a new sharpness in the air. Like a wire pulled too tight.
"I was just curious," I said finally. "I need to know where I am."
He held my gaze for a few seconds longer than I liked—reading something in my face, maybe. Then without a word, he turned and walked toward the main house. The heavy door creaked open, and he paused only once to glance back at me.
"Well, come on then," he muttered.
Inside was darker than I remembered, the walls thick with shadows and age. The smell of dry wood and old herbs clung to everything. He gestured to a wooden chair by the table. Its legs were uneven, and the surface had been patched so many times it looked more like driftwood than furniture. Still, it held when I sat.
"You want a drink?" he asked.
I shook my head.
He grunted and went about pouring something thick and dark into his own cup. He didn't ask again.
Then he sat opposite me, cup in hand, the wood between us scratched and worn by years of silent meals and quiet thinking. He didn't speak for a while. Just took a sip, then let out a low breath.
And then, finally, his voice came, low and quiet.
"Have you heard about magic?"
I was confused. The question was simple on the surface: Have you heard about magic?
In my world, magic didn't exist—at least not in any literal sense. It was smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand dressed up in capes and stage lights. Tricks. Illusions designed to fool the bored or the hopeful.
If this man was from my world—or one like it—he'd understand that. Maybe he was testing me.
"Tell me. I asked a question," he repeated, this time with a sharper tone.
It was one of those moments where you know the answer, but the question makes you second-guess yourself. I was certain what magic meant—but I couldn't tell if he was asking in the literal or metaphorical sense. He stared at me like he was losing patience.
"Yes," I said finally.
He leaned back slightly, rolled his eyes. "Gods. Why do you take so long to answer? It's a simple question."
I didn't respond. Just waited, because I had a feeling he wasn't done.
Sure enough, the next one came.
"What does the word magic mean to you? A card trick? Some parlor illusion to fool the easily fooled?"
I gave a faint nod. That was what it meant to me.
He scoffed under his breath. "I wasn't asking what you think magicians do. I wasn't talking about cheap theater. I was asking if you know what the word means."
I didn't reply. Because now I wasn't sure anymore.
He took a slow sip from his drink, set the cup down on the table, and leaned forward slightly—his voice quieter now.
"Magic," he said, "isn't a performance. It's not showmanship or illusion. It's what everything comes from. Not in the fairy-tale sense. No wands. No incantations. But the root. The base layer beneath thought, beneath logic, beneath all the things your world called real. It's the thing that bends the rules before the rules are written."
He tapped a finger on the tabletop.
"Your world. Mine. This place. They're not held together by science, or chance, or some god's decree. They're held by the old language. The unspoken rhythm. That's what magic is."
He looked at me, and for once, there was no mockery in his eyes.
"It exists," he said. "Not quite the way you understand existence—but it's there. Always has been. Long before you or I were thrown into this mess."
He took a slow sip from his drink, then slammed the cup on the table—not hard, but loud enough to make it clear he wanted my attention.
Then he looked at me. The drunken haze hadn't fully set in yet, but his eyes were already losing sharpness, drifting between something present and something buried deep.
"What was your world like?" he asked.
His voice wasn't curious. It was worn. Tired.
"Was it full of people? Crowded cities, empty highways. People you loved, people you hated. People you passed every day and never really looked at?"
I didn't respond. Not because I didn't have anything to say, but because I realized—he wasn't asking me. Not directly. He was laying something out for himself. A memory he'd pulled out too many times before.
"You were having a normal day, weren't you?" he continued. "Whatever that meant for you. Maybe with friends. Maybe with family. Maybe just another boring morning. And then, just like that… they're gone. And you wake up here."
His voice slowed at the end. Not like he was drunk—but like he'd said those words to himself more than once.
I watched him carefully. The way his fingers flexed around the cup. The stiffness in his posture. This wasn't about me, not entirely. He'd been through it too.
"Tell me something," he said, leaning in now. "I know it hasn't been long for you. But do you really believe it? That you've died? That you were dragged into this… whatever this is? Does any of this feel real to you?"
I opened my mouth, but he pushed through.
"Be honest. Doesn't it all feel like a story? Something out of a bad book. The kind of shit you laugh about when you're alive. Some B-grade reincarnation tale or whatever the hell people call it. One second you're in your own world, and the next—" he gestured vaguely to the walls, the cabin, the mountains beyond—"this."
He shook his head and poured the rest of the drink down his throat. I could tell by the way he winced afterward that it burned worse than he remembered.
He wasn't all gone yet, but he was getting there.
I stayed quiet. Let him spiral a little.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "So what's it been? A few days? And you're already walking around like it's fine. No breakdown, no screaming, no crying. You're not curled up in a corner reliving your last breath."
The words could've sounded like mockery. But they didn't. There was no malice in them. Only observation. Maybe a little confusion.
I leaned back slightly.
To be fair, he wasn't wrong. I hadn't had a breakdown. I hadn't broken down weeping or collapsed under the weight of it. I didn't think that made me some cold bastard. I think it just hadn't hit me all at once.
Or maybe it had, and I was just tired of reacting.
"I didn't believe it either," I said, finally. "Not at first. When I woke up here, everything felt… wrong. Off. The air. The silence. Even the colors felt different. That's why I left the cabin. I had to see something. I had to make sure this place was real."
He didn't say anything.
"But what did you expect?" I added. "That I'd sit around crying about people I can't even prove are dead? That I'd suffer through some dramatic breakdown like in the movies?"
His expression didn't change, but something in his eyes shifted—just a bit.
"And honestly, I've already spent too long in some dark, empty place before waking up here. Whatever that space was—that thing I talked to…" I trailed off, the memory starting to fray even as I reached for it.
That conversation. The creature. The words we exchanged. They were slipping.
"I don't even know if that part was real anymore," I admitted quietly. "I'm forgetting it. Piece by piece. But whatever it was, it brought me here. And I know that much."
A dull ache spread behind my eyes. My temples pulsed, like something inside was trying to push its way back into focus.
Still, I sat up straighter. My voice leveled.
I know I'm dead. I know I left that world behind. And I know where I am now.
I glanced toward the window, though I couldn't see the spire from here.
"I know I'm inside the Labyrinth."
The word hung in the air like smoke.
And then something clicked in my mind—sharper, more urgent.
The game.
The shadow's voice.
Maybe he knew about it. Maybe he'd heard something—anything. I turned back toward him, the question already forming.
"Do y—"
But before I could finish, he cut in, muttering something incoherent about the cold or the wind or the damned stew boiling over. The question dissolved before it even left my mouth.
And just like that, the moment passed.