Nothing.
A complete, suffocating darkness that pressed against my eyes like cold velvet.
Where... was I?
I reached out, my fingers grasping at empty air. There was no resistance, no temperature, no sound. The silence wasn't just an absence of noise; it was heavy, a physical weight that pressed down on my chest, daring me to draw a breath.
I tried to reconstruct the path that had led me here, but the harder I pulled at the threads, the more they frayed. I felt the sharp, jagged edges of a memory—a burning skyline, the smell of ozone, the weight of a blade in my palm—but as soon as I focused, it dissolved like salt in water.
The journey to the Demon King.
Had we been ambushed?
No, nobody was strong enough at that time to ambush us and succeed.
So what?
I stopped myself after a moment of thinking.
How I had gotten here wasn't important. In reality, the fact that now I was here, present, and needed to escape was much, much more important. So where was 'here'?
My mind raced, searching for the faces of my party. I could feel their presence like ghosts at the edge of my vision—the scent of medicinal herbs and a laugh that always preceded a reprimand about my lack of self-preservation, a warrior's grim silence that never created tension—but their names were gone. Blank spots where identity used to be.
I tried to dig through my memories, to recall anything I had experienced similar, but it seemed that roughly 80% of my memories were just missing, whether they were in fragments or were completely blotted out, they were gone.
A complete darkness... a loss of memories...
Was this a shadow maze?
If it was, I was suddenly operating under a few strict rules.
Firstly, do not turn back. To look behind me was to acknowledge the past, and in this maze, the past is a sinkhole. If I turned, the path would vanish, and I would be left in the void.
Secondly, my memories were not mine to keep. Every second I spent in this void, the dark eroded another fragment. If I hit zero, and I lose all of my memories, I would become a wandering spirit—I would be hollowed out. A drifting, mindless spirit in an infinite dark.
Thirdly, hope is the compass. If I let the coldness of this place convince me that there was no way out, then there would be no way out. The maze doesn't solely contain my body. It responds to my soul. If I surrendered, the maze would become my eternal tomb, and I would be cursed to wander the darkness forever.
I took a step forward into the nothingness, my heart hammering against my ribs. I had to find a thread. I had to find a moment worth holding onto, something strong enough to anchor me, or I would vanish before I ever saw the light of day again.
This hadn't been my first shadow maze. The highest ranking Demonic Generals were able to cast these, although in a fight with multiple people they would be a liability; both the caster and the victim were completely paralysed during the duration of the ability.
I took my first knowing step forward.
Almost instantly, voices of my past began to whisper into my ear.
Some whispered songs, others beckoned me to turn around and return to them, paired with a warm, familiar hand placed on my shoulder. A few cried at me walking away from them, the people I had abandoned in my last life, the people I wanted to have seen just once more.
The worst were the sorrowed voices, the ones that reminded me of a promise I couldn't keep. Of the failures I had suffered.
They hurt. They always did. But I had to keep moving.
I resolved myself once more, and continued stepping forward.
I reached for my waist, hoping to encounter any type of weapon there, but unsurprisingly there was not.
My hand met only the thin, coarse fabric of my tunic—or whatever I was wearing. The absence of my blade felt like an amputation. It wasn't just the lack of steel; it was the lack of the confidence that always hummed in my veins when I was armed. Without it, I felt exposed, not just to the shadows, but to the suffocating vulnerability that this place seemed designed to cultivate. I shivered, the cold finally biting deep enough to rattle my teeth, a sensation that felt foreign and unbidden in this unnatural void.
That was unusual... I never took Astrum off of my person. Assassination attempts, albeit usually quite pathetic, were frequent.
The ground felt like a deep mud, almost like smooth quicksand as it threatened to swallow me whole.
I dragged my foot from knee deep time and time again, until my hip flexors burnt. Even worse than that was the quadriceps—
The quadriceps? Why did I pause at that?
Yes, until my quadriceps burnt from the extreme tension I was placing them under.
The agony that burst forth from my quadriceps was almost paralysing.
Each pull against the suction felt like dragging lead through sludge.
The effort demanded more than just brute strength; it demanded a rhythmic, almost meditative focus. I had to keep the exertion steady, fighting the temptation to panic as the black mire seemed to actively hunger for my lower half, pulling with a relentless, liquid gravity.
My lungs began to sting, the air here being nothing more than a thin, freezing mist that provided no real relief, yet I forced myself to count every agonizing inch gained.
I spent what felt like hours repeating the tiring sequence of walking forward, taking no more than three steps, then being overwhelmed by the lactic acid that would start to pool in my muscles. Then I would pause for only a few seconds to let my legs cool, and repeat that. Over, and over, and over again.
How long have I been here for?
Actually, no, it was pointless to ask. Your sense of time is one of the first things that disappear when you are dragged into the depths, so me asking about time was a waste of effort I could be using to walk.
The voices had gotten quieter by now, almost silent.
The silence was shattered, not by a scream, but by a sound so impossibly familiar it felt like a hook sinking into my gut.
A laugh rang out.
It was sharp, melodic, and carried the specific, playful cadence of someone who had just won a bet they weren't supposed to. My breath hitched. I knew that sound.
I had heard it echoed across countless campfires and echoed against the stone walls of a dozen fortresses.
It was a sound that belonged to a person who stood at my right hand, someone whose presence usually meant that my own recklessness had been successfully mitigated.
My neck moved before my conscious mind gave the order.
The muscles in my shoulders coiled, a primal instinct overriding my intent, pulling my chin toward my left shoulder. The void reacted instantly.
The moment the shift in my posture began, the heavy, viscous air around me hardened. It ceased to be mud and became concrete, pinning my legs with a sudden, violent finality.
Black tendrils erupted from the periphery of my vision, lashing out like hungry vipers. The dark wasn't going to simply settle at my location; it wanted my history, my essence, what made up who I am.
The darkness began to peel away at the back of my skull, a stinging, freezing sensation that felt like needles dragging through my grey matter.
I could feel the name—the name that belonged to that laugh—teetering on the edge of my consciousness, a beautiful, golden thing that the shadow was currently dissolving into grey ash.
"Look," the voice whispered, closer now, right against the shell of my ear. "Just one look. You left so much behind, Aren. Don't you want to continue our journey?"
The temptation was a physical hook in my sternum, tugging me backward. The world behind me started to shimmer. In my mind's eye, I saw the warmth of a tavern, the clink of mugs, the familiar grin of people I had trusted with my life. If I turned, if I just completed the rotation of my neck, I could step back into that memory. I could abandon this struggle. I could stop the burning in my quads and the agony of the exhaustion.
The void surged, a massive wave of absolute nothingness cresting over my back. It was ready to swallow me whole, eager to claim the vacancy where my memories used to be. My vision blurred at the edges, the darkness encroaching, turning the world into a tunnel.
My chin hit the limit of my shoulder's rotation.
No.
The thought was a jagged shard of ice in my chest. If I saw their face—if I confirmed they were there—I would never leave. The maze would solidify into a perfect, eternal lie.
I slammed my focus onto the sensation of the mud-like texture beneath my feet. I forced my neck muscles to lock, fighting the sheer kinetic momentum of my own turning head. I grit my teeth, the sound of grinding bone ringing in my ears, and shoved my chin forward, forcing my gaze back to the front.
The pressure shattered.
The black tendrils recoiled, hissing as they retreated into the dark, and the crushing weight on my legs eased back into the sluggish pull of the mire. I stumbled, gasping, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I kept my eyes fixed on the empty, oppressive nothingness ahead, refusing to let them drift even an inch to the side.
I was shaking. Cold sweat slicked my skin. Behind me, the laughter didn't return, but the silence that followed felt even sharper, like a blade held at the base of my spine. I took a step. Then another.
I was still here. I was still walking. For however much longer I needed to.
The Demon King wasn't going to wait for me forever, and my group was going to get chaotically impatient.
The mire grew thin. The oppressive, liquid gravity that had been clawing at my shins began to recede, replaced by a firm, cold hardness beneath my boots. It felt like walking onto glass—smooth, unforgiving, and utterly devoid of friction. My breathing, which had been a ragged, desperate rasp for eons, finally began to stabilize into something approaching a steady cadence. The burning in my quadriceps dampened into a dull, thrumming ache, a constant reminder of the price I had paid to keep moving.
I looked forward. The horizon of this void had always been a uniform, sightless black, but as I continued to push, the darkness began to shift. It was not changing colour, but rather, its density was fraying.
A pinpoint of light appeared in the far distance.
It was not the warm, golden glow of a hearth or the harsh, clinical light of a sun. It was cold. It was jagged. It flickered like a dying candle struggling against a gale. My pulse spiked, not with fear, but with a sudden, overwhelming sense of vertigo. I stumbled, my balance faltering as the sensation of motion started to feel abstract. Was I walking? Or was I being pulled toward that spark like a moth to a flame?
I forced my feet to continue, my focus sharpening on that distant glimmer. As I closed the distance, the light began to bleed outward, staining the surrounding void with faint, spectral colours. It was as if someone were slowly peeling away a layer of black paint to reveal a painting hidden beneath.
Shapes began to resolve within the light. Nothing was solid yet; it was all refraction and hazy edges, like looking through a rain-slicked window at night.
I saw the suggestion of a horizon, jagged and torn. A skyline. It was dark, punctuated by vertical slivers of orange that might have been towers, or perhaps the ruins of a city being devoured by flames. There was a sense of massive, kinetic scale—an ongoing violence that felt frozen in time.
My heart stalled in my chest.
That blade. I saw the silhouette of it. It was held in a hand that I knew as well as my own, though the fingers were blurred by the static of the maze. The blade was raised, capturing a flicker of that dying light, a singular point of silver against a sea of ash. There was movement—a swing, a clash, the phantom resonance of metal biting into armour.
It was a memory. Not a vague, dissolving shadow, but a core piece of my own history, clawing its way back to the surface. It was the smell of ozone, the visceral taste of blood, and the crushing, singular purpose of a battle I had won.
My hand instinctively reached out toward the flickering image, my fingers trembling as if I could actually touch the steel, as if I could jump through the light and rejoin the fight. I didn't care about the rules of the maze anymore. I didn't care about the erosion. I just wanted to be back in the centre of that violence, where everything was clear, where my purpose was absolute, and where the world hadn't yet been stripped away to darkness.
The light flared, turning white, blinding, and absolute.
And unlike before, this time, I willingly stepped into it.