The path was no longer there. Two didn’t think about it.

Instead, she closed her eyes and sampled the paths.

To the left was spice, fetid waters and burning things. Every texture of anger visited her and battled for attention. The bitter taste of hate held it together. It was wrath.

She glanced and saw a copy of herself. The back of their burgundy cloak was silhouetted by the light of roaring fires and shouldering corpses. She skipped through the street. Splashes of red exploded like she was playing in the rain.

She couldn’t look away. It wasn’t the violence that caught her gaze. Nor the char beneath the scent of wrath. It was her reflection. She kicked her bare feet in the red waters. Jumped and hopped over and on the fallen forms as she retreads into the distance. She swayed with the flames. She hummed and the cracking wood and groaning structures joined her in chorus.

Unshackled and unrestrained she played. If she turned around what expression would two find?

The end of all she knew should terrify her, so why did it taste like freedom She tore her gaze to the right path, lest her racing heart lead her stray.

Ruined trash-filled streets and tall buildings consumed her vision. Rotting food caked a floor decorated with purulent fungus and weeping mushrooms. Rats, maggots and other vermin churned the mess. Turning the putrid mass into an writhing mat and deprivation borne of spoiled excess.

White light shone from above. Painting it in clear relief. It was one of the wort things she’d ever seen. Rousing such digest that detached curiosity took the place of nausea.

Her gaze trailed up the light above. se looked up and up and up. Until she leaned back and her neck craned painfully. A single point of light shone down on her. Offering its dregs to illuminate the trash and filth she wallowed in.

She couldn’t see its source, nor taste it, but she knew what it was. A bright world sat kilometres above. A kinder world but it didn’t want her.

She’d have to drag herself up there.

She stepped forward, it squelched. Her head snapped down as she jumped back. She was in the crossroad. Her feet were dry though a phantom wetness clung to them. A single maggot writhed in front of her.

A single step. She centred herself on the here and now. The paths represent emotions. She let that want grab. She was lucky nothing worse happened. She didn’t want to learn metaphorical rat bites gave very real diseases

She shook her head to dislodge the lingering sensations. She needs to find loneliness and leave. Or perhaps she could select the freedom hidden in wrath.

She turned to the final path she would decide after seeing what it offered.

She found herself in the middle of a still lake. There was no shift or pull. Simply a change from one moment to the next. Before she glanced into a dark alley. Now she was on an isle amidst nothing. A dim light in a dark world.

Water lapped the grey stones nuts he could see the waves. The water drank all of her meagre light. She spun her eyes tracing every spec of land and the vast empty expanse. Her scrapping steps and stifled breaths were the only sound

The more she looked the more it felt like something was stirring beneath the unseen waves. Something familiar.

Two needed an anchor, some token of the essence she was to bring to her heart. This thing felt perfect. Like the encapsulation of every lonely moment, stacked and distilled into. Yet the thought of taking it never crossed her mind.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It was ocean to her puddle, Something she was but was not ready to face. She could survive a part but truths was indivisible.

She shut her eyes and focused.

This labyrinth was off her, it was her. Bits and pieces of thought turned outward others twisted inside themselves. Until the spirits made a place of her.

She could breathe, She could raise her hand. So too could she warp the Labyrinth.

She pulled the cross roads to her mind’s fore. She conjured the feeling, the smell. The texture of the place and the places that stemmed from it.

It wouldn’t be enough, without reference or prior experience. She knew it wouldn’t be.

The looming truth neared. She didn’t know what would happen when it reached her. Would it drown her. Smother every other feeling like the taint desired. She didn’t know and refused to find out.

Sh conjured another image. She drew on the looming things approach. Collected every moment borne of isolation where idle thoughts turned to dark places.

The water rose in response, soaked her feet. Then kept crawling up. It rose above her head. She was in the water, with it.

She held her breath and pulled on the vapid cold around her. She defined here. Her first image spoke of where she wanted to be.

It neared. Heralded not by raging currents, but by the weight and pressure of the depths.

She stepped back onto the ground she willed to be. She found solid stones, her eyes opened. She gasped.

She was back in the crossroads. A path of stone sank into black water. A small distant sat a splotch of grey against perfect black.

She stared down, unwilling to tempt fate anymore.

A small stream of black mildly warm water escaped her clothes and soaked hair. Questing for the lake in rivulets and tributaries through cracks in the rocks.

She shut her eyes and rubbed her throbbing temple. She sat on the floor. Maybe she should take this slower. The Labyrinth wouldn’t get pissy because she took the time to savour its work.

***

Two stood soon after she convinced her heart to stop racing. Nothing had happened in the interim. Maybe a few cobbles had wandered out of place. One of the castles hung on a different part of the starless sky. Everything was fine and; she suspected they stay that way if she stayed in the crossroads.

She wondered how many had done that. Stayed idle till the countless little changes cascaded into complete unfamiliarity. Losing themselves in themselves.

She shook off the thought. What she did know was loneliness was a bust unless she wanted a practical introduction to insanity. A practical sort of insanity perhaps, but not one she wanted to see.

She turned to the spiced path. She saw herself again. The of her blood-soaked reflection was turned to her. She walked to their side.

She cemented her choice as the buildings shouldered around her.

Essence could be refined. Loss split from sadness. Pain and fear divorced from anger. Rhevier had explained the process and her inability to do so due to her ‘lacking skill and temperament’. He’d conceded that the Labyrinth made it possible.

Here will and metaphor weighed more than skill and comprehension.

She could pluck that spark of liberation and relief from the wrath that cloaked it.

She caught up with her burgundy-clad reflection. They hummed cheerily and danced through the black husks of imaginary people with ease.

Flames spilt upwards from piles of track and ramshackle buildings. An ever-shifting forest of twisting flame, capped by a billowing canopy of sparks. The world burned but though its heat stifled it did not burn.

Heat dried the remnant of moisture that still stained her clothes.

She could feel it. The revolt in the flames and the burgundy girl. Thoughts of purification escaped her. The essence she desired lived in every spark and scorched body and most of all in the girl. Where would she even begin?

“Are you just gonna stand there?” her voice filled with snark halted her thoughts.

The girl had stopped dancing and faced her. Their amber eyes burned with inner light. The girl lowered her hood. Her face was picture Two half recalled. Their black hair was tied into locks and bundled with a long frizzy tail that swung as it was freed.

The way it had been when she’d fled from Daisy’s gang.

“Are you deaf or are you Ignoring me.” They snapped their fingers in front of Two’s face.

She leaned back uncertain what tone to take she settled for flat. “I don’t think I was ever that rude.”

The girl glared with a broad grin. She wasn’t sure what that meant. “ I didn’t because I didn’t have a spine”

The girl puffed her nonexistent chest. Was this the truest actualization of her anger and burning desire for freedom? Was the spirit taking the piss?

“Stop that!” the surrounding flames swelled with her exclamation.

Two sighed, “I’m not doing anything.”

Their eye narrowed into slits. “Your thinking ill of me,”

Two didn’t sigh she’d ruin her voice by the conversation otherwise. Instead she leveled herself with her most disappointed stare. “I am,”

Her alter turned the most interesting shade of deep purple and threw her hands into the air. “Fuck you!”

Two suspected her trial had only begun.