It had taken me some time but I managed to reach the end of the rope. Or at least followed it as far as it would go, as the rope went into a small hole in the wall at the end of a dead end corridor. My time was not wasted however as the wall that held the hole into which the rope disappeared was part of a room. It was chiseled out of the stone in finer detail than the rest of the tunnels of the maze were, the amount of detail and art carved into the stone shocked me. Some of it even looked recent although I couldn’t be sure, I knew nothing about that sort of thing. My focus was quickly redirected to the far corner of the room where a small wooden desk sat with a lantern left burning atop it. The light from the lantern was what drew my attention but the small stack of loose written notes and an open leather bound notebook gained my interest the second I saw them.
The same elegant script ran across all the loose papers and filled half of the notebook right up to the last page that it had been left open on. I flipped to the front page of the notebook and took note of the date, the first page was marked simply “June First” while the next held the full date of “June Fifth, 1762”. With speculations and theories as to what this room was for I turned back and read the first page.
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The odd discovery of what was apparently a young man’s journal of his love life brought several thoughts to my mind. One thought being that no self-respecting man would keep a journal, not that I knew how men were back in the seventeen hundreds. More seriously though, what was it doing in a place like this? If it was here he probably had been as well, and with the lantern lit it may have been recently. If this Jonas had been alive in 1762 and was still alive today he certainly wasn’t human, at least not anymore. Burdened with more questions I turned the page.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
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The more I read the more annoyingly familiar it became to me. This was my story, told from the perspective of a young man that had already suffered through to the end, long before mine had even begun. I was only a few pages in, and I could already feel what every page to a certain point would contain. Lies and hints of truth. Questions and answers that would only leave him wondering. Taunting the promise of reality in front of a screen of fiction. Only he had been past that, the written pages continued farther than I knew. He had given me an advantage.
“Thank you, Jonas.” My whisper echoed off the carved walls and grew louder as they bounced back down the tunnel I’d come from. “I owe you one.”