Maybe the raven was right. Nin had been hopping around quite a bit, and he was beginning to wonder if perhaps it was all in vain. While Nin felt that he had learned much, he wasn’t sure if he was any wiser, or any closer to his goal.

Always, it seemed, that the little truth within his heart beat without cause or justification, as if it was aware of something he himself was not.

At first Nin tried to ply himself with trite aphorisms. “It is the foolish bunny who counts his steps while chased by wolves,” or “no rabbit chases his own tail; that is for dogs to do.” And of course, his childhood favourite: “there are two types of rabbits: those who hop, and those who think about hopping.”

But these days aphorisms seemed less and less valuable to him. He wanted something concrete, with depth. He wished to be able to point towards some hill or pile of merit and proclaim, “this is what I’ve accomplished, this is what I’ve gained.”

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This desire wasn’t born from vanity or the need for praise. It was for his own benefit, some meager reassurance that he, however slowly, was working himself out of the labyrinth he’d found himself in.

Although, he knew, on some level, that this desire for reassurance—to know that he wasn’t wasting his time trying to escape the labyrinth—was also part of the labyrinth’s trap.

Nin tired to comfort himself with the knowledge that, at the very least, he was aware that he was in a labyrinth. But then he realized this was folly as well; surely a lay rabbit, with their ordinary rabbit nature, could stumble blindly across the exit just as easily as he, and probably with a lot less mental anguish, too.

The more Nin thought about it, the worse things seemed. For is it not true, when navigating a maze, that one can never be sure they are near the end until they turn a corner and suddenly see the exit before them?