Ember was back to the stony alleyway and started carefully making her way to the end. She expected something as this was supposed to be a labyrinth, but she could see no fork left or right. So it had to be another kind of labyrinth.

Then, she saw a pitfall, effortlessly jumped over it, and remembered she was warned about those, and kept advancing at an even slower pace. But Ember barely made ten meters after the pitfall when a stone gave way under her paw, activating a pressure plate, and she got impaled by a stick coming from nowhere. The pain was atrocious, but she did not die immediately, inadvertently triggering a second trap, and slowly died pathetically on the floor from the sheer blood loss.

Only to get back to the yellow portal as if nothing happened.

You died in a trap. Your reward at the end of the labyrinth had been increased. Better luck next time.

That was it? She failed and get rewarded for it? Talk about a labyrinth of greed. It wanted her to die and die again, trying to reach its end. But it could not be all there was to it. The challenge was supposed to be near unbeatable, and a labyrinth testing her greed and perseverance was too easy.

She could see how finding her way through the trap could be a valid interpretation of finding her way through a labyrinth. But it felt wrong. And honestly, if it was a test of perseverance, she felt like she would rather fail it than feel that much pain ever again.

And so Ember decided to give it a thought before she gave it up: The first trap and been easy as the pitfall had been far too noticeable. But for the second and the third one, she did not see them coming. She did not even know what the third trap trigger had been. Only that she heard the click of the mechanism before she got impaled a second time. Ember could not help but shiver at the memory.

She had been warned of unsolvable puzzles, unwinnable fights, and unseen traps. So she knew already what this test was about.

In the end, Ember decided to give it another go and effortlessly ran and jumped over the pitfall before she stopped and moved at a slower pace.

She was about to avoid the first trap pressure plate when an idea popped into her mind, and she stopped, staring at the alleyway. Even knowing it was there, she could not see the mechanism that spelled her end. Not any other traps at any point in the alleyway. Only the first one had been obvious and easily avoided... too easily avoided. If this test was all about unseen traps, then it wasn't a trap.

It was a fork on a path down!

She had to test her theory. Maybe she was wrong, and she would miserably fall to her death... But she had to try because she did not like the alternative any better.

And so she jumped down the pitfall.

And was met with a slippery slop of smooth ice that kept leading her down in the dark for a few seconds. Then she reached the end of the ice tunnel and was met with another stone corridor, in all way similar to the first alleyway, except this time, she was seeing a branching path less than ten meters away.

She walked prudently down the corridor but activated no trap until she reached the fork and somehow activated a flurry of swing blades on the right path. She almost instinctively moved to the left path, which was all clear before she changed her mind.

Again, she could see those swinging blades just fine, and their path was nothing but predictable. Therefore, it wasn't a trap, not really. It was an effective deterrent, but again, now that she thought it better. She had just right enough space to crawl under the blades a make it unscathed on the other side and move further on the right so she could not see its end. In contrast, the left path was all too straight and clear and was probably the real trap.

So she chose to crawl under the swinging blades, which frightening grazed at the fur on her back a few times but did her no harm whatsoever. On the other side, where the corridor was curving on the right, waited yet another danger. On her left, a rope over the void led to the other side of the rift. And on the right were some stairs lacking illumination and leading somewhere downstairs.

The obvious danger was the rope. So, of course, it had to be the right way, right?

The only issue was: dogs were no acrobats, and she could not see how the hell she could do it.

Dogs' teeth were goods for playing tug of war, and she was confident she could hold on to that rope for hours. But she did not have a second set of jaws to keep moving on the rope. Walking on it was also impossible unless there was an invisible floor down that rope. And the gap between the two sides was too deep for her to jump.

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

So against her best judgment, she decided to try her luck with the stairs instead and walked her way down. Which surprisingly did not lead to her death but a brightly lighted rounded stone room with four branching paths. If the path down the stairs had been a trap, then all the branching paths had to be traps too. But she took the risk anyway and came closer to have a good look at each of them.

They were all nearly identical with a branching path ten meters in, except for one thing: the illumination of each alleyway was different, from the more poorly lit on the left to the brightly lit on the right. Supposing that all of them were traps and trying to prove her conclusion before going back to the rope path, she decided to walk into the path that was the most likely to be an actual trap: The brightly lit path which was screaming at her that it had to be a trap since it looked like one.

But again, nothing happened, and she found herself at a fork that activated a mechanism on both sides this time. One was a series of spears that rhythmically came out from the ceiling and down the floor, while the second was doing the same but from the right to the left.

And so she kept staring at the two new corridors. She had no idea how to beat the left corridor as the spears were falling down faster than she could run. While for the right passage, she could see an obvious way, up the spears, which were not wholly retracting into the wall and might allow her to walk on it. The only issue with that one was that she could see a clear picture of herself losing balance as the spear retracted, leading her to fall to her death.

But between certain death and potential death, she chose probable death before she could change her mind. And indeed, the spear motion was retracting too fast as she was walking on it, trying to make her fall. But she also realized she could quickly compensate and jump from one spear to another until she made it to the other side almost unscathed.

She had put a paw on one blade accidentally and almost fell to her death but was lucky enough to recover in time and make it through the pain and fear right to the other side. And at this point, she did not know if the labyrinth had any logic. At first, she thought the obvious trap was the way forward, but now she was unsure. It had worked for the first two but not for the other two afterward.

She had basically proven that her first hypothesis had been off, even if she did not know why. But then, at the end of this fork was no other fork and just dark stairs leading down once again. She was starting to see a second pattern here as each choice she had made so far had somewhat led her down and right, figuratively and literally, as she realized she had not taken a left fork once.

She took the stair down and was led yet to another brightly lit room with the doors this time. The left door was black, with a white arrow going up. The middle door was yellow and had bright black smiley painted on it. The right door was red, with a yellow arrow going down.

This one was a tricky one. The black door was menacing, and the arrow going up was defying all the choices she made so far. The middle door had the color of the challenge, and the smiley was inviting her to open it. While the right red door had its yellow arrow pointing down was confirming every choice she had made so far.

And finally, the doors had no handle, but she felt she would not need one, and only have to make her pick a door.

Each of those could be a trap. The right door was the most obvious one, confirming her bias. The middle door was also another potential trap cause the smiling black face on the door was promising everything would be okay if she opened that one. And the left door could be a trap just because it went against everything she had gone through so far.

Black door, yellow door, red door.

She decided to eliminate the black door first.

So far, the trap that did not kill her always had been obvious ones. It had been her rule number one. Nothing is as scary as unseen traps. As not all the obvious traps had been deadly, and choosing the least lethal-looking had so far kept her alive. That had been her rule number two. She had just realized she had spent her time going right and down, but that had never been part of her decision-making.

Both the yellow door and the red door had yellow on them. It was like a signal telling her, "Hey! Don't give up! You are on the right track!"

But which one was the least deadly according to rule number two?

The yellow door could lead to a false promise, but there was no obvious sign on the door that it was the case.

The red door with its yellow arrow could be a false promise, too, but there was an obvious sign that it was a trap. First, Ember only saw red only once before, and it had been her own blood when she "died." Merida explained to her why she could not see that color back then and repurposed it to help her see magic.

But in that dream, that labyrinth, red, obviously had another meaning. And so far, that meaning had been linked to that red portal and the bloody battle that awaited her there. Red was the color of blood.

She did not know what black was the color for, but she wasn't keen to discover it.

And so she chose the least frightening of the potential trap and went to the yellow door, which opened right for her, revealing a big empty white room with two lonely golden coins on the floor. Ember got closer, curious. The coins have a smiley on them. Could it possibly count as a treasure? She did not know. But she had no use for those coins, and the system notification did not ask her to retrieve the treasure, only to find it.

The question was: if she did find the answer to that labyrinth, how was she supposed to leave it?

You reach the end of the labyrinth and choose to leave the treasure untouched.

You passed the test of greed!

Then, a yellow portal appeared at the exact opposite end of the room.

'Wait! What? The treasure was also a trap?' Ember exclaimed.

She was glad she had no use for it and did not try to take it.

Then something hit her.

'The labyrinth said it increased the reward that time I died. Is that why there were only two coins? Because I died only once?'

But the labyrinth did not respond.

'I guess I got lucky with that one' She shrugged it off before leaving through the portal.