To jump or not.

A simple yet vital question almost drowned out by the clamor of careless strangers. A commingling of voices like purgatory songs or laughter of hell’s mocking devils. All these reached Cordelia like fans to her faltering flame.

These are but noises, Cordelia told herself, and was half-convinced by it. After all, her inner turmoil was noise enough. Even now at this point of no return, many clashing arguments still vied to make their protests heard. Voices that crawled from her brain’s every quarter in choruses of appeals to reasons, whines of fear and despair, and the loudest over them all the cackles of a mind that had long borne itself over the edge. They debated a simple question, even as her feet were growing numb on the ledge.

To jump or not.

The wind up there was cold, chilling even. They pressed the fabric of her clothes tight to her body. Which was gross: soaked in her vomit and someone’s spit. The substance had clung to her hair also, but long had the wind swept it away. In the falling dusk, her dark, dry, and tangled tresses streamed like the tattered standard to some lost cause.

Cordelia blinked, shielding her eyes from the flashlight. 

They didn’t even have the decency to turn off the flash of their phones’ cameras. But after all, it was getting dark, and there was something to be said for wanting clear, unflattering pictures of that crazy girl on the school’s rooftop. 

Already so numbed, she could scarce notice or take to anger. Numbed as she was by the wind, the cold and many things besides. And it kept her from intense emotions. Even though no one would take her seriously even now. Even though some of the girls and the boys had begun to call for a bet. That was going too far, perhaps, even for a bunch of cruel teenagers. But the truth is, they simply never believed she would jump.

She was only a naive girl, who thought by the threat of suicide those bullies would never bother her again.

No way.

The thought almost goaded her into action, into the final leap. As if such trite as bullies could have drawn her to such a course. As though these marks upon her face, three long deep gashes of self-inflicted facial scars - had not been scored by her own hand for the very purpose of being scorned by the living.

Nay, they couldn’t even begin to imagine the reason.

But in the last moment, her body flinched. Not yet. The last signal was yet to come. And for which she had been waiting, she could not be hasty now.

And with the thought of this signal, some memory bright, exceedingly warm and nostalgic crossed her mind. Its brilliance almost blinded her. It was like the flash of a life by a dying person’s eyes. Except she wasn’t dying just yet. She had only reached the threshold of last regrets. And this memory, this anticipation, it sustained her in the moment for a brief respite from darkness, a waking dream of summer days long, long ago when life had yet to plunge into the gutter, the face of a girl she could not quite recall, a warmth, a voice, a touch...

That was like a world away now. A different life altogether. Nothing to her but some inherited memory. Some vestige of a dream. She was not the person of that time anymore. She had fallen. And probably neither was that person the same now.

Even as Cordelia dwelled in these thoughts, it came at last: the last signal. The horizon took on a burning hue, marking the end of day. 

Sunset.

It was silly and, to be frank, hopelessly romantic, to delay one’s death for dusk. Foolish to pretend this ending of a miserable day was the same as these hopeful sunrises the two of them had shared once upon a time. And perhaps, since long ago, that girl had stopped admiring the dawn in that innocent and almost childish manner. But it mattered none, at this time of the day when the sun meets the earth, Cordelia could pretend that neither of them had changed, that life had not veered down such a dark path since. And all that once were shall be immortalized in her soul even as that burning celestial being in heavens. She could pretend the failing light stinging her eyes right now was instead a bright and incredibly warm dawn. One which had come after a long, long night.

But then the last sunray sank past the jagged line of urban buildings. And all that was left did not matter. And she had seen her last dusk.

Inhaling deeply, Cordelia ventured a look at the ground. The ground that lay far below, thronged with concerned, angry faces.

How loud they were for such tiny people. Their noises dizzied her. The vertigo twisted her stomach in such a way that almost compelled her backward.

Live. Live. Live. Live.

A voice pestered her from within. All else went blank.

How annoying. She said.

And jumped.

Cordila awakened to the sounds of someone weeping. The fogginess in her mind told of the passing of an unguessed span of hours or years during her slumber. Her first expression, a slight and ironic smile, betrayed some foolish gladness. To think that her death would still be mourned by someone, that the lack of her could still deprive someone in this bleak world of joy. Then she thought the better of it. She was not dead yet, apparently. For she could hear, and could think, and so it stood to reason that she must be existing still. 

As her consciousness grew lucid, the noisy lamenting became all the more vivid, echoing loudly from every direction, piercing her eardrums. Someone who wasn’t her must have just died nearby. And someone who wasn’t her relative was grieving for it. Lucky them.

She opened her eyes and saw an encompassing grayness not all that much livelier than the back of her eyelids. With great exertion, she willed her weary body up and began to grope about. Stiff as it was, her body felt not the slightest ache. She must have been asleep for a very long time to have recovered so perfectly from the fall. 

There was ample space to move about in the room, but little to see once her eyes had adapted to the dark. The walls were gray, the floor the color of dust, the slab she had been lying on impossible to make out from the rest of the room. Even a morgue could not be so unfurnished. And the light, if it could be called one, suffused so evenly that she saw no shadows. Not even her own. 

And it was cold, so cold.

After a moment, Cordelia became galled by the annoying and constant weeping. She rose, her bare feet cushioned by the thick dust, a gown of unknown material clung to her body. The doorway was only a rectangular affair in the wall. No panel there was to separate the monotony within from without.

Outside the room, the same monotonous gray stretched on to infinity, flanked on both sides by walls and, at intervals, rectangular doorways. And these rooms along this endless corridor she could already guess to be as featureless as the one she was just in.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

She shook her head, attempting to banish the nagging suspicions of the nature of the place. As someone who until now had been barren of purpose, she was suddenly determined to find out the source of the wailing, and maybe then to tell the person to shut the hell up.

Another curious thing. Once sleepiness had passed, her mind was clear and free from fogginess the way it had not been since her mother’s death. Since the day her uncle had taken her in. The thick fog which had taken form that day and never dissipated was not to be found now. 

How queer. She shuddered. It was as though she had become another person altogether.

Or could it be that she had simply returned to how she had once been before the fog?

Nope. Cordelia resumed her even steps. That was stupid. That was wishful thinking. People don’t revert to their previous selves. Scars do not heal. She should have known better than to entertain such thoughts. This was but a respite, a brief rest before these dark emotions and their cause would make themselves heard again. 

In the end, and in the first place, she just wanted some peace.

And yet she feared even to touch her face, afraid that the scars were not there anymore.

One, two, three,... she counted the rooms as she went and searched. 

It was almost by accident that she stumbled upon the weeping person. On the far side of a room just like any other, a woman was sitting with her back turned to the doorway. A gray shawl near camouflaged her from head to toe; her shoulders throbbed to the endless sobbing.

With a silent breath of relief, Cordelia approached the strange woman, unsure whether to admonish her for the jarring noises or to offer a word of comfort.

For all her wariness, she stooped to sway the lean shoulder, and near stumbled forward. The woman was light, too light, as though she had no weight, no mass. And the shawl gave in to Cordelia’s softest touch. The whole thing fell away. And she found that it was all shawl -- sheer fabric -- nothing else beneath, no woman, nothing. Only air.

Even as she stood there, dumbly clutching the ownerless shawl in hand, the wailing did not go away along with the presence, but instead hiked to a deafening degree. The carpet of dust reverberated to the roars of lamenting or mocking grief. Her senses could no more place a direction for the source of this sound, for it seemed to come from all sides all at once. Mystified, Cordelia threw the shawl as though it was a cursed thing. She stumbled out of the room, and down the corridor fled in staggered steps. Her soul was instinctively affrighted. It was much too late to fear death now, but whatever out there seemed to promise more than a simple end to her being. A primal terror urged her feet the way mere survival instinct could not. And she kept her line of sight straight, too afraid to glance even once at the doorways along the way, lest the appearance of some horror froze her with fear.

It was a female voice, no mistake, but one disembodied, chasing at her heels.

Run. She told herself. Run. Run. And she kept on running.

But the corridor was without end. She began to realize this only after an eternity of running headlong. No end ever to this gray and drab place. She knew now, as fear and dread slowly conquered her mind. This could be no place for living things. Awareness, or the lack thereof, was creeping onto her as she ran ineptly, stumbling at every step. Her senses were in delirium, her movements sluggish as though underwater, the taste upon the tip of her tongue blank, neither bitter nor dry. It was as though she walked a dream. A dream of a long, long sleep. And she regressed into sleep though her legs kept on running.

The curtain of darkness fell suddenly. 

Blinded, Cordelia caught her feet on the uneven ground, precipitating her head on the hard floor. Her light went out.

At length she lay there, numbed and emotionless in the featureless blackness of her eyelids. And impassionately, Cordelia thought this was more like the afterlife she had expected. Infinite darkness. And all quiet.

And yet, against her wish, the fuzziness that fogged her brain began to dissipate again. In this perfect darkness, there was slowly growing a new pattern of sounds other than creepy laments. Something clearer and intelligible. Until the wailing was no more.

Come, a distinct voice blasted in her ears, hither.

This one was real, was with a direction to which it beckoned, and unlike the mindless wailing, had spoken in sane words and a commanding tone that even she could comprehend.

And so she crawled to her feet and followed it like a reanimated corpse.

You took overlong, the voice persisted conversationally even as she went, What kept you, girl? Are you so bent on refusing life? Mine is not so miserly a gift as the good gods may bestow. You need but follow the path I have laid out. Make haste!

And indeed, there blinked into existence an illuminated path ahead, framed on both sides by walls in colors other than gray: dark green and purple. The wall looked reflective, the terrain rough. And no ceiling hung overhead but a night sky glittered with strange stars. As for what lay behind -- she peered over her shoulder - only darkness.

Cordelia swallowed, then stepped further in, even steps hypnotized by beckoning words. There was only one path indeed, if with many twists and turns. No forks there were for her to pick erroneously. One path. For which she felt trapped. And yet gone were the strange dreads from before, replaced now by a keen sense of obedience, owing to a mortal and realistic fear that seemed infinitely more bearable. She felt safer, and hastened her steps.

The path led Cordelia in diminishing circles spiraling inward. Her footsteps echoed and she felt an intense gaze follow her path. As though the stars and the walls had eyes. And as she counted the turns, she recalled something she had been told long ago, back in the brighter days, by a pleasant voice filled with warmth. 

A labyrinth has no branching path, only a maze does.

So this was a labyrinth. And she was headed towards its center.

Ah! You draw near. Come; come! Let my eyes feast upon she whom I had picked for my vast ambitions!

Shuddering, Cordelia made the last turn and emerged into a spacious courtyard walled by the same purple-green material. A shape as large as a house loomed at its unlit center. The sourceless light seemed to avoid illuminating the thing specifically. And she saw only that the soft soil at its base was dented by the great mass.

The voice came echoing from there.

“Here at last! Hihihi! What a homely thing you are, servant! What weak-willed, what miserable ghost! Such a critter to be trampled upon!”

The mocking rubbed Cordelia wrongly, and she mustered some little courage to speak up. “I’m dead, aren’t I? So out with it... Are you the devil? Is this Hell?”

“Devil?” There came a giggle. Out of nowhere, Cordelia assumed that it was female, though she knew not if the speaker was even human. “Ah, I suppose, by some reckoning, my kind is comparable to the creatures conceptualized as devils by your race. But we prefer more flattering names, you see. Such as the Tribe of Danu, the Fair Folk - fairies, if you may.”

“Fairies are beautiful,” Cordelia said automatically, and was surprised by her own calm remark.

“And I am beautiful, girl, by all mortal and immortal reckoning! How unmannerly of you to suspect otherwise! Ah, well, I thought to spare you the fright till we get somewhat more acquainted, but since you insist, let us come to a face!”

A great rumble punctured the rumbling voice, and the enormous shape rose into the air.

Cordelia staggered back.

What abomination she had suspected of the unlit thing was indeed a far cry from the real terror. Look and see that her eyes did, she could not believe in the absurdity then revealed. She screamed.

The shape halted mid-air and cracked into horizontal halves. A slithering thing sprang out from within. At the same time it shook off the tangible darkness of the courtyard. And there, the pseudo-moonlight revealed a terrible serpent. Or rather, the head of which. As the body stretched down from the enormous head and ran beyond the illuminated courtyard. On and on it stretched. Cordelia realized now that the accursed serpent was itself the labyrinth, the slimy walls unfathomable flesh of a coiling body.

Then the head lowered, upon which a terrible mask of corrupting evil peered out like the gaping maw of a volcano, its eyes fiery, its might uncontestable. The forked tongue slid in and out, whose each tip could wrap a human entire.

“A-shishishi” the serpent hissed, “Joyous mortal despair! I shall never be tired of the cornered rats’ squealing! I do welcome thee to my service, servant! And do despair!”