The moment Lilliana’s haunting whispers faded into the bck, Kerris ran. Not out of cowardice, and certainly not out of some st sliver of hope—but out of primal, shuddering terror. Her limbs were numb with shock, her heart hollow, thudding only to keep the trauma alive. The bck stitch etched between her shoulder bdes pulsed softly, like a heartbeat not her own. She dared not investigate further.

  The silence of the byrinth was not empty—it watched. Though no creature lunged, though no jaws snapped or cws raked, the undead loomed in the shadows, sck-jawed and swayed gently like mourners at a funeral procession. They stood in alcoves, nestled in walls like statues, watching her with hollow sockets, skulls half-crumbled, still moist from the kills she’d just fled. Death blossoms cackled, cooed, and moaned as they watched her, their petaled arms jeering as they traced her path.

  She ran until her legs burned and the stone beneath her feet vanished into a blur of cold texture. Then, she stumbled, colpsing to her knees, bile rising in her throat. The vomit that followed was violent as her stomach continued to turn.

  No torch. No light. Only the dark; it was alive and full of horrors.

  Death blossoms seemed to be all around her, their many faces crying, howling, ughing… and every so often, whispering her name. “Kerris,” they would moan, “don’t leave us here.”

  Her fingers trembled as they grazed the floor, slick in pces she couldn’t see. Blood, maybe. Maybe water. Or worse. She cwed forward on instinct, a quiet sob escaping her lips.

  Something whispered.

  She snapped her head around—nothing. The echo mocked her, reverberating off the tight stone walls of the byrinth. Sometimes, the architecture seemed to shift: a corridor that bent where it hadn’t before, a wall that seemed to breathe with mold and memory. She remembered stories of the maze shifting when watched—but this pce didn’t just shift, it moved full sections entirely.

  For what seemed like days, Kerris crawled her way across the dark, wet passageways. Fear and exhaustion coalescing into a single animalistic need to escape.

  Kerris wasn’t sure if it was real, but she began to see flowers.

  Small ones—bck blossoms with curling petals, weeping crimson dew. She stepped around them at first, then through them, not even caring when they burst into clouds of rot beneath her soles. The air thickened as time seemed to fold around it. Once, she screamed, hoping for someone—anyone—to hear her, desperate to be saved from this nightmare. The sound died inches from her mouth, muffled as if the air itself had hands pressed against her face.

  The silence was crushing. Her screams went unheeded, her pleadings drowned, and her tears fell until they could fall no longer. There was no life here, only death in silence.

  A child’s giggle rippled behind her.

  She turned so fast she nearly fell over again—but there was no child. Only a figure in the distance.

  Tall. Hunched. Dragging something.

  She pressed herself to the wall and slid silently to the floor, too afraid to breathe. The figure passed, giggling without turning, trailing behind it a corpse—maybe one of her companions, maybe something else entirely. Every corpse she’d passed looked familiar now, her companion’s faces repeating over and over in grim expressions. She clutched her head, whispering “no” to herself over and over, too low for the gods to hear.

  Then the chanting began. Low. Ritualistic. Repeating in a nguage she didn’t know but the purpose was unmistakable. It was a call to death; a lulby for madness granted them by their murderous queen.

  She ran again.

  Hallway after hallway. Turning. Descending. Climbing. Time lost meaning. Her skin numbed to the cold, her eyes blurred. At one point, she found a dirty bde. Her own? Someone else’s? She clutched it anyway. Her fingers cramped around the hilt as if it were the only anchor to sanity she had left.

  Kerris began counting her breaths—one, two, three, five, she’d skip numbers when the stitch pulsed too hard. She felt it spreading, not across her body…across her mind. A darkness she couldn’t see but felt—like someone else’s shadow had tched onto her and refused to let go.

  Eventually, she stopped.

  At the end of a long corridor stood a door—wooden, cracked, and ancient. A false hope, maybe. Or salvation.

  She pushed it open.

  And for the first time in what felt like years, she felt air. Cold. Wet. Empty. No more undead watched her. No more creatures danced just out of reach. No more giggles. No more steps.

  Only her, a distant moonlight spilling through swaying trees, and silence. Real, natural silence.

  She fell to her knees and screamed. This time, her voice reached the sky.