The night the sun died, the world didn't scream. It simply… stopped.
One moment, the sky was its usual pale grey, the kind Kael had grown used to in the smog-choked city. The next, the clouds thinned, and there was nothing beyond them—no sun, no moon, no distant stars. Just a vault of black, as if the heavens had been replaced by a curtain that let no light through.
It wasn't the darkness that unsettled him. Darkness he could understand. This was something else. A darkness that pressed against the skin, seeped into the breath, and settled deep in the chest like a second heartbeat.
Kael had been scavenging along the dried riverbed when it happened. The air went heavy, sound fled, and the shadows around him began to shift—pulling away from their owners, stretching like spilled ink. He froze, eyes darting to the rusted bridge above. No one. Not a single soul in sight.
A faint, brittle sound rose from the emptiness. A whisper, too close to his ear.
"Do you want to be chosen?"
He spun, heart pounding. No one stood behind him. The only thing there was his own shadow, elongated and trembling, as though it were trying to crawl out from under his feet.
Something burned at the base of his skull. Not pain exactly, but a deep, foreign heat, like an ember pressing against bone. The whisper came again, inside his head this time:
Do you want to live?
Kael's mouth went dry. "Yes."
The answer came without thought, without hesitation.
The ember flared. His vision blurred, and for a heartbeat, the world around him dissolved—streets, riverbed, rusted bridge—replaced by an endless corridor of stone walls slick with something black. Torches guttered in the distance, casting pale, sickly flames.
A weight formed in his palm. He looked down. A small lantern rested there, its frame made of tarnished silver, the glass smoked and fractured. Inside it, no flame burned—only a faint, pulsing glow, like the last breath of a dying firefly.
When he blinked, the vision was gone. The lantern remained.
Kael staggered backward until his shoulder hit the bridge's support column. The shadows around him writhed, sliding along the ground as if drawn toward the lantern's dim light.
He didn't understand it then, but that was the first moment the Labyrinth took notice of him.
The city was gone by the time he found his way back.
He walked for hours, following familiar streets that no longer existed. Buildings bent in impossible angles, doors led to brick walls, and alleys wound back to where they started. The ground was paved with cracked stone tiles instead of asphalt, each tile engraved with a different, illegible sigil. The air was thicker here, carrying the faint smell of old blood and damp paper.
Somewhere far off, he heard the sound of a bell. Not a church bell—this one was hollow, metallic, and uneven, as if it had been struck by a hand that didn't quite know how.
He followed the sound. It led him to an archway framed in black iron, its bars twisting upward like the ribs of some long-dead beast. Beyond the archway lay a corridor.
At first glance, it seemed simple—stone walls, low ceiling, dim torchlight—but as he stepped through, a strange pull settled into his chest. The corridor stretched ahead too far, longer than any building could contain. The torches flickered in odd rhythms, some guttering as if suffocated, others burning unnaturally steady.
The lantern in his hand gave a faint pulse. The glow inside it grew stronger, illuminating a circle barely two steps wide.
Something moved in the dark beyond that circle.
He stopped breathing. The shape was hunched, its limbs too long, head cocked at a wrong angle. It didn't walk so much as slide, as if the floor welcomed it. Kael took a step back. The creature's head twitched toward him, though its face remained hidden in the shadow beyond the lantern's reach.
The whisper came again. Not inside his head this time, but curling through the corridor, almost playful:
Feed it.
Kael didn't understand. The lantern pulsed again, and with each pulse, he felt… lighter. Not in body, but in thought. Little things—his mother's face, the smell of bread from the old market, the sound of rain on the tin roof—slipped away like sand through fingers.
The light grew brighter. The creature hissed, retreating a step.
Kael stood there for a long time after it vanished. The whisper didn't return, but the weight of its absence was worse.
He wandered for what felt like days. The corridors bent into staircases, staircases led into vast halls with ceilings lost in shadow, and occasionally, he found other marks of life—a bootprint pressed deep into the dust, a shredded scrap of cloth snagged on rusted metal.
He didn't see another living person.
Only when his legs trembled with exhaustion did he find a door that opened without vanishing or twisting away. It led into a small chamber lit by a single, white candle. In the center of the room was a table, and on it, a map.
The map wasn't drawn on paper but carved into stone, lines so fine they could only have been made with something sharper than steel. The moment his fingers brushed it, the candle sputtered.
The door slammed shut behind him.
And in that instant, Kael realized something far worse than being lost—
The Labyrinth had closed its mouth.
And he was inside.