The world above vanished in a single step.
One moment there had been wind, a sky stretched thin by dawn, and the smell of cedar. The next there was only pressure—an invisible weight settling over the lungs. Sound folded; even the creak of leather and the jingle of harness faded to a memory. The lampstones the priests carried spilled a syrupy blue light that clung to every surface and refused to die.
The caravan entered single file. Hooves struck basalt with muffled dignity. Ropes trailed behind wagons, measured, counting the way back. Ernest led Team Two at the point of the procession, his silhouette cutting through the gloom like a stroke of ink across wet parchment.
Behind him, Rowan muttered, "It feels like walking into someone's throat."
"Then don't speak," Mikel said.
Celina's fingers brushed the wall. The stone was warm. "Alive," she whispered.
Ernest only said, "Listening."
The passage opened into a hall large enough to house the chapel and its tower. Pillars rose like tree trunks, their surfaces slick with a mineral sheen that reflected the lampstones in broken constellations. Between the pillars, faint mist curled close to the floor, breathing with the rhythm of the lamps.
Halvern called for a halt. The old priest dismounted and touched the nearest pillar. His lips moved in a private prayer that sounded like arithmetic.
"Pressure stable," Halvern said. "Air thin but breathable. We make first camp here."
His voice came out flat, stripped of echo. Words died in midair as if swallowed.
Rowan tried clapping once; the sound went nowhere. He frowned. "Even the air's afraid."
"Or greedy," Mikel said. "Keeps what it hears."
They unloaded the wagons. Crates thudded onto stone that didn't ring. Ropes were pegged; tents erected from habit, though the notion of wind here was ridiculous. Fire refused to burn yellow—only pale blue, like memory.
The priests unpacked silver censers, swinging them lazily, perfuming the air with something sharp and metallic. The scent reminded Ernest of blood diluted in water.
"Sanctification," one murmured.
Halvern's expression was grim. "Superstition."
Ernest said nothing. He was watching the walls.
They shimmered faintly, not with light but with attention.
Mikel began measuring. He placed copper rods in a square, tapped them with a hammer, and listened. Each strike returned a pulse that trembled underfoot.
"Two-point-four," he said at last. "The echo's slow—like hitting the inside of a lung."
Halvern frowned. "Meaning?"
"Meaning the walls aren't stone. Not entirely. Something's moving through them."
Celina crouched, brushed dust aside with her palm. Beneath the layer of gray she found a surface that wasn't rock at all but glass, veined faintly with light that pulsed when she touched it. She drew her hand back quickly.
Rowan leaned over her shoulder. "It's watching."
"It's waiting," Celina corrected.
Ernest studied the pattern that her touch had awakened: concentric ripples, expanding outward until they faded. "Waiting for what?" Rowan asked.
Ernest looked toward the deeper corridors. "Us."
Curiosity outweighed sense before the tents were finished. Rowan, restless as ever, picked up a pebble the size of a thumbnail, weighed it once in his hand, and tossed it into the nearest corridor.
Silence.
He laughed under his breath. "Dead air."
Then—so faint it could have been imagined—the pebble clicked against something distant. After the click came a whisper, sliding back along the stone. It was his own voice, warped but recognizable.
Did you see that.
He froze. The others turned.
"Say it again," Mikel said.
Rowan shook his head. "That was from… days ago."
Ernest stepped forward until his shadow swallowed the corridor mouth. He listened. Beneath the whisper there was another sound—something that mimicked breathing, drawn through a hundred throats of stone.
"It's storing us," he said softly. "Every word we speak."
Celina's eyes widened. "Memory."
Rowan forced a grin that didn't reach his eyes. "Then let's give it something worth remembering."
He raised his voice. "We're not afraid of you!"
The echo came back slower, deeper. …not afraid of you.
For a heartbeat it sounded almost amused.
By evening the priests had decided to "measure holiness." They gathered in a semicircle, torches planted upright, censers swinging. The old priest's tone was gentle, like a man explaining rules to children.
"Light within stone," he began. "Remember the maker's hand."
The syllables slithered through the air, sticking to the walls. The ground shivered. Dust rained from the ceiling in a thin curtain.
Halvern stepped forward. "Enough—"
But the chant had already deepened. The priests' voices layered until language collapsed into vibration. One acolyte staggered, blood trickling from his nostrils. Another screamed once, the sound instantly devoured by the silence.
Then Ernest spoke.
He didn't raise his voice. He simply said, "Still."
The word struck like a physical blow. The tremor ceased. Lamps steadied; dust froze midfall before drifting down again. The bleeding acolyte stopped mid-sob, staring at his clean hands.
The old priest looked at Ernest over the rim of his staff. His eyes gleamed with something between reverence and hunger.
"So simple," he murmured. "You close what we open."
"I prevent collapse," Ernest said.
"Collapse is revelation," the priest replied, smiling.
When quiet returned, it felt heavier than before. The air pressed closer to skin; breath came thick. Team Two withdrew to their corner of camp without orders.
Rowan sat on a crate, staring at his trembling hands. "I think the ground's still moving."
"It isn't," Mikel said, though his own fingers tapped an invisible rhythm.
Celina leaned back against the pillar, eyes half shut. "I can feel it listening again. Louder now."
Ernest's gaze stayed on the priest, who was still smiling to himself like a man who'd glimpsed the first line of a forbidden book. "He's not afraid either," Rowan muttered. "He's in love."
"Everyone worships what answers," Ernest said.
He turned away, lifted his lampstone, and looked down a corridor that sloped into black.
The light did not reach the end. Instead it curved back, faintly, like breath returning to a mouth.
Night arrived without darkness.
The lampstones bled their dull blue into every corner until time itself seemed to flatten.
The priests slept in neat rows, hands folded over their chests as though rehearsing for burial.
The instructors whispered once, then gave up language.
And still the walls hummed faintly, as if digesting the day.
Ernest sat awake, quill moving slowly over the thin pages of his notebook.
The air behaves as muscle rather than element.
It contracts when disturbed.
The priests' chant awakened it further.
It remembers words; it does not yet understand them.
He paused, listening.
The hush carried weight, the kind that bends thought.
He could almost hear the silence thinking.
It happened between one heartbeat and the next.
A long, slow pull in the chest of the world.
Every lamp guttered inward; fire bent sideways.
The dust that had rested for centuries lifted in unison, swirling toward the corridor mouths.
The labyrinth inhaled.
Rowan woke first, gasping.
His blanket clung to him as if suctioned by unseen hands.
"Gods—what—"
Then came the release.
A single, massive exhale that rattled bones and extinguished all but one flame.
Tents shuddered; ropes went slack; something deep beneath them groaned like shifting ice.
When silence returned, it was thinner, stretched, expectant.
Celina's voice broke it. "It breathed."
Halvern's reply was hoarse. "Impossible."
Mikel touched the floor. It was warm, pulsing once every few seconds. "Not impossible," he said. "Measured."
Ernest stood slowly. "It knows we're inside."
Sleep came again, but it was no refuge.
Every soul in camp dreamed the same dream:
A lung of stone rising and falling, chambers vast enough to hold cities.
Each breath drew them inward, closer to a heart they could not see.
In the dream, a voice whispered through their bones: Name yourselves.
Rowan woke biting back a scream, the echo of that question still vibrating in his ribs.
He turned; Mikel was sitting upright, eyes wide but unfocused.
Celina tossed restlessly, her wrist glowing through the cloth.
Only Ernest was gone.
He followed the sound—the faint throb below hearing—down a narrow incline that curved like a spine.
The walls glimmered faintly, veins of light pulsing in rhythm with his steps.
At the corridor's end lay a round chamber, perfectly smooth, the floor reflecting him like water.
He whispered, "Show me."
The surface rippled.
A circle formed—an arch sculpted from dust and light.
Beyond it waited a hollow space blacker than shadow, the absence of everything the world knew.
Inside that absence, something listened.
He felt it probing the edges of his thought, curious, childlike.
When he spoke again, his words carried weight he had not intended.
"Hello."
The darkness quivered.
A breath came back—warm, intimate, the size of mountains.
He did not step through. Not yet.
Instead he bowed his head, as if acknowledging an equal, and the arch folded itself closed with the gentleness of a sigh.
When he returned to camp, his boots left no prints.
The few who had half-woken thought they'd dreamed his passing.
Morning—if such a thing existed underground—arrived with a dull vibration.
Mikel emerged from his tent and stopped dead.
The chalk circles he had drawn to mark their perimeter were moving.
Not erased, but rewinding—lines un-drawing themselves until the floor stood clean.
He crouched, chalk in hand, and traced a single cross.
Within seconds it faded backward, stroke by stroke, the cross unmade.
He whispered, "It remembers in reverse."
Rowan leaned over his shoulder. "Then stop marking it."
"We need to know where we've been."
Rowan stared into the hollow corridor beyond. "Maybe it already knows that too."
By mid-cycle the old priest called a convocation.
His smile was too bright for the wan light.
"The labyrinth stirs," he announced. "It hears the Voice. We must proceed before its curiosity wanes."
Halvern protested. "We lost the western passages overnight. The map no longer matches—"
"Then we follow faith, not cartography."
Serren spat into the dust. "Faith doesn't feed a compass."
The old man ignored him, eyes fixed on Ernest. "You will guide us."
Ernest inclined his head, neither accepting nor refusing.
"Guide what listens?" he asked. "Or guide what follows?"
The priest's smile did not waver. "Whichever obeys."
They broke camp. The rope lines were useless; paths had changed shape.
Corridors curved where they had been straight; ceilings rose and fell like breathing.
Even the pillars of the first hall had rotated a few degrees, each facing Ernest as they passed.
Celina felt the warmth in her wrist pulling south-east again.
She whispered to him, "It wants us deeper."
"It wants to know what depth means," he replied.
The air grew thicker, almost sweet. Rowan began to taste copper. Mikel's instruments clicked without being touched.
They reached the place where the outer gate should have been—and found only smooth wall. The labyrinth had closed its mouth.
Rowan's voice cracked the silence. "We're sealed in."
Halvern looked at Ernest. "Can you—"
"No," Ernest said quietly. "It isn't keeping us. It's keeping others out."
Celina shivered. "Then who's 'us'?"
Without warning, the floor trembled again, but this time it was softer—like a sigh.
The light shifted, painting their faces with colorless radiance.
Every lampstone dimmed as if yielding to a greater glow seeping from the walls themselves.
The labyrinth exhaled once more.
Dust rose, swirling around Ernest's head, forming shapes—letters that almost resembled his handwriting, breaking apart before they could be read.
He raised his hand; the dust froze mid-air.
"Enough," he whispered.
The motion ceased. The air settled.
For a heartbeat, everything was still.
Then, faint and low, came the echo of his own word returning—Enough.
But the voice was not his.
It was deeper, older, curious. And it laughed.
The sound rolled through every corridor, shaking loose centuries of silence.
When it faded, the priests lay prostrate, murmuring half-prayers. Halvern clutched his satchel of instruments like a talisman.
Rowan's face was white. "It answered you."
Celina looked at Ernest, eyes wide, light flickering behind the fear. "It knows your voice."
Ernest said nothing. He simply turned toward the direction the echo had come from—a darkness that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Mikel's hand tightened on his rope coil. "How do we know it's not leading us into its lungs?"
Ernest's reply was almost gentle. "Then let's see what breath made us."
As they moved forward, the passage behind them folded shut, the stone sealing smooth as skin.
Each heartbeat they took echoed in time with another rhythm beneath their feet.
The labyrinth had learned their pattern.
Now it began to hum along.