"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man?"
[What if I was assembled too incorrectly to be loveable? I was built wrong, born into a world that never wanted me. I can't change, changing is hard.]
"Neila."
She stood with her hand still raised, fingers curled from the snap, her expression caught somewhere between boredom and the faintest flicker of satisfaction. The creature dissolved into motes of grey light that scattered across the corridor like ash caught in an unfelt wind.
The ceiling flickered.
'4'
Seraphina exhaled slowly, lowering her defensive stance. Her pink hair clung to her forehead, damp with sweat she hadn't noticed accumulating. "That was..."
"Obvious," Neila finished. "It was just standing there. What did you expect me to do, negotiate with it?"
"God knows how many more we have to go through, I'm already tied of all this meaningless work." Neila finished, brushing imaginary dust from her uniform sleeve. "Like I said, someone of my caliber shouldn't do such petty shit like–"
The lights died.
"You're not even doing anything."
"I don't need to."
Not flickered. Not dimmed. Died. Complete and absolute darkness that pressed against the eyes like physical weight. For three heartbeats, there was nothing. No sound. No light. No sense of direction.
Then the humming began.
Low at first. Almost below the threshold of hearing. But it rose, slowly, inexorably, until it vibrated in their teeth, their bones, the marrow of their very souls.
"What?" Neila's voice came through the darkness, stripped of its usual condescension, "How impressive of you."
Seraphina didn't answer. She was already moving, her hand finding the wall, her feet counting steps. "It's something I developed, echolocation."
"Like a bat hmm? I guess a small blind mammal fits you."
"Bats aren't blind."
"Could've fooled me," Neila shrugged, acting indifferent. "Not that I care anyways."
"In fact, bats have better eyesight than us, especially in low light conditions."
Neila's brows furrowed. "Okayy?"
The sound kept going. Kept traveling. Never bouncing back.
"It's infinite," Seraphina whispered. "The space. It's actually infinite now."
"Why didn't you check it before?"
"It's easier to do it in the dark."
"Then you could've just turned off the lights."
"The light switch disappeared, what did you expect?"
"I found it."
The lights returned.
The lights flickered again. Once. Twice. Then held steady.
They stood in the hallway, the same endless, identical hallway they'd been trapped in for what felt like hours. White walls. Chrome doors. Fluorescent lights humming at that maddening frequency. Everything was exactly the same.
Except now the portrait was empty.
The old man was gone. Just a blank canvas in an ornate frame, staring at nothing.
"That's new," Seraphina murmured. "It was here before the lights went off."
Neila started walking, her heels clicking against the floor with sharp, irritated precision. "This has really been really fucking boring, like someone is trying to stall for time, this hasn't even been hard."
Seraphina's eyes narrowed. "Maybe you haven't been doing jack shit, so stop complaining."
"Man." Neila stopped, turning to face her sister. "That counter." She pointed at the ceiling, where the '4' still glowed faintly. "That number could mean anything, it doesn't even tell us how close we are to the exit, for god knows how long, it could be out of a hundred or a thousand, we'd be better off finding another way to get out of here."
Seraphina considered this.
[As much as I hate to say this, she's right. Who knows how long this is going to go on for, we have no frame of reference, I'm not even sure we aren't going in a circle, but Zeniths, especially game based ones like these have some sort of escape route]
"Then we need more data."
"Obviously."
They walked.
The corridor stretched ahead, identical in every way to the one behind them. Seraphina counted her steps.
"The hallway is the same, except for a few oddities here and there," she noted. "The space resets perfectly."
"Or it's not resetting at all. Maybe we're the ones moving in circles, and the hallway just looks the same because it is the same."
"That doesn't make sense. We passed the portrait—"
"The portrait that's now blank. The one that used to have an old man in it." Neila's eyes narrowed. "It's not insane to say that it probably grew legs and ran off, I guess this will be our task, to find the portrait and destroy it."
Seraphina stopped walking.
She looked at the wall. The paint was flawless, no bubbles, no brushstrokes, no imperfections of any kind. The floor tiles were mathematically spaced. The lights hummed at a frequency that never wavered, never fluctuated.
"This isn't a real space," she said slowly. "It's a construct. A model. Like a blueprint made solid."
"Yea whatever." Neila shrugged. "I think that was obvious though? Our dorms were copied."
"But the finer details look off, somehow, like they were made from memory."
The lights flickered.
At the far end of the corridor, a door opened.
Not one of the chrome dormitory doors, a new door. Wooden. Old-fashioned. The kind of door that belonged in a different building entirely. It stood ajar, just enough to show darkness beyond.
"That's not supposed to be there," Seraphina said.
"No shit Sherlock."
They approached cautiously. Seraphina's hand was raised, ready to snap, mana crackling at her fingertips. Neila walked slightly behind her, scanning the walls, the ceiling, the floor for any other changes with a bored expression.
The door had no frame. It just... stood there. In the middle of the corridor. Blocking their path.
Beyond it, darkness. Not the absence of light—the *presence* of dark, thick and heavy, like velvet draped over an open mouth.
"The oddity, I guess the painting ran in here, but for what reason? There's undeniably a trap here or… maybe it was scared of the light." Neila said.
"Do we go through?"
Seraphina considered.
[If we don't do anything about this then the counter will be reset, I don't want to restart everything]
"We're going."
"You go in first, that's ominous as shit."
"Hell no."
They circled the door, keeping their distance. From the back, it was just a door. Plain wood. Simple handle. No different from the front.
But the darkness beyond it wasn't coming from anywhere. It was just there. Spilling out of the doorway like smoke from a fire, except it wasn't moving, wasn't spreading, wasn't doing anything except existing in the wrong place.
"Look at that." She pointed at the edges of the doorway. The darkness wasn't touching the frame. There was a thin border of normal space, maybe an inch wide, where the corridor's fluorescent light still reached. "It's contained. Something's keeping it from spreading."
"The door itself?"
"Maybe. Or maybe the rules of this place. The construct. It allows oddities, but only within certain parameters."
Neila stepped closer, peering into the darkness. Her reflection didn't appear in it, nothing appeared in it. It was absolute black, the kind that existed before light was invented.
"Or maybe, you're reading too much into it. A door is a door anyways, this is a Zenith, it's not going to follow the laws of physics, it's all an illusion anyways."
Seraphina listened. At first, nothing. Then, faintly, from somewhere deep in that velvet dark, breathing. Slow. Rhythmic. Heavy.
"Go in Seraphina, the painting ran in the room."
"Neila you're just using me to check for traps."
"I don't know what you're talking about, I'm feeling rather scared so I have no choice but to rely on you."
The door stood there, wooden, old, wrong. Seraphina circled it once more, her pink hair catching the faint light as she moved. Neila watched from a careful distance, arms crossed, tapping her foot with exaggerated impatience.
"Well?" Neila drawled. "Are we going to stand here all day, or are you going to do something useful?"
Seraphina's amber eyes narrowed. "Useful. Right."
She stopped circling. Looked at Neila. Looked at the door. Looked back at Neila with an expression that shifted from calculation to something almost resembling amusement.
"You know," Seraphina said slowly, "speaking of being useful."
Neila's smirk faltered.
"I've been doing all the work. You've just been sitting there making rude comments and occasionally killing things I've already identified." Seraphina took a step toward her sister. "Maybe it's time you contributed."
The lights flickered.
"What are you sug-"
Seraphina moved fast.
Her leg shot out, her foot flat against Neila's chest, and she pushed.
Neila's eyes went wide. Her heels scraped against the linoleum, arms pinwheeling, mouth opening to form words that never came. She crossed the threshold of that wooden door in less than a heartbeat.
The darkness swallowed her whole.
"Fuck off."