The maze breathes—a living network of fractured pathways shifting with raw, unfiltered emotion. Aria’s boots press against a floor disintegrating into static, each step a precarious balance. Walls heave and contract like injured lungs, their surfaces trembling with the weighted pressures of countless condensed lives.
Her wristband flickers, the cyan light of Bolt faltering with pronounced fractures. “—Warning. Path instability detected,” it stutters, words fragmented like shattered glass. “Corridor breach… system integrity… expos—” It cuts out, leaving a faint hum, indistinct and unresolved.
The corridor churns and splits again. Behind her, the walls seal one route shut with a hiss of flickering energy, leaving only forward. A faint temporal marker pulses on her interface—timestamped movement through Everstill's labyrinth, but distorted, intervals blending like smeared ink. Time here isn’t linear. It folds inward, relentless.
Ahead, faint echoes guide her steps—scrambled voices, fragmented laughter, a sharp crack like a breaking plate. She activates the spectral algorithm, her fingers brushing over the console. Luminescent glyphs fragment and reform in the air, hovering with an organic hesitation. This isn’t just data. These are wounds. She recognizes it in the sharp edges of their light—each piece trembling under the unbearable weight of its contained pain. Some glow hot, burning with anger. Others dim, a desperate quiet.
She tracks the algorithm's pulsing lines. To the left, a holographic room dives into view—an auditorium crowded with children, positioned in rigid rows. Their silence hums louder than any sound. Above their heads, fragmented captions hang: "Unseen. Alone. Written Off." Their forms glitch erratically, blinking in and out, faces frozen mid-scream, the sound stripped away but resonant in its absence. The maze interprets their pain, magnifies it, makes it inescapable.
Aria exhales sharply, tracing the algorithm’s stream, her hand brushing emotionally charged fragments captured midair. “Focus,” she whispers, grounding herself.
The path ahead shivers violently. A room dismantles in her periphery—furniture warping, dissolving into columns of digital smoke. A screech erupts—neither fully human nor simply machine, but something painfully caught in translation. Walls vibrate, unveiling translucent inner structures veined with pulsing red energy.
A figure emerges as the shapes shift. Mira. Her holographic form flickers unevenly, pieces of light breaking off and dissolving into fractals. She hovers at the edge of Aria’s vision, never fully still. “You’re running out of time,” Mira says, her voice stable yet touched by a warbled undertone, like something fighting deterioration.
“Mira,” Aria begins but doesn’t finish. Recognition lingers—something too tightly threaded through memory for her to untangle fully. A fragment of herself? A guide? A ghost?
Mira glances to the hovering symbols above Aria’s wristband, glyphs swirling like fragmented fireflies. “You know you can’t map all of this,” Mira says softly. “And you can’t carry it. Choose. This maze... do you think it’s a map? It’s bait.”
Aria pauses, her lips tightening. A chill moves through the air, sharp as broken glass. She doesn’t answer Mira—can’t. Not yet.
At the path’s narrowing edge, something calls. A door takes faint form ahead—its outline wavering, unstable. The Core. Its gravitational pull is undeniable, working against every instinct she’s trained to suppress. And behind Mira’s words, something sharp glimmers. A hint of transfixed recognition—not from Mira, but from herself.
It’s watching her. It always has.