AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ferrier. Ferrier. Ferrier.” I muttered her name over and over and tucked my chest against my knees, pressing my forehead to the ground.
It couldn’t all be fake. Some of this had to be real. The pain I was feeling was real. My feet—they were throbbing. They were cold. I was so cold.
I shook. As I shook, more dirt tumbled off me, out of my hair and off my back. Footsteps neared and I looked up. A lone figure approached from between the ever-changing walls. It wasn’t Ferrier. It was a man.
At first, it looked like the man wore next to no clothing, but as he neared, I realized his clothes were simply so dirty, it was hard to determine what he had on. He was barefoot. And his knee was bleeding.
He walked with a vacant expression, his mouth slightly ajar and his muscles slack. He didn’t look at me as he passed by. I shuddered and scurried away, placing my back against the stone wall, but I quickly jerked forward just in case the wall decided it wanted to crumble on top of me because I had touched it.
The door that caged my fears shook and rattled against my consciousness. If it burst open now, I might drown. Go mad in a single breath. I couldn’t let that door open now. Not when I knew how much fear I’d bottled up behind it. The man, who must have been one of the Nameless, ambled absently, a slight limp to his gait.
I coughed up a piece of dirt that was lodged in my throat. He turned at the sound, his eyes searching vaguely until they landed on me. Then he hunched his shoulders and walked toward me.
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry. I need to find Ferrier.”
I scrambled to my feet, choking out gasps of pain as I stumbled away. Reason was enough to tell me to distance myself from this Nameless man, so I ran along the wall.
The Labyrinth—or whoever was controlling it—stole more of my reason with each step I took. The walls wavered. I was pretty sure I saw a tree take a step.
Ignore it, I told myself.
For all I knew, not a single thing I saw was real. The magical mist that filled this place seemed to be having a riotously good time, sensing my demise. It whirled and waved in its own merry little circus as my mind began to snap.
The Labyrinth felt its victory nearing.
I reached a right angle in the wall and turned. Through the trees, pale gray stone walls came into view. My hands slammed into the rock. I was trapped. It was a dead end.
I spun around and stared at the man still stumbling toward me. He made strange, unintelligible sounds—groanings and mumblings—that grated on my remaining sanity.
“Edith!” I shouted. “Ferrier! Ash!”
The Nameless man only seemed to sense where I was when I shouted, so I clamped my mouth shut and, with a deep breath, lunged into a sprint back through the forested Labyrinth, past the Nameless man, the mist stinging my face as I ran.
“Edith!” I called. “Ferrier!”
Up ahead I saw red hair. With a surge of relief, I recognized Ferrier’s short frame. She was stumbling along much like the man who was by now far behind me. Dread pooled in the pit of my stomach as I neared her.
“Ferrier?”
She didn’t turn toward me. I ran around her and looked her dead in the face.
“Ferrier?”
Her brown eyes slid vacantly toward me.
“No!”
But it wasn’t my voice that uttered the sentiment I felt.
“Ferrier!” Edith screamed and ran from a small opening between the walls to my left that had been concealed by vines. She raced forward and wrapped her arms around her sister, then began to shake her.
“No, no, no. Ferrier, listen to me. Ferrier!”
Ferrier’s head lolled, and her neck slumped backward as her sister tried to shake her back to her right mind. Edith reached a hand around her sister’s neck and supported her head, then tucked it against her shoulder and wept softly. After a heartbeat, her eyes slid over to me. In them was a murderous darkness.
“What happened?” she snapped.
I swallowed, cringing as more grit slid down my throat.
