Page 42 of Labyrinthine
“You’re quiet,” he says.
I glance sideways. His cloak is dusted in pale ash, the hem dark with dew. The man is nearly a shadow beside me, all stillness and steel. But his eyes don’t match his body. They’re restless, flickering toward me like he’s scanning for wounds he isn’t allowed to dress.
“I don’t have anything to say,” I murmur.
He nods once. Accepts it without flinching. And that’s the worst of it—how easy it is to be angry near him. How he gives me space to bleed and doesn’t demand I sew myself back together. I hate how grateful that makes me.
The sun is rising when we reach the steps, its midnight paling into pinks and golds.
The entrance to the labyrinth is older than the palace, older than the city itself. A circle of worn stone descends like an amphitheater into the earth, each ring lower than the last, until it meets the iron gates that seal off the labyrinth mouth. And above those gates stands the statue.
She’s twice my height, cloaked and hooded, one arm raised in warning. The other holds a curved blade, rusted at the tip where generations of offerings have dripped. Her face is lost beneath the cowl, only the faint suggestion of features beneath the veil of weathered stone.
The gods have no faces. Only hungers.
I step forward, pulling off my glove. My palm is already marked—my father made sure of that, slicing it open in front of the court like the ceremony had meaning. I press the cut against the rusted blade and feel the sting as fresh blood joins the stains of centuries.
It’s always cold here. Even in summer, even when the festival fires are still smoldering in the streets behind us. This place belongs to something older. Something that doesn’t care for the sun. And this year, it seems darker than before. Less stable. Like it too is changing.
Mallen waits beside me, silent. Watching.
“I thought you didn’t believe,” he says softly.
“I don’t,” I say. “I know how to follow orders.”
He hums low in his throat. Not quite agreement. Not mockery either.
We linger.
The gates are sealed shut by thick iron vines—interlocking curves like thorns or talons, impossible to bend by mortal hands. A faint shimmer pulses behind them. The magic of the Reaping hasn’t awakened yet. But it will.
This is the tenth Reaping I’ve endured.
I know its rules and rituals—or what they’ve always been until now. I know what waits beyond those gates. And I know what they say about the monster in the labyrinth.
Mallen shifts, not touching me, but close enough that I feel it. That low hum beneath his skin. The restless containment. It radiates off him like heat from a furnace its keeper forgot to extinguish. There’s always been an unnamed pull contained within him—a darkness that’s luminous, like a night lit by too many stars. I’ve spent years not letting myself look too closely. But here, near the labyrinth, it dazzles. And I look.
Heavens, I look.
Darkness stirs beneath my skin—burning, silent, restrained. My magic. It shouldn’t be surfacing, not yet, not until the Reaping begins in earnest. But here, at the threshold, it coils like smoke in my veins. A presence more felt than seen, pressing up against the wards that bind it, the way water presses against glass. It doesn’t burn. It hums. Not in pain. In anticipation.It remembers this place and the people who perished. It remembers the gates and the gods that bound it. And though it’s leashed, it wants out.
We look at the iron bars too long. Like they’re a nightmare that will not let us wake.
“Have you ever gone in?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer at first. His jaw tenses. “You know I have.”
“Will the gates open?”
He finally looks at me, and shadows twist through his sharp features. Not cruel. Not tender. Just dark. Old. There.
“If you ask them to.”
I pull my glove back on, fingers tight, throat tighter. The stillness between us isn’t still at all. Not really. It’s laden with what we do not say but both feel. It’s stirring, disturbed, as if it’s an ocean whose smooth surface conceals turbulent currents in its depths. My heart beats not from habit, nor of its own accord. My father’s words still echo behind my ribs, bitter and poisonous. You are a girl with no choice left but one. You belong to your bloodline. To the court. To me.
You owe me.
But standing here, with Mallen, I don’t feel small. I feel dangerous. Not because the chains are gone. The Reaping still waits and the gods still count, yet I can place my next step where I choose and watch the pattern change. Even the possibility is new, and I intend to see how far it carries me.
