The Final Gavel

5. The Infinity Crypt

[Trial Segment: Path of Judgment.]

[Choose your fate.]

[Time Remaining: 02:00:00]

Panic erupted almost immediately.

"Two hours? For what?" a man yelled, his voice sounding strangely loud in the quiet cathedral.

The silver-haired girl seemed unaffected. She walked toward the Sword arch without saying a word and disappeared into the darkness beyond it. A Highborn boy with a smirk followed the Scale path, and that seemed to encourage others. Soon, several people were pushing toward the same arch, arguing over what it meant and whether choosing together would make them safer.

Rem stayed where he was.

There were three paths.

The Sword was straightforward. Strength, violence, direct conflict. It was probably the natural choice for anyone confident in their ability to fight, but for someone in Rem's condition, it was almost an invitation to die.

The Scale was different. Truth, judgment, balance. It sounded more suited to people who relied on their minds instead of their fists, but the growing crowd around it made Rem uncomfortable. Too many people meant too many unknowns.

Then there was the Closed Eye.

Mystery. Ignorance. Willful blindness.

Almost nobody was choosing it.

Leonard appeared beside him again.

"The eye," he murmured. "It has to be the mercy door. Closing your eyes is like forgiving a sin. I think it's the safe choice."

Rem glanced at him, then looked back at the three arches.

Mercy?

It was a nice story. Maybe Leonard actually believed it. Maybe he just wanted someone to walk into the darkness with him. Either way, Rem wasn't going to make his decision based on another person's guess.

This was a Divine Trial. The gods had given them three doors and two hours to choose one. Rem doubted mercy had much to do with it.

The Closed Eye could mean mercy. It could also mean walking somewhere blind, being ignored, or stepping into something no one else wanted to face.

The Scale didn't appeal to him either. There were already too many people around it, and people were unpredictable when they were afraid. They lied, they panicked, they made mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes killed everyone around them.

Rem had spent most of his life avoiding that kind of situation.

The Closed Eye was almost empty.

At least he understood isolation.

He took a slow breath and started walking.

Not because Leonard had suggested it. In a world filled with terrible options, the empty path simply had the fewest variables. The fewest ways to die because of someone else's mistake.

Leonard followed him without saying anything.

The moment Rem stepped through the Closed Eye arch, the cathedral disappeared. It wasn't like entering an ordinary tunnel. The darkness seemed to swallow the sounds behind them until even the footsteps of the people nearby became muffled.

The passage was narrow, its stone walls close enough to touch on either side, and it sloped sharply downward. Flickering torches in iron sconces came alive as they passed, revealing the way ahead.

Five people were already walking in front of them, three men and two women who had the lean, hardened appearance common among people from the Warrens. A few others had chosen the same path behind them, but Rem could only hear their footsteps.

Nobody spoke.

The descent continued for what felt like an unreasonable amount of time.

Rem began counting his steps. It gave him something to focus on and helped keep the strange sensation of being underground from getting to him. At one hundred steps, the air became warmer. By three hundred, he noticed a faint vibration beneath his feet.

It wasn't quite a sound. The low hum seemed to travel through the stone itself, rising through the soles of his shoes and into his jaw.

The people ahead stopped.

Rem slowed down and looked past them. They had reached the last torch.

Beyond it, the tunnel simply ended.

At first, Rem thought there was a wall ahead, but the longer he stared, the more wrong it seemed. It wasn't made of stone, and it wasn't ordinary darkness either. It was something completely black that seemed to absorb the weak light around it.

One of the larger men cautiously stepped closer.

"It's not a wall," he whispered. "There's... nothing there."

The final torch flickered.

Once.

Twice.

Then it went out.

Darkness covered everything.

Rem couldn't see his own hands anymore. The silence was so complete that he could hear his own breathing, and the blackness seemed to press against his eyes.

Then came a grinding sound from behind them.

Stone scraped against stone.

The tunnel they had descended through was sealed.

Rem barely had time to realize what had happened before the ground disappeared beneath his feet.

He fell.

There was no warning and no time to brace himself. One moment he was standing on stone, and the next he was dropping through complete darkness. Wind tore past him as his stomach rose into his throat. He couldn't tell how far he was falling or whether he was even falling straight down. There was nothing to see and nothing to hold onto.

Then the fall stopped.

A tremendous impact shook his entire body. Rem slammed onto a stone platform, his knees buckling beneath him. He caught himself with both hands, the cold surface biting into his palms.

For a moment, nobody moved.

The darkness remained, but this time there was something else in the air.

The smell of old, dry stone.

"Where...?" a woman's voice whispered from somewhere nearby. "Where are we?"

Light suddenly appeared.

A small glyph of cold white fire ignited on the wall beside them. Another appeared above it. Then another. Within seconds, dozens of them were glowing, followed by hundreds, spreading across the walls until the darkness finally gave way to an enormous chamber.

Rem stared.

They were standing on a narrow stone ledge barely three paces wide. Beyond it was a gigantic cylindrical shaft that stretched both above and below them, so large that Rem couldn't see its full height. The curved walls were covered in circular platforms.

Ten levels.

Each one ran around the entire circumference of the shaft, and every level was lined with heavy iron doors set into the stone. Some were close enough to see clearly, while others disappeared into the darkness above and below.

But the doors weren't connected by ordinary stairs.

Bridges made of pale, polished granite moved constantly between them. Rem watched as one bridge connected to a door several levels above, remained there for only a few seconds, then slowly retracted into the wall. Almost immediately, another bridge emerged from a different section of the shaft and extended toward a door two levels below.

The entire place was changing in front of him.

There was no fixed route. No obvious way to know which door was safe.

Then Rem noticed what was hanging in the center.

A single enormous chain disappeared into the darkness above. Suspended from it was something that made his entire body go still.

The creature was broad and low, its body covered in thick, segmented chitin that was almost black. Eight jointed legs were folded beneath it, each ending in a hooked claw sharp enough to tear through stone.

There was no head.

Instead, the front of its armored body sloped downward into a smooth carapace, with five dark, glass-like orbs arranged across it. A faint green light moved inside them. Around those orbs was a ring of pale, needle-like mouthparts.

Rem had seen illustrations of abyssal monsters before.

This was something else entirely.

The creature wasn't moving, but one of the green-lit orbs slowly shifted from left to right, examining the chamber. It passed over the doors, the bridges and the ledges with a strange precision.

A deep vibration travelled through the stone.

Rem felt it in his bones.

The chain holding the creature trembled slightly, and the sound coming from it was uneven, almost as if whatever was keeping the monster restrained was beginning to fail.

Rem remembered the classifications he'd seen in the archives and the cheap horror books sold around the Warrens.

Soulless.

Creeper.

Bone-Singer.

Veil-Walker.

Descended.

He had never expected to see one himself.

A Soulless was little more than a mindless husk. Creepers hunted from dark corners and narrow spaces. But Bone-Singers were different. They didn't simply chase their prey.

They changed the environment around them.

Rem looked at the enormous shaft again.

The moving bridges. The countless doors. The shifting paths.

His eyes narrowed.

This place suddenly made a lot more sense.

Maybe the maze wasn't the trial.

Maybe the maze belonged to the monster.

The central green orb stopped moving.

Rem felt a strange pressure before he even realized what had happened. The creature was looking at them. Its body remained still, but the orb slowly rotated until the green light settled directly over their ledge.

The low vibration in the chamber changed.

Then a sharp crack echoed through the shaft.

A fracture appeared across one of the creature's middle legs.

Rem's expression tightened.

The Bone-Singer was waking up.

[Trial Segment: The Infinity Crypt.]

[Primary Objective: Locate and open the True Door.]

[Secondary Data: Abyssal Guardian - Classification: Bone-Singer.]

[Temporal Stasis Integrity: 87%.]

[Estimated Time to Full Mobility: 01:47:22.]

Before Rem could think about what the message meant, the bridge directly ahead of them began to move.

Pale granite scraped against stone as it extended from their ledge, eventually locking into place against a door three levels below.

The Bone-Singer watched the bridge for several seconds. Then its central orb moved away from them and settled on the door.

Rem stared at the path in front of him.

Whatever the True Door was, the trial had just given them their first direction.

The timer in his vision changed.

[01:46:41]