"Choose."
It did not hold the intent of a threat. The wanderer's body had begun a flight or fight response.
Confusion ran through him as he realized he feels to be running or even agreeing to attacking, but he stayed as is. "What-what-what is happening!"
The black shrouded being only indicated to the two visible paths. It did not cause a word a third time.
Why was it here? Who made this castle? What was the ending that the wanderer saw exactly as it is? Many questions existed in the boy's mind. Everything suppressed under a devastating urge to flee.
To run. To hide.
'Wait! I was able to say!' He panicked. He had tried saying bluffs and threats but his mouth let alone his lips ever moved. The thoughts of doing that died in his mind. Except when he questioned his own conundrum.
'What's…the…difference?'
He pushed against his fear to analyse what he is facing. Dread of the unknown wrestled for authority against his innate will and curiosity.
Every lo-league of his body strained and split between choices he was forced into. None by his own decision. That hurt him more.
Pain of an emotional kind burned like an ocean of pure rage. 'Is it because it was not in defiance? Is that right?' It was his first guess.
Nevertheless, it wasn't said. He just couldn't ask the very same thought out loud even to himself. 'No, there's something more. Uhhhh, I just want to own what I choose to do!'
His gaze darkened. The being in the black shroud stayed unmoved. Its appendages only pointing outwards.
Gritting through the forced inaction, the wanderer spoke. His teeth shut tight. "I'll choose. So let me."
Maybe it was because the boy asked, or it was because the being in the black shroud understood the inner intent. The wanderer felt his body being released from the unseen binding.
His tissues felt relaxed better than he did when he walked in the desert hungry. 'I did eat..'
Shaking his head, he gazed down the two paths. Now, he had to choose. Even if it wasn't made purely out of his own choice there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing more than stick to it and the consequences of that choice.
The boy tilted his head and looked into the path filled with the fog. Light sometimes shone through, but mostly it made the fog appear either gray or white.
Then, he took the chance to look into the other path. Darkness clutched tightly at every corner while light shone brilliantly like stars caught in the darkness.
'Decision, decision, hmm,' he nearly came to one in the instant he had first seen the paths. But looking at them again and the being in the black shroud's otherworldly unseen actions, the boy believed each path meant more than simply walking down them.
'Fog is connected to memory in many of the highly debated scriptures and philosophies.' Inaction gripped him tightly, he knew he could have moved. He wanted to, but he chose not to. 'I don't know what could be considered as giving my decision.
The boy had read some stories where even the slightest of actions and words were treated as more than what the conveyor meant to say through them. And he did not want to become another like them.
Choice of his answer steeled itself. Glaring into the hidden spectral eyes, he answered.
"I choose the one mixed with light and darkness. The one without the fog of memory." He took a gamble.
A skeletal arm broke down into dust. It was the left one. The being in the black shroud's right arm kept pointing with its drawn frail bone finger.
The finger held a sheen to it unlike any. Wanderer in his brown overcoat glanced at it then back at the face of the being in the shroud and then at the path it pointed to. Every single action was made in ways that screamed to be made from logic.
And yet, the boy felt it. He sensed it within himself. 'Nothing here is based in logic…. No, not even nothing is based in logic here.'
He peeked back at the path of the fog of memory. Only to see the fog becoming denser, until it was too gray for it to be part of the black crystal walls of the castle. No trail of fog ever escaped the walls of the path. It clung and clung, no more black crystal could be seen to be behind the front made from the grayish fog.
'Why? Why is it obeying to stay still?' And then it dawned on him. It isn't staying still. Whatever it is being held by is being forced to or pressurized against its ability to hold it back. 'If that truly turns out to be a fog of memory, I don't want to find out what kind.'
The boy half turned to take a step toward his choice. Trails of fog escaped into the same corridor he was in.
Catching the scene in his periphery, he ran. Ran to escape into the path of soft light and cruel darkness.
Sprinting to outrun the fog did not prove possible, it had already reached his ankles. His right ankle forgot how to move. The boy was about to stumble down to his knees.
Before he did, he put force behind his only stable foot and slammed himself into the wall of the castle. Not staying put to know what more could happen. He switched tactics and tapped frantically three or more times around his right abdomen.
A flame of noteworthy force spewed out. Keeping his balance on his left foot, he used the force of the fire to spin against the wall as his hands kept trying to grab on the wall to pull him forward.
It took four rotations but the fifth never came. It happened because the fog had reached near his abdomen's level in the corridor. The wanderer still held a smile. He did not fall, his tactic had worked.
The boy in the brown overcoat had escaped into the chosen path of light and darkness.