"A door does not open by hand, but by the confession beneath breath. Do not lie to the wood that listens."
- Manual of the Crimson Script, p. 2
---
Ren opened his eyes to a ceiling that looked like it had once tried to forget.
Cracks threaded the plaster like dead veins, yellowed with age, and at the center a line had been carved - a sentence drawn in red so thick it almost glistened:
Only those who choose may proceed.
The words did not sit still. They pulsed, faintly, as if alive - or recently bled.
He stayed where he was, not out of fear, not exactly, but because moving felt like a commitment. If he sat up, the world would become real, and reality was a contract he was not ready to sign.
He did not remember how he had come here.
He did not even remember his own name.
But he remembered the feel of a pen that dripped like a wound, and the quiet thrill of changing something just by writing it down.
That felt more intimate than a name.
---
There were fifteen people in the room. Sixteen, counting him.
They were scattered like abandoned game pieces on a board someone had grown tired of finishing. A girl curled in a corner, rocking. A man paced tight circles. Two argued near the far wall. Others sat in stunned silence, trying to breathe without being noticed.
He pushed himself upright.
The room was nearly circular - poured concrete, exposed steel, a cold industrial blankness that made the hush heavier than it should have been.
Ten doors lined the walls. Matte black, unlabeled, handleless. They loomed like question marks with no sentences attached.
"Nothing's happening!" someone shouted, voice cracking.
"Maybe it's a waiting room," another muttered.
"No. It's a test. They said it would start once we-" a third voice cut in, shaking.
They? Who was they?
He remembered no instructions. Not even arriving. Only the sentence bleeding on the ceiling, the doors, and the odd sense that he had been here before - in a dream that might not have been his.
A soft click broke the silence. It was so slight most people missed it. But Ren felt it, like a match struck inside his chest.
His hand twitched.
Something waited in his coat pocket.
He did not remember putting it there, yet his fingers closed around smooth, cold metal.
A pen. Thin. Black. Weightless. His.
A smear of dried red stained the barrel. Not ink. Not exactly.
It smelled like copper and memory.
He asked no questions.
He only stared at it, and felt the air around him shift - as if the room had recognized him.
Only those who choose may proceed.
The sentence was still there, still bleeding.
He glanced from the ceiling to the doors to the pen. There was no question what this demanded.
It was not a puzzle. It was a choice.
The worst kind of choice - the kind made blind.
He twirled the pen once, like a habit baked into bone. It felt more familiar than his breath.
He stood.
No ceremony. No revelation. Just two feet finding weight on cold concrete and a hush inside him like the quiet before a storm that thought it was early.
The ten doors were arranged in a shallow arc. Identical. Impenetrable. Yet when he walked toward them, one drew him - the third from the left. Nothing moved, but pressure gathered behind his eyes, like static in the skull.
"Hey. What are you doing?" a tall, twitchy man barked.
Ren kept going.
---
He felt her before he saw her.
A ripple of presence, not physical, not even spatial, but narrative - as if someone had stepped into the logic of the room and rearranged it by existing.
Glass took shape where there had been only wall - or perhaps it had always been there and only now agreed to be seen. Behind it, a figure stood in a wash of dim light. The outline was a woman's. Long coat. Not military, but purposeful, the sort worn by people taught to survive and graded on it.
Her hair was tied back. Her eyes were shadowed, yet he felt the weight of her gaze. Being studied without malice - only a clear, clinical need to know if he could endure the cutting.
He said nothing.
Neither did she.
The air between them tried to speak. Letters flickered ghost-red across the glass, as if a hand wrote and erased in the same instant.
She doesn't know yet.
Don't show her the script.
If she remembers you, it breaks.
He blinked. The letters vanished.
The silhouette tilted her head.
Such a simple motion, and it nearly undid him. Not because it threatened him, but because it was familiar. Painfully familiar. A gesture Ava had used in a memory that wasn't fully his. A fragment snagged between dreams and consequences.
Choice gathered again like weather.
The pen in his pocket twitched.
Unasked. Unwelcome.
It wanted to write her. Or erase her. Or warn her.
He didn't know which impulse would win.
"Do you remember me?" he asked, low, not expecting the sound to cross glass. But the barrier was thinner now, or memory thicker.
The silhouette shifted.
She lifted one hand, not touching, only mirroring his height and angle. For a heartbeat, the pane was a mirror and he didn't know which side he stood on.
Then her hand fell. She drew in the air between them, a single letter.
R.
Plain. Deliberate.
She turned and walked away. Not vanishing - withdrawing. As if she had come only to confirm something she already feared, and once confirmed, could not remain.
His throat tightened.
He had not said his name. But the silence between them had been full of it.
Ava.
He did not know if that was truly her, or a pre-memory, or a warning wearing her shape.
It felt like her.
He stood there, rooted, as the glass turned to nothing but his own reflection. The space she had occupied seemed heavier than the air around it, as if her absence had mass. He could still feel the echo of her gaze like the afterimage of lightning behind closed eyes - seared deep, impossible to blink away.
For a moment, he tried to summon some rational thread to pull through the confusion, something to explain why the sight of her had pressed into his mind with the force of an old scar reopening. But the logic frayed in his hands. Memory was supposed to be proof. Proof of what was real. Proof of who you were. Yet here he was, staring at a blank pane, and the only proof he had was the hollow ache of recognition.
She had written one letter. Just one. And yet it carried the gravity of a name spoken in a crowded room when no one else should have known it. That letter felt older than the moment, as if it had been carved somewhere in the marrow of his bones long before today.
Ren's fingers twitched toward the pen in his pocket. A reflex. A temptation. If he wrote her name now, perhaps the world would remember her. Or perhaps it would tear itself apart for the crime. The thought shivered down his spine - not with fear, but with a strange hunger.
His breath clouded faintly in front of him. He only now realized the room had grown colder in the seconds since she had gone. Or maybe the cold had been here all along, and her presence had merely disguised it.
In the far corner of the room, someone coughed - sharp, nervous. The sound reminded him he was not alone, though it felt as if the others belonged to a different scene entirely, one playing in the background of his own story. They were pieces scattered across a board he hadn't chosen, bound by rules he did not yet know, yet already suspected were cruel.
Ren's gaze returned to the spot where Ava had stood. The glass caught the light from the ceiling's pale bulbs, but it seemed duller now, like it had been touched by shadow. He reached out, stopping inches short of the surface. It was cold - the kind of cold that felt less like temperature and more like an idea.
The idea that some doors did not open outward.
They pulled you in.
And once you stepped through, they closed forever.
It always would.
And that was the problem.
---