The stone door didn't lead to another trial. It led to a circular chamber so vast its ceiling was lost in shadow. And it was filled with doors.
Dozens of them. Hundreds. They lined the curved walls in a dizzying spiral—elegant marble arches, rough-hewn wooden gates, doors of gleaming metal, and even a simple screen of woven reeds. Some pulsed with soft light, others seemed to absorb the very air around them. The only constant was the silence, a heavy, waiting silence that pressed against their eardrums.
"The voice was right," Yara whispered, her voice swallowed by the enormity of the space. "The further we go..."
"The more the paths multiply," Maro finished, his gaze sweeping over the impossible choice before them.
There was no disembodied voice to guide them here, no instruction. Just the silent, monumental burden of choice. Walking forward felt like sacrilege. Every door was a question, and behind it, an answer they might not survive.
Yara pointed to a simple oak door with a tarnished bronze handle. "That one... it feels familiar. Like the front door of my grandmother's house."
Maro nodded toward a jagged opening framed by what looked like fused bones. "And that one feels like the fire. Like pain."
This was the new trap. Not just monsters, but psychology. The doors called to their memories, their fears, their regrets. Choosing wasn't just about strength anymore; it was about knowing themselves.
As they stood paralyzed, a change occurred. On the surface of a nearby door made of cloudy obsidian, a scene flickered to life. They saw a man—one of the survivors from the first trial—crouched behind a rock in a desert landscape, sobbing as a scorpion the size of a horse stalked him. The image lasted only a second before vanishing.
Then, on a door of warped brass, another scene: a woman they recognized from the Forest of Whispers was running through a hall of mirrors, her own reflections clawing at her.
"The doors are showing us the other trials," Maro realized, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. "We're seeing what the other choices led to."
It was a mercy and a torture. They could see the failures in real-time. They could also see, on a door of smooth, white alabaster, a man standing before a glowing fountain, drinking deeply, his wounds closing. Success. Safety.
The weight of the crossroads was crushing. The right choice meant survival, maybe even reward. The wrong one meant a death more horrific than the last.
"We can't stay here," Yara said, her voice firm despite the tremor in her hands. "Looking at these... it will break us."
Maro tore his eyes from a door showing a man being slowly encased in ice. "How do we choose, Yara? How?"
"We don't choose with our fear," she said, turning to look at him, her Aegis of Dawn flickering unconsciously around her, a tiny beacon in the immense gloom. "We don't choose with our regret. We choose with this." She took his hand, and the moment their skin touched, their powers hummed in unison, a soft chime of light and shadow. "We choose together. Like we always have."
He looked from her determined eyes back to the endless doors. The safe door of alabaster was there, promising respite. The bone door promised a familiar pain. But then he saw a third option, one that called to neither memory nor fear. It was a simple, gray stone door, utterly plain, with a single, faint silver rune etched into its center that seemed to shift when he looked at it directly. It promised nothing. It was an absolute unknown.
It was the hardest choice of all.
Maro squeezed Yara's hand. "We don't look for safety. We don't look for what we know." He pointed to the plain stone door. "We look for the path only we can walk."
Yara followed his gaze, and after a long moment, she nodded. "Together."
They walked towards the unassuming door, passing visions of heaven and hell playing out on the thresholds around them. They did not look back. As Maro reached for the cold, featureless stone, the silver rune flared once, and the door swung inward, not into a room, but into a blizzard of howling wind and driving snow.
The Crossroads of Regret was behind them. A new, frozen hell awaited.