The violet flame did not burn
it unmade.
It coiled up from the obsidian altar like smoke given voice, whispering in a language Jorren almost remembered, syllables slipping through his mind like water through cracked stone. The heat did not blister his skin, but his vision wavered as if seen through the breath of a dying man.
He hung there, hand outstretched, suspended between surrender and survival, the wound in his thigh pulsing with slow, wet thuds.
Then—
stillness.
The flame retreated, not fading but folding inward, collapsing into the altar's surface like ink drawn into a sponge. Where his fingers should have touched cold stone, they met only air.
Yet something had changed.
The light in the chamber—what little there was—had dimmed.
Or perhaps his eyes had dimmed with it.
Jorren pulled his hand back, trembling. The obsidian shard remained lodged in his thigh, black and glassy, weeping a thin thread of crimson. The pain was no longer sharp, but deep and gnawing, as though the wound had begun to drink from him rather than bleed.
Silence returned.
Heavier than before.
No voice spoke. No shadow loomed. But the air tasted of iron and old incense, and the walls—even in the dim glow of the Maw's eternal dusk—seemed to watch.
Jorren swallowed, his throat dry as parchment.
I did not choose.
He had not taken the altar.
Nor had he rejected it.
The violet flame had taken something else instead.
Then came the hollowness.
It began behind his eyes—a quiet theft.
A memory, small and sunlit, slipped away: the scent of crushed mint underfoot, a woman's laugh from a garden he could no longer place.
Mother?
The word came—but no face.
No voice.
Only the echo of warmth, now gone cold.
His breath hitched.
The Echo again.
He had not invoked it—but the Maw had.
It had taken in his stead.
Jorren pressed his palms to his temples, fighting the pull of forgetting. Each use demands a sacrifice. That was the rule he had learned in the tunnels.
But this—
This was theft without consent.
A tax levied on his soul for merely standing where he stood.
A low hum vibrated through the floor, rising from the obsidian slab beneath the altar. Carved into its surface were the three interlocking circles—Observe, Offer, Obliterate—their lines too precise for human hands.
The Binding Sigil.
He had seen it etched into doorways, whispered in half-remembered grimoires.
Now it pulsed faintly, like a buried heart.
Jorren forced himself to think.
The Maw was not a maze.
It was a contract.
A living covenant built upon forgotten gods, fed by memory and flesh and will. The creature that hunted him—bone and rust, hollow-eyed—was no mere beast.
It was a ward.
A keeper.
And the altar…
The altar was a tongue of the Maw itself.
Sight for passage.
But he had not given his sight.
The flame had risen, hesitated, and withdrawn.
Was it unsatisfied?
Or had it taken something else?
He looked down at his hands.
They were his own—calloused from scrolls, not swords, stained with dirt and blood. But when he flexed his fingers, for the briefest instant, they blurred.
Not with fatigue.
With absence.
As if part of them existed only in recollection.
A new dread coiled in his gut.
Jorren reached into the satchel still slung across his chest—leather cracked, contents sparse.
A charred journal.
A sliver of moon-chalk.
A vial of dried ink, ground from the bile of cave moths.
And the scrap of parchment he had found in the first chamber, scrawled in a cipher older than kings.
Rule IV: The Echo may not be invoked when the soul is already unspooling.
He had not understood it before.
Now, the System voice echoed in his mind:
RULE IV VIOLATION – EXCESSIVE LOSS OF MEMORY DETECTED.
He had used the Echo three times since entering the Maw.
Once to foresee the bone-beast's lunge.
Once to glimpse the path through the fissure.
Once to know the shard had poisoned his blood.
Each time, a piece of him had been taken.
Not just memory—
substance.
First, the name of his sister.
Then the sound of his father's voice.
Then the memory of his first book, the one bound in foxhide.
He had not just used the Echo.
He had overdrawn.
And now—
The Maw was collecting.
Jorren leaned back against the cold wall, sliding down until he sat, leg trembling. His breath came in shallow pulls. He closed his eyes—not to rest, but to search the dark behind his lids.
And there, in the silence—
He heard it.
Not a voice.
Not a whisper.
But the absence of one.
A gap where a thought should be.
A space in the architecture of his mind, freshly hollowed.
Something had been erased not from memory
but from experience.
Something that had defined him.
He could not recall ever learning the Binding Sigil.
Yet he knew it.
Knew the order of the circles.
Knew the weight of each vow.
Observe: To witness the truth of the Maw.
Offer: To give of oneself, willingly.
Obliterate: To erase what must not endure.
But there were not three circles.
There was a fourth.
Tiny.
Faint.
Beneath the others.
Half-eroded, as if scratched out long ago.
A circle with no name.
Jorren's pulse slowed.
His breath stilled.
Because now he remembered—not with his mind, but with his blood—how such sigils were broken.
Not by force.
By replacement.
The fourth circle was not part of the sigil.
It was the lock.
And someone—
Long before him—
Had tried to open it.
Jorren reached toward the altar again, not to touch, but to trace the unseen curve beneath the binding. His finger hovered over the stone, trembling.
Then—
From deep within the labyrinth—
A sound.
Not the clank of bone and iron.
Softer.
A weeping.
Low.
Wet.
Human.
And beneath it—
A footfall.
Delicate.
Bare.
Not hunting.
Searching.
Jorren drew his hand back as the first drop of blood fell from his nostril.
Black.
Thick.
Glistening with things that shifted when not looked at directly.
The Maw had not taken his sight.
It was taking his time.
And somewhere in the dark—
Something that was not the bone-ward,
not the shadow,
not the flame,
Something older
Was waking up.
And it was calling his name.