Day 380.

The sky above her had no colour. It sagged like soot pressed into a dome, heavy enough to flatten thought itself. The air did not move. It clung, dense and stagnant, the kind that sat in the chest like wet wool and made each breath feel stolen rather than earned. Liz crawled across a plain of broken concrete that may once have been streets or classrooms or hospital wards, but now was nothing but splintered slabs, jagged glass, and bones of structures that bled into each other until all sense of place had rotted away.

Every movement was deliberate not by choice but because her body had forgotten how to move any other way. Her knees dragged through shards until blood made the path behind her shine black in the ash. The skin on her palms had peeled away days ago, or weeks, or centuries—it no longer mattered. One arm no longer bent at the elbow, the joint popping in and out with every shift of weight. She barely noticed. The world itself had bent her bones.

The ruins around her shifted as she crawled. One moment she passed the outline of her high school quad, benches jutting from the soil like teeth, shade sails torn and snapping in a wind that wasn't there. The next moment it was gone, replaced by the husk of a hospital corridor, IV stands bent like crosses over a floor slick with ash. She blinked and found herself crawling through the kitchen of her old house, cupboards hanging open, every plate filled not with food but soot. The world no longer obeyed shape. It folded her memories into itself and stitched them into broken mosaics, and Liz was too empty to question.

Only one thing remained constant.

Through the smoke and ruin, she saw the cliff. A black ridge of stone that rose jagged on the horizon, veined faintly with scars of gold that never glowed. At its base stood the door. A slab of seamless steel soldered into the world's broken tooth. No frame, no hinges, no handle. Just the certainty of it, like absence given form.

Liz's body moved toward it the way a needle tilts toward iron. She didn't know when the compulsion had begun. Perhaps on the first day, when the forest spat her onto the plain. Perhaps earlier, when she was still whole enough to think in words rather than fragments. It didn't matter now. She had a direction, and in this place that was all that kept her from dissolving.

A window frame jutted from the earth ahead, its glass cracked but intact, leaning like a picture waiting to be filled. She reached toward it with trembling fingers. On the other side sat her father's recliner, the brown one with the tear in the headrest, the one she used to curl into when he was at work. For a moment she felt the ache of wanting—then the glass shattered inward and the chair collapsed into dust. She blinked through the shards and kept crawling. Nothing here lasted but the door.

A wall fragment lay on her left, remnants of wallpaper and wood. Nailed to it was a photo, half-curled at the edges. Liz saw herself grinning, flanked by Chloe and Alyssa in a photo booth, fingers raised in peace signs. Their faces had been scratched out. Not by marker. By fingers. Her own. Her blood-black nails had clawed through the paper until only gouges remained. She didn't remember doing it. She didn't need to. It had been necessary.

Her hand twitched, a bare stump of split nail catching against the wall. She stared at it without recognition. These weren't hands anymore. They were tools, raw edges used for tearing, for clawing.

The ringing in her head grew louder as she leaned her cheek against the wall for balance. "Almost there," she whispered. Her voice scraped out like rust on stone. She didn't know where "there" was, only that it was always the same direction, always toward the cliff, always toward the door.

And then she saw it, looming closer, half-buried in rubble. The steel surface was scarred with scratches. Dozens. Hundreds. Overlapping until they formed a mad tapestry of grooves and blood. Names. Carved until her fingertips split, until the bones themselves ached from the force of trying to cut steel with human fragility.

DAD. MAX. MAX JAEGER. dad dad dad dad dad.

Some letters bled fresh. Some rusted with age. Some no more than shallow etchings that had already begun to heal. She couldn't remember when she had made each mark, only that the act was constant. The scratching was the only prayer she had left, and the door was the only god that hadn't betrayed her.

She dropped to her knees before it, forehead pressed to the cold steel. It didn't yield. It never did. That was why it mattered.

Her hand trembled as she raised it, nails split to the quick, skin hanging in ribbons. She pressed the bloody stump against the surface and dragged downward, carving another desperate line.

Scratch.

The pain was nothing. The sound was everything.

"Max Jaeger," she rasped, throat raw. "Dad. Firefighter. Idiot. Hero. You said you'd come."

The steel remained still, silent, cold.

"You said I'd never be alone." Her breath cracked into a sob. "You said you'd find me."

Her palm slipped. She bit down, hard, until her teeth split skin. Blood welled, warm and copper. She smeared it against the steel and began again, this time with a jagged shard of glass she had scavenged from the ruins.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

The demon didn't stop her.

It didn't have to.

Because every mark she made was another thread woven into its skin. And still she carved, because she could no longer tell the difference between worship and resistance.

The door never opened. But it never disappeared.

And that was enough.

***

The door never moved. The cliff never crumbled. The world around her rotted and reshaped a thousand times, but this place remained, fixed like a nail through the heart of the maze. Liz came back again and again, drawn by something deeper than choice, her body dragging itself here even when she no longer remembered starting the crawl.

In the beginning she had thought it was days. A week, maybe. Then she began to mark the time. Not with clocks, not with sunrise or seasons—there were none. She made her own.

The first bone had come almost by accident. A splintered finger, still wrapped in the tatters of cloth she recognised as her own sleeve. She had placed it at the base of the cliff without thinking, a token to prove she had been here. The next day she added another. Then another. A rib. A bird's femur. A jaw with a single gold tooth. Soon the base of the door was ringed with them, white against the black stone like spokes radiating from a wheel.

Now they circled the cliff in wide spirals. Three hundred and eighty bones, give or take—she had stopped trusting her own count, but the number lived inside her like a pulse. Every day she scratched the steel and every day she placed another piece of the dead in the spiral.

A year. She had lived a year in this place. Outside, it would be weeks, maybe days. Here, every hour stretched into ten. She thought of her father searching, still believing she was gone for only a month. But the maze had already carved three hundred and eighty days into her bones. And it was still hungry.

A year.

She whispered it sometimes, lips cracking, voice shredding in the dry air. A year had passed here, though she knew—she was certain—it had been only weeks outside. Two months, maybe. She couldn't hold the numbers anymore, but the ratio stayed sharp in her mind like a thorn: ten years for every one. If Dad was looking for her—and he was, he had to be—he'd still think it had been a month. Meanwhile the maze had already stripped a year from her bones.

Her hands trembled as she traced the spiral. She had long since stopped asking where the bones came from. Some were animal. Some human. Some she knew had once been hers. She had woken more than once with less of herself than before—half a nail gone, a strip of skin peeled and missing, a tooth loosened. She wondered if the maze fed her to herself, piece by piece.

The bones didn't rot here. They gleamed pale in the dim light, as clean and permanent as the steel of the door. They were her calendar, her anchor.

She pressed her forehead to the cold surface of the door and whispered the ritual, the words ground down into habit.

"Dad. Max Jaeger. Firefighter. Idiot. Hero." Her lips bled with every syllable, but she spoke them anyway. "You said you'd come."

The maze hummed faintly in the background, almost pleased. Every scratch feeds me. Every bone is mine.

Liz clenched her eyes shut. "No. This is mine. The door remembers."

Her voice cracked into a rasp, but she pushed the words out again. If she forgot, the door wouldn't. That was the bargain she had made with herself. Every day she gave her blood, her bones, her breath, and in return the door stayed. It was cold, cruel, silent—but it was real. And in a place where everything else melted into lies, that was all she had left.

She raised her hand again, flesh split and nails long since gone, and dragged it down the steel.

Scratch.

The sound echoed through the dead air, sharp as prayer.

Scratch.

The spiral of bones seemed to lean closer.

Scratch.

Her voice followed, broken but steady: "Stay with me. Stay with me."

A year gone. A name clung to steel. And Liz still breathing.

***

That night, the world changed.

Not with thunder or fire, not with the laughter of the maze pressing against her skull. It shifted softly, like silk sliding across cracked skin. Liz closed her eyes against the door, breath rattling in and out, and when she opened them again the cliff was gone.

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She was sitting on a couch.

Not the jagged stone she had fallen against, not the cold ground carved with bones, but a couch she knew as intimately as her own heartbeat: her mother's old one, faded fabric worn soft by years of use, coffee-stain marking the left cushion, a neat tear in the seam where Liz used to stuff coins until April found them. The room around her was warm, cream-coloured walls, sunlight seeping in through curtains so faded they were nearly white.

She froze.

Her hands were clean. Whole. No scabs, no blood, no dirt clotted under nails. Her skin shone pale, soft, like it had never been dragged through ash. For a moment she couldn't breathe, not because it hurt but because it didn't. The air was clean. Real.

A bowl of soup steamed on the coffee table in front of her—miso, her favourite, with cubes of tofu bobbing in the broth. A glass of water sat beside it, clear and cold, condensation streaking down the side. A spoon lay across the rim. Metal. Smooth. Not bone.

Her body swayed toward it before her mind caught up.

Footsteps sounded from the hallway. She turned, her heart seizing.

Her mother walked in.

April Jaeger, alive. Not scorched, not broken. Just Mum. Her hair tied up in a bun, gardening sweater flecked with soil, grey sweatpants worn at the knees. She was holding a mug in both hands, smiling in the way only she ever had—soft, private, with the corners of her eyes creased.

Liz's throat closed.

"You don't have to keep bleeding, sweetheart," April said. Her voice was warm enough to melt the air. "You don't have to keep hurting. It's over."

Liz shook her head, weakly, but the scent of the soup made her stomach ache with longing.

April set the mug down, crossed the room, and sat beside her. She touched Liz's hair, stroking it back from her forehead. "You did enough. You came so far. Look at you—still alive, still breathing. That's enough."

The touch made Liz's chest convulse. It felt real. Too real. She wanted to collapse into it, to bury her face in her mother's shoulder and forget. Forget the bones. Forget the door. Forget the screaming hunger of the maze.

"No," Liz whispered, the word scraping her throat.

April tilted her head, gentle as ever. "Yes. It's time to stop fighting. Eat. Rest. Stay."

From the hallway came another sound: a man's voice. Deep. Calm. Familiar.

"Lizzy."

Her chest heaved. "Dad?"

She turned. A silhouette stood in the doorway, tall, broad, steady as the memory she had clung to through every scratch of her nails on the door. The voice rolled through the room like smoke and warmth all at once.

"You're not alone," it said. "You never were."

Her eyes blurred. Tears streamed hot and salt down her face. She stood on trembling legs, staggering toward the shadow.

"Dad," she sobbed. "Please."

The figure lifted a hand, palm open, as if waiting to catch hers.

"Come home, Lizzy. Let go."

Her hand reached for the wall to steady herself. And passed through it.

Her fingers sank into the plaster as though it were mist. She yanked back, staring in horror at her palm. The skin flickered, translucent for an instant, her fingertips already flaking into dust.

Her heart convulsed.

The soup on the table bubbled black. The water glass filled with writhing shadows. The blanket folded on the armrest curled and blackened like paper catching fire.

Liz turned back toward her mother. April still sat there, still smiling—except her lips were stretching, splitting at the corners, peeling back too far to be human.

And in the hallway, the shadow shifted. For a breath, it wasn't her father's frame at all. Broad shoulders sloped into a firefighter's jacket, hair cropped short, jaw set in a way Liz recognised too well. Ethan. Uncle Ethan. He was watching her mother, not Liz, his gaze crawling over April with a hunger Liz remembered from the corners of childhood rooms. A look she had never understood then but had felt in her bones.

The vision flickered. Back to the father's silhouette. But the sickness of it stayed.

"It doesn't have to hurt anymore," April said, her voice cracking into something lower, inhuman, vibrating from the walls themselves. "Just let the door go."

The silhouette in the hallway did not move. Its voice followed, smooth and final.

"Let him go."

Liz stumbled back, heart slamming.

"No!"

The room cracked like glass, walls sagging inward, ceiling curling away into darkness. She turned and ran—ran from the couch, from the soup, from the smile, from the shadow that kept changing shape, always watching, always wanting.

She crashed into stone. Cold. Rough. Real.

The cliff. The door.

She collapsed against it, sobbing, forehead pressed to steel. Blood leaked from fresh cracks in her skin. But it was still there. Still waiting.

She laughed through her teeth, a sound halfway to a scream. "Nice try," she croaked.

Her fingers rose, trembling, and scratched another line into the steel.

***

The door did not move. It never did. But the world around it rippled, shadows closing tighter, the forest trying to wrench her away. Liz clung to the steel until her nails bled, whispering his name, before the ground itself tilted and dragged her back into the dark.

The forest closed in like a fist.

One moment her forehead pressed against the door, steel cold and sure against her skin. The next, the trees rose again like ribs, shadows stretching like muscle. Ash seared her lungs. The laughter began softly, then swelled until the branches shook.

Not one laugh. Not one voice. All of them. Jack's chuckle, Alyssa's sneer, Chloe's soft giggle, her mother's warm exhale. Even her own. Layered together until they blurred into a single vast mouth echoing through the trees.

"Still running, Lizzy?" "So stubborn." "Is this all you are now? A body in motion until it breaks?"

Her breath hitched, panic burning her throat raw. She pushed herself upright, legs screaming, nails tearing fresh splits in her palms. She wanted to stop. Every part of her begged for it. But if she stopped the voices would crawl inside her and finish the work.

She stumbled forward.

The trees shifted with her. Branches bent low, raking at her face, curling behind her like bars. Roots coiled over the path, slick with pulsing veins, grasping for her ankles. The ground twisted and looped, spitting her past the same crooked tree again and again. A boulder split down the middle. A bird carcass with its beak torn away. Always in her way. Always watching.

She wasn't escaping. She was feeding it.

Her stomach clenched. She gagged, vomit forcing its way up her throat. It wasn't bile this time but thick, glowing red fluid — rage made physical. It steamed as it struck the dirt. The forest shuddered in delight.

"You taste like yourself, Lizzy. And that is enough."

Liz staggered forward, wiping her mouth with the back of her trembling hand. "No," she rasped. "Not you."

The trees roared with laughter, shaking so violently she thought the trunks would snap. Bark split, showers of black dust falling like ash.

The ground tilted upward beneath her. First a slope, then a climb, then a punishing ascent that dragged at her bones like iron chains. Her bare feet slipped on moss-slick roots, skin tearing open, blood streaking behind her like breadcrumbs. Every step left a piece of her behind.

Time fractured.

She passed the same slope, the same tree, the same dead bird, over and over until she felt she had lived lifetimes in the climb. Hours or weeks. Days or centuries. She had already forgotten what thirty-eight meant. Three hundred and eighty, perhaps. Or three thousand. It didn't matter. Every second was a year carved into her body.

Her legs buckled. She hit her knees hard enough to split skin. Rocks cut into her shins, blood welling thick. She pushed herself upright anyway, screaming through clenched teeth, a sound more rage than pain.

"Stay with me," she whispered. To herself. To the door. To Max.

Her body moved now not from strength, not even from will, but from spite. If the forest wanted to own her, she would drag herself just one more step further out of its grasp. One more. Always one more.

The air grew hotter with every climb, clinging to her skin like breath. It wasn't hers. She could feel it on her neck, warm, moist, intimate. Someone breathing her in, closer than skin, deeper than bone.

Her stomach lurched again. She vomited once more — this time only a thin string of black fluid flecked with teeth. Her teeth.

The forest roared, delighted.

"You see? We don't take, Lizzy. You give." "Every mile. Every scream. Every thought you won't let go." "All of it feeds us."

Her throat ripped open on the word: "No!"

She clawed forward on hands and knees, palms raw, knees leaving smears of blood behind. The ground was no longer earth but something warmer, slicker. It pulsed under her like muscle flexing beneath skin, shivering with every touch. She crawled across it anyway, leaving her blood as tithe.

At the crest she collapsed against something that wasn't stone at all.

A ribcage.

Massive, half-buried, hollowed and blackened as if charred from within. The curve of it rose above her, jagged, skeletal, shaped like a crown of thorns. She scrambled back in shock, but behind her the trees folded shut. No retreat. No air.

Forward. Always forward.

She shoved herself through another thicket, branches tearing her clothes, slicing her cheek. A root snapped tight around her ankle, peeling skin as it tore free. Her vision swam, black spots dancing across her eyes, but she kept moving. Always moving. Until her body finally gave out.

She dropped beside a rotting stump, chest heaving, face pressed into the warm dirt.

The laughter quieted.

Only because it no longer needed to chase.

"You were never escaping," the voice whispered, not from the trees but from within her bones. "You've been running deeper and deeper into me."

***

Liz didn't remember falling. Only the stillness that followed.

Her body lay curled beneath the arch of a root system, vast and tangled, twisted into a crown of thorns overhead. The soil beneath her was damp and spongy, swollen with something that pulsed slowly, like blood moving under bruised skin. Every breath she drew scraped her throat raw.

Her lips split when she tried to speak. Her tongue was too dry to form words. Dirt and blood caked her hands where they trembled against her ribs, and her legs had gone numb, stolen by the forest until they felt like nothing but dead weight dragging behind her.

She tried to remember her name. Nothing came.

What was I before this?

The thought moved through her head like smoke, impossible to hold. She remembered whispering it once—Liz—but the syllables no longer belonged to her. Her name felt like a stranger's; a sound borrowed from another life. If the door did not hold it for her, she would have nothing. Not Liz. Not daughter. Not anyone. Layer by layer the maze had stripped her down: her voice, her body, her memories. What remained was not a girl. Not a daughter. Not a student or a friend. Just a hollow shape with breath rattling inside.

Something shifted beside her.

Not sudden. Not violent. Just a slow adjustment of weight, like an old body settling deeper into the dirt. The roots around her creaked in answer. The ground pressed against her ear as though it wanted to listen.

Liz didn't lift her head. She couldn't.

"You stopped running," said a voice. Low. Calm. Intimate. Not cruel, which somehow made it worse. "Good girl."

Her throat clicked. A dry sound, half sob, half laugh.

"You see it now, don't you?" the voice went on. "You were never in a maze."

The roots flexed overhead, groaning like bones under strain.

"You are the maze."

Her eyelids fluttered open. She pressed her cheek deeper into the soil, as though she could sink through it and vanish. Her broken laugh cracked again, too weak to be sound.

The presence didn't move closer. It didn't need to.

"Every scream you carried. Every memory you clung to. Every heartbeat wasted on ghosts… all of it fed me. You thought you were escaping, but every step was another stitch in my skin."

Faces flickered through her skull.

Dad. Chloe. Alyssa. Jack. Mum.

Memory cut sharp as glass: the chalk circle, candlelight guttering, her palm bleeding into the floor, her own voice begging. Give me anything. Just bring her back.

She had done it. She had brought April back. And lost her again in fire.

Now there was nothing left. Only a whisper trapped inside her own bones.

Her lips moved. No sound came. Not her mother's name. Not even her own. Only one word shaped itself against her teeth.

"Dad."

The air pulsed in answer. Once. Then again. A faint warmth brushed against her skin, fragile as the glow of a coal. For a moment she almost believed it. That he was there. Reaching.

But the voice coiled tighter through her skull.

"Don't waste yourself on shadows. Your father can't reach you here. No one can. Not Max. Not Dan. Not anyone."

The warmth faltered. The roots quivered.

"Let me in, Lizzy." The voice softened, stroking her mind like a hand over tangled hair. "I'll be your mother's voice. Your father's hand. Jack's laugh. I'll be everyone you've ever loved, until you can't tell the difference."

Her body curled tighter, arms wrapping around her chest as if she could shield what little remained inside. Her mouth worked, but no words came. Only the sound of her own ragged breath.

In the end she gave nothing back.

Only silence.

But her fingers moved.

Weak, trembling, half-bone and half-scab, they scratched at the dirt beside her. A broken gesture. A child's defiance. They drew letters she couldn't see but knew by shape, carving the only name she had left into the soil.

M A X

The roots quivered, the voice waiting for her to surrender. But Liz pressed her bloody fingertips harder into the dirt, gouging deeper even as her skin tore.

"Max," she mouthed without sound.

The demon's whisper coiled tighter, hungry.

Her silence bled into the dirt, her fingertips carving until skin split, until bone struck stone. Three hundred and eighty days. Three hundred and eighty scratches. Three hundred and eighty prayers unanswered. And still she carved. The forest whispered, the demon pressed closer, but Liz had only one word left. One anchor. She carved it again, letters jagged, bloody, defiant.

M A X.

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