This Shitty Maze Isn’t OSHA Compliant!
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SaintJibblies
[VERIFIED SHITTERBOX]
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I left without much ceremony.
No grand send-off, no final blessing from the Greybeards. Just a pack of supplies I didn't need, a few scrolls I couldn't use, and the gnawing certainty that the longer I stayed up here, the more I'd turn into part of the mountain.
Solveig didn't say goodbye. Kaelen nodded once, like a soldier acknowledging retreat. Arngeir simply watched me go.
Smart man.
The descent from High Hrothgar was silent, save for my own footfalls and the occasional crack of frost underfoot. The snow thinned as I passed beneath the clouds, the sky widening into pale, shapeless grey.
It should've been peaceful.
But something was off.
I stopped walking.
That wasn't normal.
Even for me.
I looked around. No obvious landmark. Just mist. Pine trees. A sloped ridge I didn't remember from the climb up. The path behind me had vanished—not in a metaphorical sense. I turned to trace my steps and found nothing but untouched snow and a treeline that hadn't been there ten seconds ago.
"…Okay."
And then I saw it.
Stone jutting from the earth like broken fingers. Overgrown. Cracked. Not Draugr crypt stone—this was older. Smoother. Wrong.
A door half-buried in rock sat between two leaning arches, carved with spirals I couldn't read.
Not Nordic.
Not Dwemer.
Not anything I recognized.
"Fantastic," I muttered. "Exactly what I needed. A bugged dungeon with a poetic subtitle."
I stepped closer. Moss clung to the stone like veins. The air smelled wet. Like mold and secrets. And underneath it all, a faint vibration in my bones—like something behind the door was humming. Or breathing.
There were no torches. No lanterns. No guiding signs.
Just an entrance, waiting.
Inviting.
I looked around once more, but the world behind me remained quiet. No watchers. No birds.
"Sure," I muttered, drawing my cloak tighter. "Let's go off-script."
I stepped inside.
And the door closed itself behind me.
Inside was dark—but not the normal cave-dark of Skyrim. This darkness moved. It pressed like smoke against my robes, curling softly, parting just enough for me to see a few steps ahead, as if guiding me forward.
I held up one skeletal hand, expecting the usual flare of candlelight or magelight.
Nothing happened.
"Oh good," I muttered. "It's one of those."
I moved forward slowly. The passage felt narrow, smooth, but oddly organic—walls curving gently like I was inside some ancient throat. The air was damp but not stale—more like breathing mist.
Then the hall opened into a chamber, perfectly spherical, floor polished smooth. In the center floated a single orb, about the size of my skull, suspended by nothing visible. It shimmered faintly, like liquid silver.
Below it, glowing softly, words formed from thin air:
A voice unspoken holds the way. A truth withheld reveals the path.
Cryptic bullshit. My favorite.
I reached toward the orb—carefully.
It immediately shifted color, turning dark red, humming a warning.
I pulled back.
Okay. Touching: bad. Got it.
I spoke aloud, testing, "Reveal the path."
The orb flickered white, then back to silver, as if confused.
Not the right answer.
I tried again, improvising: "...I am lost?"
Red again.
Great.
I paced, thinking. No spell, no touch, no spoken answer...
Then I realized what I hadn't tried.
I stood still and said nothing. I withheld speech deliberately, letting silence hang.
Slowly, the orb deepened from silver to a radiant gold. A low vibration filled the room, resonating in my ribs.
The floor rippled like water, stone dissolving into liquid darkness. A set of narrow stairs spiraled downward, shimmering faintly as if lit from beneath by starlight.
I stared down, frowning.
"I hate it when dungeons try to teach me moral lessons."
"I rescind my humility."
The stairs held steady. Apparently, sarcasm was permitted.
I sighed. "Fine. Lesson learned. Time to find whatever cryptic nonsense is waiting downstairs."
I descended deeper into the silence, each step solidifying only moments before I set foot upon it. And behind me, unseen, the orb quietly followed—glowing with patient curiosity.
The stairs led down into stillness.
No dripping. No breeze. Just the low, constant hum of something vast and patient. My footsteps didn't echo. The air absorbed sound like velvet.
At the bottom: a hall. Seamless stone, walls too smooth, geometry too clean—uncanny in the way perfect symmetry always is. The kind of place you feel before you understand it.
And lining the sides of the corridor were mirrors.
Not glass. Not Dwemer metal. These were reflective surfaces grown from the walls themselves—curved and black and impossibly deep. They didn't show my reflection.
They showed... versions.
In the first, I was human again. Pale, tired, wearing the same robes but with eyes like empty wells. I looked afraid.
In the second, I was maskless. A hollow face. No skin. Just ivory bone weeping black mist from the sockets. That one smiled.
I kept walking.
The mirrors shifted. Responded. I slowed down, and the next one showed me still—motionless, entombed in stone, vines growing over a frozen shape in the same robes I wore now. Dead, but revered. Like a saint. Or a warning.
I quickened my pace.
The next reflection showed me sprinting—away from something unseen, robes tattered, mask cracked down the middle, one hand bleeding stars. I passed it without stopping.
Then the hallway changed.
Not visibly. Just… the floor tilted by half a degree. The temperature dipped. Barely perceptible. Subtle signs of a new mechanic.
I reached a room shaped like a cube turned on its side—no gravity to speak of. Floor, wall, ceiling, corner—didn't matter. Orientation was a suggestion.
And floating dead-center: a single white thread. Taut. Glowing. Humming like the note of a tuning fork buried inside my skull.
Naturally, I ignored it. I stepped around it, keeping my distance.
As I did, the thread shifted slightly toward me. Not moved—leaned. As if curious.
I didn't move.
The thread rotated midair. A 90-degree turn without any visual transition, like it had always been in that position and reality had just caught up.
The mirrors in the last room hadn't shown this.
This wasn't a reflection.
This was a reaction.
I left the thread untouched. The room stayed still.
But as I crossed into the next corridor, the walls rippled. Just once. As if sighing.
And then I realized something chilling:
None of the spaces behind me remained.
I stood there for a moment. Just long enough to feel it:
Whatever this place was, it didn't want to kill me.
It wanted to see what I did.
And that was worse.
The corridor narrowed until I had to turn sideways to pass.
Then the walls blinked out of existence.
One moment I was in a hallway. The next, I was standing in an infinite void made of angle. Not darkness. Not space. Just endless geometric contradiction. Surfaces folded inward and past themselves, recursive corners where corners shouldn't be. Triangles that somehow had four sides. Stairs that looped upward forever but also ended right behind me.
"That's not ominous at all."
The void hummed.
Not with noise—but meaning. It wanted me to walk. But direction meant nothing here. There was no "forward." The concept was being actively disassembled in real time.
I stepped diagonally.
The space shifted. The angles hiccupped, unfolded like petals made of impossible dimensions. For half a second, I saw myself from five directions at once.
Then I was in a room.
Square. Clean. Normal.
Or so it seemed.
There were three doors. Each one identical—black stone frame, no handle. On the floor in front of them, an inscription burned faintly:
Only one door is real. You cannot guess. You cannot test. You must know.
I stared at the doors.
I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything.
But one of the doors... felt like it knew me. Not in the way friends do. In the way a tooth knows a nerve.
I walked toward the rightmost door.
Not because I thought it was real.
But because it remembered I had once walked through something just like it.
The door didn't open.
It just wasn't there anymore.
And I stepped through.
The next step landed on stone.
Cold, rough, Nordic-carved.
I blinked, trying to orient myself, half-expecting the angles to dissolve again—but they didn't. I was standing in a long, rectangular chamber, unmistakably Nordic in architecture: grey walls, carved pillars, high-vaulted ceiling. Dust motes danced in amber light from fire sconces on the walls.
The air was warm. The smell was right—aged stone, ancient ash, nothing threatening.
It looked like every other ancient barrow I'd ever broken into, minus the Draugr stench and existential dread.
That was the problem.
Nothing was wrong.
And that was very wrong.
The floor was clean.
The carvings were crisp.
The torches didn't flicker.
And in the center of the room, resting on a black stone pedestal, sat a Nordic burial urn.
Standard. Bronze. Familiar.
Too familiar.
It sat there like it wanted to be looted. As if the room was daring me to open it.
My hands itched.
Not from greed. From narrative conditioning. My brain expected a trap. My instincts didn't. That contradiction made my spine hum.
I didn't move. I just stared at the urn.
The moment stretched.
I chose nothing.
And the urn twitched.
Just slightly. Not a jump. Not a movement.
A single frame of visual error.
The pedestal dipped by half an inch.
The torchlight bent—toward it.
I turned my head slowly. One of the wall carvings—previously depicting a Nordic battle scene—had changed.
Now it showed a figure in robes, staring at a burial urn.
My mask stared back at me from the carving's surface.
"Right," I said aloud, voice echoing. "This isn't a room. It's a mirror maze in drag."
The walls blurred.
The room dissolved.
And I stepped into something deeper.
The world snapped back into place like a stage curtain dropping.
Stone underfoot again. But wrong, somehow. Too dry. Too brittle. As if it had been burned from the inside out.
Before me stretched a corridor—no markings, no lights. Just a tunnel carved by something that didn't understand space the way humans do. It twisted slightly to the left, then kinked back on itself like a bent rib.
"…Oh no," I muttered.
I stepped forward.
The air shimmered, and the walls breathed. Not literally—but the way they pulled inward and out like lungs filled with silent laughter.
Then came the first branch—a T-intersection.
To the left: flickering candlelight. Warm. Inviting. Something about it tugged at the hollow behind my sternum.
To the right: cold blue stone and a sharp curve into darkness.
"…What."
I chose Right. My gut felt locked down tight—anger, anxiety, something defensive. The hallway narrowed. Tightened. The air turned biting cold, like shame that never thawed.
My breathing hitched.
The walls pressed closer.
I kept walking. Said nothing.
The corridor choked in tighter. My shoulders brushed the sides now. Cold mist clung to my mask.
So I tried something. I stopped.
Inhaled.
Said quietly, "I'm afraid."
The walls relaxed. Just barely.
A pulse ran through the stone like a heartbeat.
And then the path shifted downward.
Not with stairs. Just… a slow slope, bending space until gravity tilted in a new direction. My feet followed without thinking.
At the bottom: three doors, each one pulsing faintly with color.
Red.
Grey.
Amber.
"…Okay, you're broken."
But I didn't have time to debug my imaginary UI. I stepped toward Amber, just to see what would happen.
The moment I touched the surface, it turned black, and the other two doors slammed shut like angry jaws.
The air changed again.
The hallway reformed.
But now… it smelled like ink.
And I heard something impossible—
Whispers in my own voice, saying words I hadn't spoken yet.
I fell for what felt like minutes.
No impact.
No sound.
Just stillness, and then—floor.
Cold stone again. Real enough. Enough to stand on.
Above me: a ceiling made of water, holding perfectly still.
Around me: six archways, equally spaced. Identical. Too perfect.
And directly ahead, in the center of the room, was a mask.
Not mine.
Not the Daedric one. Not the bone thing I'd crafted as a second skin.
This one was carved obsidian, featureless, reflecting no light—just shadows. And it pulsed faintly, like it was breathing.
I took the only real option.
I stepped toward the mask.
And the archways opened.
Six of them.
Each belched out a figure.
Each one… me.
But not.
They surrounded me in a ring.
And all at once, they spoke. In my voice. But wrong.
"You don't deserve a face."
"You were never real."
"We carried you."
"You only learned to lie better."
"We kept you safe."
"You forgot who broke first."
I said nothing.
I stared at them.
Each one a role I'd worn. Each one a coping mechanism with teeth.
I stepped toward The Machine.
It tilted its head. "You needed me. Precision kept you from error. We had rules."
"I don't want to be rules anymore," I said.
And smashed my fist into its face.
It cracked like glass. Light poured out. The sound it made wasn't pain—it was release.
And then the others stepped forward.
Not hostile. Not angry.
Just... waiting.
I turned back to the central pedestal.
The obsidian mask was gone.
In its place—
A mirror.
Perfect.
Flat.
Untouched.
I stepped up.
And saw myself.
Not the mask.
Not the system interface.
Not the skeleton or the mage or the myth.
Just a man.
Tired.
Still standing.
The room cracked at the edges.
The floor pulled away.
The ceiling fell.
And then—
I was outside.
On a cliff overlooking a forest I'd never seen.
Birds wheeled in the air. The sun hurt.
I exhaled.
And for the first time since entering the Deep—
I didn't hear the System at all.
No grand send-off, no final blessing from the Greybeards. Just a pack of supplies I didn't need, a few scrolls I couldn't use, and the gnawing certainty that the longer I stayed up here, the more I'd turn into part of the mountain.
Solveig didn't say goodbye. Kaelen nodded once, like a soldier acknowledging retreat. Arngeir simply watched me go.
Smart man.
The descent from High Hrothgar was silent, save for my own footfalls and the occasional crack of frost underfoot. The snow thinned as I passed beneath the clouds, the sky widening into pale, shapeless grey.
It should've been peaceful.
But something was off.
I stopped walking.
That wasn't normal.
Even for me.
I looked around. No obvious landmark. Just mist. Pine trees. A sloped ridge I didn't remember from the climb up. The path behind me had vanished—not in a metaphorical sense. I turned to trace my steps and found nothing but untouched snow and a treeline that hadn't been there ten seconds ago.
"…Okay."
And then I saw it.
Stone jutting from the earth like broken fingers. Overgrown. Cracked. Not Draugr crypt stone—this was older. Smoother. Wrong.
A door half-buried in rock sat between two leaning arches, carved with spirals I couldn't read.
Not Nordic.
Not Dwemer.
Not anything I recognized.
"Fantastic," I muttered. "Exactly what I needed. A bugged dungeon with a poetic subtitle."
I stepped closer. Moss clung to the stone like veins. The air smelled wet. Like mold and secrets. And underneath it all, a faint vibration in my bones—like something behind the door was humming. Or breathing.
There were no torches. No lanterns. No guiding signs.
Just an entrance, waiting.
Inviting.
I looked around once more, but the world behind me remained quiet. No watchers. No birds.
"Sure," I muttered, drawing my cloak tighter. "Let's go off-script."
I stepped inside.
And the door closed itself behind me.
Inside was dark—but not the normal cave-dark of Skyrim. This darkness moved. It pressed like smoke against my robes, curling softly, parting just enough for me to see a few steps ahead, as if guiding me forward.
I held up one skeletal hand, expecting the usual flare of candlelight or magelight.
Nothing happened.
"Oh good," I muttered. "It's one of those."
I moved forward slowly. The passage felt narrow, smooth, but oddly organic—walls curving gently like I was inside some ancient throat. The air was damp but not stale—more like breathing mist.
Then the hall opened into a chamber, perfectly spherical, floor polished smooth. In the center floated a single orb, about the size of my skull, suspended by nothing visible. It shimmered faintly, like liquid silver.
Below it, glowing softly, words formed from thin air:
A voice unspoken holds the way. A truth withheld reveals the path.
Cryptic bullshit. My favorite.
I reached toward the orb—carefully.
It immediately shifted color, turning dark red, humming a warning.
I pulled back.
Okay. Touching: bad. Got it.
I spoke aloud, testing, "Reveal the path."
The orb flickered white, then back to silver, as if confused.
Not the right answer.
I tried again, improvising: "...I am lost?"
Red again.
Great.
I paced, thinking. No spell, no touch, no spoken answer...
Then I realized what I hadn't tried.
I stood still and said nothing. I withheld speech deliberately, letting silence hang.
Slowly, the orb deepened from silver to a radiant gold. A low vibration filled the room, resonating in my ribs.
The floor rippled like water, stone dissolving into liquid darkness. A set of narrow stairs spiraled downward, shimmering faintly as if lit from beneath by starlight.
I stared down, frowning.
"I hate it when dungeons try to teach me moral lessons."
"I rescind my humility."
The stairs held steady. Apparently, sarcasm was permitted.
I sighed. "Fine. Lesson learned. Time to find whatever cryptic nonsense is waiting downstairs."
I descended deeper into the silence, each step solidifying only moments before I set foot upon it. And behind me, unseen, the orb quietly followed—glowing with patient curiosity.
The stairs led down into stillness.
No dripping. No breeze. Just the low, constant hum of something vast and patient. My footsteps didn't echo. The air absorbed sound like velvet.
At the bottom: a hall. Seamless stone, walls too smooth, geometry too clean—uncanny in the way perfect symmetry always is. The kind of place you feel before you understand it.
And lining the sides of the corridor were mirrors.
Not glass. Not Dwemer metal. These were reflective surfaces grown from the walls themselves—curved and black and impossibly deep. They didn't show my reflection.
They showed... versions.
In the first, I was human again. Pale, tired, wearing the same robes but with eyes like empty wells. I looked afraid.
In the second, I was maskless. A hollow face. No skin. Just ivory bone weeping black mist from the sockets. That one smiled.
I kept walking.
The mirrors shifted. Responded. I slowed down, and the next one showed me still—motionless, entombed in stone, vines growing over a frozen shape in the same robes I wore now. Dead, but revered. Like a saint. Or a warning.
I quickened my pace.
The next reflection showed me sprinting—away from something unseen, robes tattered, mask cracked down the middle, one hand bleeding stars. I passed it without stopping.
Then the hallway changed.
Not visibly. Just… the floor tilted by half a degree. The temperature dipped. Barely perceptible. Subtle signs of a new mechanic.
I reached a room shaped like a cube turned on its side—no gravity to speak of. Floor, wall, ceiling, corner—didn't matter. Orientation was a suggestion.
And floating dead-center: a single white thread. Taut. Glowing. Humming like the note of a tuning fork buried inside my skull.
Naturally, I ignored it. I stepped around it, keeping my distance.
As I did, the thread shifted slightly toward me. Not moved—leaned. As if curious.
I didn't move.
The thread rotated midair. A 90-degree turn without any visual transition, like it had always been in that position and reality had just caught up.
The mirrors in the last room hadn't shown this.
This wasn't a reflection.
This was a reaction.
I left the thread untouched. The room stayed still.
But as I crossed into the next corridor, the walls rippled. Just once. As if sighing.
And then I realized something chilling:
None of the spaces behind me remained.
I stood there for a moment. Just long enough to feel it:
Whatever this place was, it didn't want to kill me.
It wanted to see what I did.
And that was worse.
The corridor narrowed until I had to turn sideways to pass.
Then the walls blinked out of existence.
One moment I was in a hallway. The next, I was standing in an infinite void made of angle. Not darkness. Not space. Just endless geometric contradiction. Surfaces folded inward and past themselves, recursive corners where corners shouldn't be. Triangles that somehow had four sides. Stairs that looped upward forever but also ended right behind me.
"That's not ominous at all."
The void hummed.
Not with noise—but meaning. It wanted me to walk. But direction meant nothing here. There was no "forward." The concept was being actively disassembled in real time.
I stepped diagonally.
The space shifted. The angles hiccupped, unfolded like petals made of impossible dimensions. For half a second, I saw myself from five directions at once.
Then I was in a room.
Square. Clean. Normal.
Or so it seemed.
There were three doors. Each one identical—black stone frame, no handle. On the floor in front of them, an inscription burned faintly:
Only one door is real. You cannot guess. You cannot test. You must know.
I stared at the doors.
I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything.
But one of the doors... felt like it knew me. Not in the way friends do. In the way a tooth knows a nerve.
I walked toward the rightmost door.
Not because I thought it was real.
But because it remembered I had once walked through something just like it.
The door didn't open.
It just wasn't there anymore.
And I stepped through.
The next step landed on stone.
Cold, rough, Nordic-carved.
I blinked, trying to orient myself, half-expecting the angles to dissolve again—but they didn't. I was standing in a long, rectangular chamber, unmistakably Nordic in architecture: grey walls, carved pillars, high-vaulted ceiling. Dust motes danced in amber light from fire sconces on the walls.
The air was warm. The smell was right—aged stone, ancient ash, nothing threatening.
It looked like every other ancient barrow I'd ever broken into, minus the Draugr stench and existential dread.
That was the problem.
Nothing was wrong.
And that was very wrong.
The floor was clean.
The carvings were crisp.
The torches didn't flicker.
And in the center of the room, resting on a black stone pedestal, sat a Nordic burial urn.
Standard. Bronze. Familiar.
Too familiar.
It sat there like it wanted to be looted. As if the room was daring me to open it.
My hands itched.
Not from greed. From narrative conditioning. My brain expected a trap. My instincts didn't. That contradiction made my spine hum.
I didn't move. I just stared at the urn.
The moment stretched.
I chose nothing.
And the urn twitched.
Just slightly. Not a jump. Not a movement.
A single frame of visual error.
The pedestal dipped by half an inch.
The torchlight bent—toward it.
I turned my head slowly. One of the wall carvings—previously depicting a Nordic battle scene—had changed.
Now it showed a figure in robes, staring at a burial urn.
My mask stared back at me from the carving's surface.
"Right," I said aloud, voice echoing. "This isn't a room. It's a mirror maze in drag."
The walls blurred.
The room dissolved.
And I stepped into something deeper.
The world snapped back into place like a stage curtain dropping.
Stone underfoot again. But wrong, somehow. Too dry. Too brittle. As if it had been burned from the inside out.
Before me stretched a corridor—no markings, no lights. Just a tunnel carved by something that didn't understand space the way humans do. It twisted slightly to the left, then kinked back on itself like a bent rib.
"…Oh no," I muttered.
I stepped forward.
The air shimmered, and the walls breathed. Not literally—but the way they pulled inward and out like lungs filled with silent laughter.
Then came the first branch—a T-intersection.
To the left: flickering candlelight. Warm. Inviting. Something about it tugged at the hollow behind my sternum.
To the right: cold blue stone and a sharp curve into darkness.
"…What."
I chose Right. My gut felt locked down tight—anger, anxiety, something defensive. The hallway narrowed. Tightened. The air turned biting cold, like shame that never thawed.
My breathing hitched.
The walls pressed closer.
I kept walking. Said nothing.
The corridor choked in tighter. My shoulders brushed the sides now. Cold mist clung to my mask.
So I tried something. I stopped.
Inhaled.
Said quietly, "I'm afraid."
The walls relaxed. Just barely.
A pulse ran through the stone like a heartbeat.
And then the path shifted downward.
Not with stairs. Just… a slow slope, bending space until gravity tilted in a new direction. My feet followed without thinking.
At the bottom: three doors, each one pulsing faintly with color.
Red.
Grey.
Amber.
"…Okay, you're broken."
But I didn't have time to debug my imaginary UI. I stepped toward Amber, just to see what would happen.
The moment I touched the surface, it turned black, and the other two doors slammed shut like angry jaws.
The air changed again.
The hallway reformed.
But now… it smelled like ink.
And I heard something impossible—
Whispers in my own voice, saying words I hadn't spoken yet.
I fell for what felt like minutes.
No impact.
No sound.
Just stillness, and then—floor.
Cold stone again. Real enough. Enough to stand on.
Above me: a ceiling made of water, holding perfectly still.
Around me: six archways, equally spaced. Identical. Too perfect.
And directly ahead, in the center of the room, was a mask.
Not mine.
Not the Daedric one. Not the bone thing I'd crafted as a second skin.
This one was carved obsidian, featureless, reflecting no light—just shadows. And it pulsed faintly, like it was breathing.
I took the only real option.
I stepped toward the mask.
And the archways opened.
Six of them.
Each belched out a figure.
Each one… me.
But not.
- The Warrior – Heavy armor, blade on back, mask cracked from battle. Eyes cold. Mouth silent.
- The Coward – Pale. Unarmed. Maskless. Trembling, shifting weight from foot to foot.
- The Trickster – Laughing softly. Dressed in stolen robes, mask made of mirrored shards.
- The Tyrant – Floating slightly above the ground. Robes like smoke. Mask fused to flesh.
- The Martyr – Bloodied. Holding a broken staff. Doesn't speak—only bleeds.
- The Machine – Eyes glowing blue. Limbs jointed wrong. Voice flat and recursive.
They surrounded me in a ring.
And all at once, they spoke. In my voice. But wrong.
"You don't deserve a face."
"You were never real."
"We carried you."
"You only learned to lie better."
"We kept you safe."
"You forgot who broke first."
I said nothing.
I stared at them.
Each one a role I'd worn. Each one a coping mechanism with teeth.
I stepped toward The Machine.
It tilted its head. "You needed me. Precision kept you from error. We had rules."
"I don't want to be rules anymore," I said.
And smashed my fist into its face.
It cracked like glass. Light poured out. The sound it made wasn't pain—it was release.
And then the others stepped forward.
Not hostile. Not angry.
Just... waiting.
I turned back to the central pedestal.
The obsidian mask was gone.
In its place—
A mirror.
Perfect.
Flat.
Untouched.
I stepped up.
And saw myself.
Not the mask.
Not the system interface.
Not the skeleton or the mage or the myth.
Just a man.
Tired.
Still standing.
The room cracked at the edges.
The floor pulled away.
The ceiling fell.
And then—
I was outside.
On a cliff overlooking a forest I'd never seen.
Birds wheeled in the air. The sun hurt.
I exhaled.
And for the first time since entering the Deep—
I didn't hear the System at all.
