---
Elara's POV
I'd barely stood up when the floor beneath me changed.
What was once smooth stone now split apart, rippling like paper soaked in too much ink. The book—still glowing faintly—hovered in front of me and then vanished into thin air.
No announcement. No guidance.
Only a whisper:
> "Welcome to the Labyrinth."
Before I could move, the space around me shifted—walls unfolded from the mist, high and seamless, made of bookshelves stacked with words I couldn't read. Pages fluttered like wings. Shadows darted between the gaps.
I was in a maze of words.
No exits. No clues. Just winding passages with echoing silence.
Until I saw him.
One of the three.
Caelum.
The silent one with ice in his veins and an unreadable gaze.
He leaned against a shelf, arms crossed. He didn't look surprised to see me. "So the Inkbearer bleeds," he said quietly, glancing at the bruises left from my last trial.
I held his gaze. "Do you live here?"
A ghost of a smile. "I am this place, in some ways. Or it is me. That's the problem, isn't it? No one knows what's real."
I frowned. "Why are you here, Caelum?"
"Maybe I'm a lie," he said. "Maybe you are."
---
The Labyrinth tests not what you know—but what you believe.
That phrase echoed as I wandered alone again. The walls began to whisper.
> "You were never enough."
"They all died because you picked up that pen."
"Aryn should have lived."
"Your father burned the storybook, and you still wrote it again."
"You brought the villain to life."
"No," I whispered. "No—I didn't—"
But every hallway repeated the same voices in different tones. Some mine. Some others. I ran through them, breathless, chasing silence.
That's when I saw the second one.
Lucien.
He was crouched beside a mirror on the floor, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling.
"I believed I was the hero once," he murmured. "The story loved me. Until I fell in love with the wrong person."
"Who?" I asked gently.
He looked up, and in his eyes, I saw flames.
> "The villain."
---
I moved on, shaken.
Every hallway bled into the next. A maze that responded to my fears. I wrote doorways, and they closed. I summoned paths, and they twisted.
Then I found the center.
It wasn't a room.
It was a scene.
Me. On the train, leaving home.
My mother screaming.
The book hidden in my bag.
Tears on my cheeks.
But in this version—my sister was gone.
> "One lie erased a life."
My knees hit the floor.
I remembered now.
I wrote my sister out of a story once.
To punish her.
To be alone.
I'd forgotten.
The ink had helped me forget.
---
"I never meant it," I whispered. "I never meant it."
The scene burned away.
Then—
The third boy appeared.
Soren.
The dangerous one. The charming mask. The one who stared too deeply.
He knelt beside me, lifted my chin. "The labyrinth only lies if you don't listen."
"Which are you?" I asked.
He smirked. "I'm whatever you wrote me to be."
---
Trial Two completed.
The book appeared again.
One line formed across the page:
> "The truth is what remains after the lies have shattered."
And beneath it:
> Your next trial begins: The Binding of the Heart.
---
End of Chapter 18