Chapter Text
“The moral of this story is:
Beware the man who faces you unarmed.
If in his eyes you are not the target, then you can be sure you are the weapon.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six
Atsumu opened his eyes to the pale white dome of a high ceiling, back flat against the cool marble floor.
He must be back inside the Labyrinth again, a new section of it this time judging from the unfamiliar hall he was in with its great central staircase and two other ones running up its sides. He noticed that the central one led into another hall, while the two smaller ones branched off into separate passages. From where he was, he couldn’t determine where these led to.
The walls around him were streaked with gold, the air crystalline clear, a prism giving the impression that the place was glinting off itself. He was awed by the sheer grandeur of what he was seeing.
Usually the halls weren’t this brightly illuminated, but he wasn’t about to complain. The last time he had appeared here he had been in a ghastly, cell-like chamber, barely able to see five metres ahead of himself. It didn’t help that stretching from floor to ceiling was a large painting of what looked like a macabre battlefield, manic brushstrokes depicting a gory bloodbath and bodies piled up high next to a lone victor facing away from the observer, a symbol of doom and destruction. His hackles had immediately risen at the scene.
Needless to say, he had immediately hightailed it out of there.
Most of the places he had ever been to in the Labyrinth had works of art on display, all equally morbid and disturbing, and this hall was no exception. On both sides of the central staircase and directly in front of the side staircases were two monumental marble statues of faceless human figures, easily nine or ten times his own height, interlocked in battle. Each had a weapon raised in motion and these were clashed together, forming an ‘X’ above the steps.
He spent a few moments appreciating the statues’ expertly captured forms and how their weapons gleamed in the light. He liked making up stories about how and where each artwork or statue was made, even though he suspected that the entire Labyrinth was just an elaborate lie constructed by his subconscious.
Looking around again, he paid more attention to what the hall contained this time. It was completely bare apart from these features, no path leading elsewhere behind him, so he decided to move on, walking up the stairs into the next hall.
He had been dreaming about the Labyrinth for as long as he could remember, periodically every few months or so on completely random nights. It was so named by him exactly because of its eerie, maze-like quality. Endless and confusing with impossibly grand architecture, full of unexpected dead ends and secret passages going in circles and sometimes even non-Euclidean geometry, it always made his head spin.
Entirely devoid of life and horrible in its majesty, he had wandered through its tortuous halls and chambers ever since the first dream that arrived when he was a young child.
Sometimes he would only catch a glimpse of the Labyrinth before he was whisked away into another dream, sometimes he remained in it for what felt like hours. But the catch was that he would only ever remember all his instances of being there when he was actually back in it again, and never when he woke up in the real world.
He wasn’t quite sure why this would happen every time without fail, but it wasn’t as if he could ask anyone about it, given that he would have forgotten all about his recurring dreams of this particular place.
The next hall was not quite as remarkable as the previous one in the sense that it was a simple rectangular room, save for the murmuring of flowing water that he could hear as he crossed the threshold, which revealed a fountain in the shape of an impossible triangle. It had a tiny navigator figurine holding up a cracked compass perched on its highest point. Water from the base of the waterfall appeared to run downhill along the water path before reaching the top of the waterfall.
He stared, mesmerised by the sight.
It had no colour to speak of and a fine mist rose out of the ice-white foam where the waterfall hit the granite of the fountain, casting a miniscule rainbow in the air and further adding to the fountain’s mystique.
But this wasn’t even close to the most astonishing thing he had ever seen in the Labyrinth. He recalled a hall where dense clouds drifted lazily in the air right next to him as he had walked; another fog-filled one where statues of weeping children were cloaked in hazy grey mist, and yet another where the floor, walls and staircases curled and curved with every step he took as if someone had slid fisheye lens over his eyes. It had been hell to get through that one in particular.
No matter where he was, he had never seen any sort of indication that the Labyrinth terminated somewhere. There was no start or end to the place, only the regular progression of halls and passageways into the far distance.
His usual way of dealing with being in the Labyrinth was to explore a few halls to pass the time while he waited for the tingling sensation that would compel him to fall asleep and wake up in the real world.
He didn’t consider himself to be an art appreciator at all, but there was only one way to keep himself entertained in these vast, empty halls. So he had taken to slowly savouring every minute detail of the artworks found everywhere within these halls, and not just via observation: sometimes he tried to climb onto the statues and monuments too.
Walking over so as to get a closer look at the fountain, he ran his hand through the waterfall, feeling the cool water catch in the cup of his palm. An impulsive notion to do something silly ran through his mind; in a swift movement he flung the water in his palm out towards where the light in the hall seemed to be coming from, a bright patch tucked away into a corner, and tracked the graceful arc of the water droplets.
And for a moment he swore they hung suspended in midair, shimmering.
Atsumu opened his eyes to the concave whiteness of a ceiling stretching out above him, his body lying strangely on a raised platform. He shifted and sat upright.
Some distance away guarding an entrance out of this hall were two identical stone statues of inconceivable chimeras, indescribable in the sense that there was some force at work that caused his eyes to conveniently slide off the spaces they occupied whenever he tried to get a good look at them.
He saw glimpses of a few features nonetheless; monstrous heads, sanguine eyes, long lean bodies and tails. There was a strange feeling that he had seen the statues somewhere before in the real world, a childhood memory lurking just out of reach in the depths of his subconscious.
He made his way off the platform and turned around. Now that he was on flat ground, he realised he was previously on an altar of some sort, lighted candles framing the apse it was situated in.
Their flames cast strange shadows on the walls that danced as if they were alive, creating a haunting effect. There was the heady, intoxicating scent of burning incense in the air.
His gaze travelled upwards, and his breath caught in his throat.
Rising high above the rest of the room was a mural made of stained glass in varying shades of emerald and ruby and volcanic obsidian, rendering a portrait of a man dressed in green robes once again facing away from the viewer, with his arms raised up high as if praising the sun.
The giant crimson orb positioned in the centre of a soot grey sky dripped red onto the mossy ground. From where he stood the red of the bottom panels reflected onto the bone-white of the altar, as if bathing it in blood.
How creepy.
He was about to move on, but something about the man shown in the mural made him pause mid-stride.
Then it clicked in his mind.
He had no way of confirming it, but he had a sneaking suspicion that this was the same man that was depicted in the battlefield painting he saw some time ago. It would certainly explain the recurring themes of death and decay in these artworks.
A few minutes of ogling later, he decided to proceed into the adjacent hall, all the while trying to shake off a sense of deja vu that there was something familiar about the shrine-like place, as though it was some forgotten temple that he had visited once upon a dream.
He passed through the narrow, bamboo-paved passageway, and stepped out to find himself in a large atrium.
He blinked. This was surprising.
It was the first time he didn’t emerge in yet another hall. After going through so many of them he had taken it for granted that the Labyrinth solely consisted of a network of rooms connected to three others at most; now that he thought about it, he had no idea where this conception came from.
Perhaps it was because he always randomly spawned somewhere in the Labyrinth and had never stumbled on the same hall more than twice. It made trying to chart his way through the labyrinth extraordinarily difficult and he had quickly given up on his barely started task.
He had assumed there was no central location from which many of the halls could be accessed at once, but clearly he was wrong. Maybe he should reconsider calling this whole place a labyrinth.
The atrium he was in now was a stately, magnificent affair, and oddly reminiscent of Ancient Greek architecture: it was supported by numerous columns and pillars, in a similar manner to the Parthenon in Athens.
In neat orderly rows countless towering statues occupied the niches lining the walls, evenly spaced apart and imposing on their dark stone plinths. Squeezed in between these were doorways of various shapes and sizes, each leading to a different hall.
He could spot one that would take him into a garden of some sort, and another with sunken steps disappearing into a subterranean cavern.
Stepping forward to the centre, he took in the panoramic view, amazed by the sheer design of the place.
The Labyrinth never ceased to astound him.
Deciding he had plenty of time to kill, he turned to the statue on his immediate right. It was of a woman, her eyes narrowed in what looked like concentration and hair flying like a war banner. In her right hand she was armed with a trident that had a scorpion the length of his arm crawling over it. It made him feel slightly queasy, so he looked across the atrium at the statue on the opposite side instead. That one had a broadsword in his left hand raised mid-strike, eyes blazing and head thrown back in a silent roar, the spitting image of a fearsome warrior—
—Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed movement, a distinctly human-shaped shadow at the far end of the atrium trailing on the ground.
Atsumu gaped, frozen in absolute shock. It was no trick of the light; the shadow was still moving, so it was definitely from a person.
Never had there been any sign of life other than his own in the Labyrinth until now.
The person to which the shadow belonged was completely hidden from his view, seemingly cloaked by the darkness that covered the area behind the many thick pillars in which they walked.
But it didn't matter. Shock finally wearing off, Atsumu raced as fast as he could towards the mysterious presence.
If this person wasn’t some mindless apparition conjured up by his subconscious, perhaps they might have answers for him regarding the nature of his dreams and the Labyrinth. He just had to get to them before he lost them forever, paths diverging permanently.
“You! Wait!” He yelled as he ran, but the person seemed not to have heard him for their shadow soon disappeared around a corner, and just as he thought he could catch up to them he felt that insistent, spine-tingling tugging that would wrench him back into the real world.
Please, not now, not now…
But trying to resist the pull did not work. It was simply too late.
He woke up to the sounds of Osamu snoring in the bed beside his own, feeling the urgent feeling of needing to be somewhere, but not knowing where.