The gate stood before him ancient, silent, and impossible.
Its surface was carved from a stone-like substance that seemed older than the world itself, the kind of material that time had long forgotten how to erode. Symbols crawled along its surface, not drawn or etched, but alive—shifting, reshaping, bleeding into one another. Each symbol burned with a pale, ethereal glow, pulsing faintly like the heartbeat of something sleeping beneath eternity.
At the center of it all was the mark of a god.
He could not tell which god it was perhaps none that mortal tongues had ever dared to name. The symbol was endless in its geometry, devouring the eye whenever one tried to define its shape. The more he stared, the more it seemed to twist, spiraling into itself, becoming not a symbol, but a hole. A hole into something vast. A god that was not life, not light, but death itself.
The air trembled around it. Shadows deepened, folding upon themselves until the cave became little more than a frame for that impossible structure. The darkness clung to the stone like oil, rippling in faint waves, as if the gate itself exhaled void into the world.
And yet… it was beautiful. Terrifyingly beautiful.
The young man stood still, his gaze tracing every impossible detail. His robe shifted faintly as cold air pressed against him. The labyrinth behind him was silent now utterly still, as though it too feared to disturb what stood before them.
He stepped closer. The ground felt heavy beneath his boots, each step echoing faintly, swallowed quickly by the oppressive hush. The closer he came, the more he could feel it—the gravity of it. The gate was not merely stone or structure; it was presence. A living, ancient consciousness.
Images flickered faintly across its surface. Mountains that shifted into deserts. Deserts that bled into oceans. Then faces—countless faces blurred, flickering, crying, vanishing. The images were not memories, not illusions. They were echoes of something the gate remembered.
He felt its gaze upon him. The void itself was watching.
The young man exhaled slowly, his breath misting in the air, and in that quiet moment, a thought crept through his mind. Why am I here?
He knew the answer.
He was searching for one of the Seven Keys of Blasphemy.
The very artifacts that had once torn the world apart.
They were said to be the cause of the first Conjurers' War. A war that nearly ended humanity. It was the Keys that drew blood across the continents, that ignited the flames that devoured cities and gods alike. Legends said that the Seven Keys, when joined together, would open a Gate to the Arbiter, a being so vast and incomprehensible that its existence defied the notion of reality itself.
The Arbiter could grant any wish. Any desire. Any dream.
But everything came at a cost.
That was the truth told to the world the tale that survived the centuries, passed from scholar to wanderer, from priest to madman.
But the young man knew more.
He knew a secret whispered only in the dying breaths of those who had seen too much.
The war had not been caused by the wish.
Nor by the Arbiter.
It had been the shards themselves.
The Keys were not simply artifacts they were fragments of something older, something far more terrible. Shards of divine rebellion. Each one held a portion of a power no mortal was meant to touch.
It was the shards that killed the conjurers. Not battle. Not betrayal. The shards consumed those who tried to wield them.
And yet, someone someone long forgotten had gathered them all. Combined the shards. Opened the Gate to the Arbiter. Made a wish so great that it ended the war.
But the world never recovered.
The young man's black eyes reflected the shifting images on the Gate. For a moment, his face softened, the firelight catching the faint ache in his gaze. So much blood… for the truth we were never meant to touch.
He remembered the tales of that war how seventy, maybe seventy-five percent of all conjurers had died. Entire schools of magic erased, cities turned to dust, kingdoms lost to silence. The power of the shards had rewritten the laws of the world.
And now he was here.
Because of a single shard.
He need the shard, he had came here for it to learn the truth about the past about the people he could not save. So he had wondered here to this labyrinth, to this gate—because somewhere beyond it, lays the answers he seeks.
He wanted to know the truth.
The truth about the burning.
The screams.
The faces that haunted his mind every night.
He could still see them.
The people being buried in collapsing streets. The sky filled with smoke. The castle walls crumbling into fire. And always, always, the sound of screams. A sound that never faded, even when the fire did.
He closed his eyes for a moment, breathing in the heavy air, the weight of memory pressing against him.
He had been there.
He had watched it happen.
And he had done nothing.
"Fate…" he whispered bitterly. "You took everything from me."
When he opened his eyes, the gate still stood before him unchanged, unfeeling. The void around it seemed to breathe in rhythm with him now, faint pulses of light crawling along its frame.
He could sense it the shard beyond. Waiting. Calling.
The war that had begun years ago had left the world broken, and since then, the shards had vanished. Some said they had returned to the places they were born from the depths of the world, the hearts of dying stars, the remains of forgotten gods.
But the conjurers who sought them had learned something horrifying:
The shards chose where to return.
And to reach them again, one needed to survive the Trials of the Gods the same trials that had birthed the first conjurers, the same gates that had tested the divine.
This was one of them.
A Key of Trial, forged to guard what mortals were never meant to touch.
He understood that now. The labyrinth had been the test before the test. A prelude to judgment.
And this gate… this was where the truth began.
He stood before it, his reflection dimly visible in the stone. His eyes, black as the abyss itself, stared back. He looked tired. Worn. Too young to look so old.
Still, he did not hesitate.
Because hesitation was for those who still had something to lose.
The gate pulsed. The symbols upon it rippled like water, shifting through shapes that had no name, no geometry, no language. He stepped closer, close enough to feel the faint vibration beneath his skin. The air was cold, sharp, metallic.
And then…
Click.
The sound echoed like a death knell through the cavern.
The gate trembled. The symbols froze. The void around it seemed to collapse inward, folding space upon itself.
A sound followed one that was not a sound, but a feeling. The hum of something vast waking from slumber.
Then came the voice.
Cold. Eternal. The sound of inevitability.
It was death itself speaking not a being, not a thought, but the echo of an ending that had always been coming. The voice filled the labyrinth, filled his mind, filled everything that could be filled.
"Your trial begins… now."
The words struck like a blade through his thoughts.
The gate convulsed once, shuddered, and then began to change. The images across its surface burned away into blackness. The darkness deepened until it became a hole, an endless maw of shadow swallowing light.
The young man took a single breath and stepped forward, his expression unreadable.
And as the void opened, swallowing the world around him, his voice was nothing but a whisper drowned beneath the roar of eternity.
"Let's see what truth waits in your darkness."
And then
He was gone.