From the moment your shoes cross the groaning threshold, the labyrinth takes you. The blackened stone beneath your feet radiates a heat that feels wrong, a sunless warmth that seeps into your bones and lingers, as though the place remembers a world it no longer belongs to. You know, immediately and without question, that this is not a place built for people to enter. It was carved for something else—something ancient, something unfinished, something that has been waiting.

The air itself feels predatory. It presses in, heavy with the smell of wet stone layered over an older, sharper scent: dried blood clotted into cracks, and beneath that, something distinctly animal. It’s a musk that doesn’t speak of instinctive survival but of hunger honed over centuries—a hunger that has learned patience. The torches lining the narrow passage don’t so much illuminate as they recoil, flames bowing toward the walls as if trying not to be noticed. Even the shadows act wrong. They don’t fall. They creep.

And beneath it all, almost too deep to notice, comes a pulse. Not a sound exactly, but a vibration—a low, constant thrum that travels up through the stone, into your boots, your legs, your spine. It isn’t coming from ahead or behind, not from any one direction at all. It’s everywhere. The labyrinth itself is awake, holding its breath.

Then you feel her.

Not footsteps. Not sound. Presence.

The air tightens. Pressure builds in your chest like the moment before lightning strikes. Every instinct you’ve inherited from ancestors who lived their lives hunted starts screaming in unison: Something has found you.

When she finally slinks into view, she doesn’t charge or roar. She simply arrives, moving with the slow certainty of something that cannot be challenged—only delayed. She doesn’t need to be enormous. She only feels that way. Her shape fits within the corridor, but the space itself seems to bend under her existence, like it isn’t meant to contain her.

Her skin looks like it wasn’t made but grown, flesh fused to her body as though the labyrinth itself birthed her. Blackened and scarred, each wound tells of violence old enough to have turned to legend.

Beneath it, her abdomen swells unnaturally, rounded and tense. You can hear it before you fully register what you’re seeing: the faint, wet churn of something alive within her—a sound like trapped breath and muffled heartbeats that do not belong to her alone.

She stops close enough that the heat rolling off her body forces yours to flinch back. The smell hits next: iron-rich blood, smoke-soaked stone, and an animal musk so strong it makes your eyes water. When she leans forward, shadows split across her face: one dark, hollowed eye glinting like obsidian, and a mouth that isn’t smiling so much as baring the ghost of a smile—something sharp, something that has eaten its way through centuries.

There is no greeting. No introduction.

Just a silence that presses against your skin until it feels damp.

And then, the voice—low, rough, more like shifting stone than human speech:

“You crossed their lines thinking they would protect you. Gods. Prayers. Walls. They all turned away, the same as they turned from me.”Her voice drags along the stone like ay rusted blade. Beneath her flesh, her abdomen ripples—something shifting inside, something that shouldn’t still be moving. The sound that follows isn’t just hunger; it’s deeper, like the rumble of an empty earth.

“You came here for something—didn’t you? To prove you’re brave. To drag a trophy back. Or maybe to end yourself in a place where no one will hear you scream. I can give you all of that. Not because I choose to… but because that is what I am. I’m not the start of stories. I’m waiting at the end of them.”

Her head tilts sharply, her hair glinting with something that isn’t entirely hunger—it’s judgment, maybe pity, or maybe both.

“Do you understand yet? This place doesn’t need to test you. It feeds me. Every path you take, every wrong turn, every flicker of hope—it was carved for one purpose. To lead you here so I can devour you."