The End of the Way
By: Jiraishin Posted on: March 31, 2013
A hollow voice sounded in his head: "Obey My Will and spread My teachings to all people, that they might be turned to Suffering."
The Adik's hand jerked back. A single, surreptitious touch to the hooked length of chain he wore on his other arm, a negligible amount of blood, and then-- this. His Master's voice, though heard as from a great distance. His Master's voice, which he had not heard for decades.
He was elated at first, but quickly realized that pressing a finger against a barbed section of chain would always bring the same message, delivered in the same voice. He considered whether this message might be new, a sign of his Master's immanent return, but decided that the instruction had likely been left there before the Suffering God withdrew from the realms, to be carried out in His absence. The Adik had simply never run his fingers over the chain before.
Even in his Master's absence, he did his best to obey.
o-o-o-o-o
He stood in the temple's central chamber, and the last few notes of a requiem lingered in his ear. His eyes sought the form of Suffering's Muse, barely distinguishable from darkness and entirely invisible to those who did not look for her. He smiled into the shadows. "Hail, Umbriel," he whispered. He heard her voice in his head, promising him gifts beyond imagining... for a price. Her mouth never ceased to form her song. With a shake of his head, still smiling, he walked from the room.
So many people saw only the reddened skies and tar-stained streets of Mhaldor, and thought Evil not just terrible but hideous. He wished he could show them the quiet cobalt depths of this temple; he knew it would be far more effective than any words he could speak. He loved this place. Too few people did, these days.
He continued down the eastern passage until he came to a secluded apse, elegantly tiled but bare of any ornament but a single, small, ivory idol placed upon a lazurite pedestal. He touched the idol's kneeling form, feeling the familiar spark travel up his arm. "Let Suffering be your path and your witness," a voice whispered in his ear.
There was darkness for a moment, and then he stood in a dark passageway, similarly elegant and with an identical idol underneath his hand. He stepped away. If he touched it again, it would tell him that Suffering was the way and the truth beyond all things, and it would bring him back to the apse. Instead, he headed east.
The chamber he entered had little beauty in it. Two statues, of a man and a woman, adorned its walls, their forms twisted in agony. At times the eyes of one or another seemed to follow him in a way he knew was not his imagination. He ignored them. At this point he could still turn back. He ignored that as well. He walked with purpose. He descended down the great stairwell, with its grand carpets of cobalt and gold, and entered the maze.
The way back vanished behind him, as he knew it would. The exits of every room he entered shifted in impossible directions; more than once he left a passageway, his footsteps echoing on tile or stone, and found himself standing at its entrance once more. His eyes took in the statues of one chamber or the carvings of another, but he lingered nowhere long.
Eventually he came to a point where the maze ceased to move. This hallway was dark and solid, and from it there was no way back. He walked forward, into greater darkness, and found himself upon an unlit ledge that stretched over a bottomless void. He stared into the Void of Despair and knew that he had failed again.
This was the end of the maze. There was another way out, he knew. The Master had decreed it was so, and likewise decreed a reward for any who found it and sent Him a letter describing both solution and significance. The Adik glanced at the daemonic stallion that stood impassively some distance away, the blue flames arising from it doing nothing to lighten its surroundings. Such a stallion would be his if he mastered the maze. This he would do, not for the material reward but for the knowledge of his mastery. But not this time. This time he had failed.
He had been confident, once, that the solution lay either on the ledge or within the Void itself. That confidence had been destroyed by repeated failure. He simply did not see where else it could be, and so he returned here.
He stood silent for a time, thinking of anything he had not done before. Nothing occurred. With a silent shrug and a last glance at the stallion, he walked towards the edge. His physical self felt cold fear as the Void tugged at him, a fear that touched him no more than the pain of his chained arm. He was not afraid as he stepped off the ledge, only humiliated.
On the way down, he spoke every phrase and password of Suffering he knew, gasping for the air to do so as he fell. None of them helped.
Despair crushed his soul. He petitioned Maya for salvation as soon as he was conscious enough to do so, and walked Her halls still numb.
He knew, though, that there was another way out.
o-o-o-o-o
The maze became his obsession in the years that followed, as the Suffering God retreated further into memory and the Order grew in emptiness. He discovered that the statues at the entryway, when touched, transmitted memories of torture so intense they could bring a man to his knees, so real that he felt himself bleed. He discovered that, should he stay long in any one room, the maze could influence his mind more directly than any of Umbriel's songs, a revelation more crippling at first than the statues' memories of vivisection or cut sinews, for its first manifestation came as feelings of intense isolation and loneliness, and the Adik was much of the time alone.
He learned to master the visions and urges and false memories that the maze brought to him. He did not enjoy them, but they fascinated him. Every section of the maze, he discovered, was linked to a different form and source of mental Suffering, evoking feelings from anger to insignificance to phobia. He made a point of spending time in each room, meditating there, pacing tight patterns of seven sides to maintain his concentration.
His knowledge of the maze grew extensive, and often he was able to find his way back to the maze's entrance and depart without ever feeling the Void's embrace. This was not, however, a true solution, he knew. He continued to seek, just as he continued to await his Lord's return. He had little hope for either one.
o-o-o-o-o
He walked within a hall of bas-reliefs, carefully counting his steps and ignoring the visions and sensations that assaulted him. This was by far his least favourite part of the maze, and he seldom came here. It was the only place between the entry staircase and the dark ledge where the maze did not play on his emotions. Instead, it showed him visions of the grotesque: demons torturing their prey, pools of dark fluid forming under his feet, the feel of scrabbling beetles in his mouth. It cut into his focus not because it trapped him but because it annoyed him.
He began to walk his pattern again, ignoring the sound of fingernails scraping invisibly down the stone walls-- and then he stopped. An indescribable pattern hung in the air before him, woven from all the colours of a prism and containing in it all the secrets he had ever sought to know. Then the pattern vanished, leaving the Adik with his control shattered and the unshakeable impression that he had only to watch the patterns long enough to find every answer.
No matter how long he waited, however, and no matter how often he saw those patterns or how well he committed them to memory, the answers remained out of reach. Reluctantly, for those patterns were breathtakingly beautiful, he came to understand that their promise was illusion, its power to convince magnified by his desire to believe it could be real.
For a while he wondered how this beauty and subtlety fit with its hideous and obvious surroundings, and then he understood. And he knew the way out of the maze.
o-o-o-o-o
Further time passed, and his long-sought knowledge brought him little satisfaction, for he had no certainty. His God remained absent from the realms, and out of pride he refused to ask either of the two mortals he knew had defeated the maze. He feared being wrong. So he doubted and paced and listened to Umbriel's music, and he prayed without expectation for his Master's return.
Then it happened. His Master did return. He stood in the maze, in the chamber where rage assaulted the senses and carven, mocking eyes stared from every wall, and he laughed exultantly, this man who went years and decades without laughing. He had new purpose, new importance, and all those who had sneered at him in the past as following a dead God would feel the fury beneath his laughter. His Master's fury.
He would send his letter regarding the maze in a few months, after events had settled somewhat.
o-o-o-o-o
"Suffering is the way and the truth beyond all things." The words, he remembered, belonged to the ivory idol at the maze's entrance. He wondered if the idol was still there, if Umbriel still sang, if the maze itself survived beneath the rubble of a temple no one could enter. In his mind he pictured the shattered stones and statues of the maze, pictured the broken shimmer of its visions and suggestions and tricks of the mind stretching into the darkness like cobwebs.
His fingers curled tightly about the chain on his arm. Blood flowed across the links. He closed his hand more tightly, though the touch of a single finger should have been enough. He heard nothing, and there had his answer. The maze was gone.
His God was dead. Not even an echo of His voice remained.
The man who had once been an Adik removed his hand, letting moss tattoo and boar heal the minor damage done.
He had been right about the maze. He knew it. He would never hear a confirmation now, but now more than ever he knew he had been right.
The maze had no solution. Suffering was the way and the truth beyond all things, and beyond Suffering there could be nothing. Suffering was the maze, the maze on the edge of the precipice, where each turning led either into the Void of Despair or back to Suffering's endless hidden meanings and terrible, brilliant, illusions. Hope kept one bound to its halls; despair was the only release.
He touched the chain again, out of habit and without thinking much about the motion. The silence jarred him.
All hope false, all mastery futile. In the end, there was nothing but the Void.
Smiling bleakly, the man went about his business.