"But don't worry." The voice was closer now, close enough that she felt breath on her face. It smelled of ancient earth and endless dark. "You won't be alone. We're all here. All the forgotten ones. And eventually, you'll forget too. Forget the sun. Forget your name. Forget everything but the dark."
"Stop."
"That's what I said at first. Stop. Please. Let me out." A hand, it must have been a hand, though it felt wrong, too soft and too cold, touched her cheek. "Now I can't remember what out means. Can you?"
Terror erupted through her chest as Briar screamed, pushing at the thing that wasn't quite human anymore. It retreated, laughing with that sharp, brittle sound.
She scrambled sideways, hands scraping stone until she found a corner. She pressed herself into it and made herself as small as possible.
The mark pulsed, still dim, still distant, but there.
"My name is Briar Delarosa," she whispered into her knees. "I have a sister named Allegra. She's twelve. She makes ugly bracelets. My mother's name is June. My father died before I was born. His name was Jeffrey."
Facts became anchors, things that were true before the dark and would be true after.
If there was an after.
The whispers resumed their circling, endlessly patient.
Waiting for her to forget.
She'd stopped counting breaths and stopped reciting names. The darkness pressed down with physical weight. Even the whispers had grown bored, drifting to distant corners to mumble their forgotten languages.
Then light appeared.
Not light exactly—that was too strong a word. A lessening of darkness emerged, a place where the black wasn't absolute.
Briar blinked hard, sure she was imagining it. Her eyes had been playing tricks with phantom colors and false stars. But this stayed.
Golden and faint, a tiny glow appeared near the base of the wall.
She crawled toward it, knees scraping stone. As she got closer, the glow morphed into shape, a flower with delicate petals unfurled from the solid rock, pulsing with faint luminescence.
Her fingers trembled as she reached out. The petals were real, warm, and alive.
As her hand brushed the petals, another bloom spiraled into existence a few feet away, then another. A path of impossible light led along the wall to where the corner should have been.
But there was no corner. Where solid stone had been, a passage yawned, narrow and dark beyond the flowers' glow, but a different dark. Dark that led somewhere.
"No." She pressed back. This was a trick, a test, another punishment disguised as hope.
The first flower began to wilt.
Its light dimmed as petals curled black at the edges. Soon it would be gone, and the darkness would rush back in.
Behind her, something shifted. Not the forgotten voices, something else had noticed the light and noticed her moving.
The second flower started to fade.
Instinct overrode thought as Briar lunged forward. The third flower bloomed as her hand touched the passage wall, then a fourth, always just enough light to see the next step. Behind her, darkness reclaimed each bloom as she passed, erasing every trace of her path.
The passage was older than the oubliette. These stones remembered when the world was young. They wept moisture that tasted of centuries, and things skittered just beyond the flowers' glow, pale, blind creatures that had never known the sun.
"Follow..."
She froze. That wasn't the broken voices from the pit. This was different, it was soft and almost encouraging.
"This way... not that way... this way..."
