The corridor narrowed until it became little more than a slit in the stone, forcing Aaryan to twist his body sideways and suck in a breath just to pass through. Every inch scraped skin and soul alike. Finally, the corridor widened, and he emerged.

No echo. No wind. No scent.

Just a room of obsidian and gold.

In the centre stood a lone pedestal, carved from glassy black stone that shimmered with heatless light. Upon it, arranged in perfect symmetry, lay three objects:

A silver vial, pulsing with soft blue light. Cool mist curled from its lip like a promise.

A golden circlet, inlaid with crimson gems that throbbed like heartbeats.

A plain copper ring, unadorned, unremarkable, and silent.

Aaryan's footfalls echoed louder than they should have. As if the room were holding its breath, waiting for his choice to echo.

He frowned. "Oh good," he muttered, flexing his sore fingers. "Another divine riddle from a dead man with too much time and not enough sense."

And yet... each item had a faint call, almost like a summoning to him.

The vial tugged at the base of his spine, whispering of survival, endurance, healing. The circlet throbbed in his skull, humming with the taste of power—dominion over flame, over form, over others. And the copper ring...

Nothing. No song, no whisper. But it still watched. Waited. Weighed him.

His hand hovered.

Then dropped.

"No," he said aloud. "I know this trick. One's a lie, one's a trap, one's a test. Pick wrong, you die. Pick right, you... probably die slower."

He turned from the pedestal.

The room groaned.

Stone beneath his feet vanished.

He dropped with a startled curse, slamming hard into a smooth plane of shifting crystal. Not stone. Not floor. A mirror.

He rolled onto his back, gasping, only to find the ceiling wasn't stone—it was his own face, staring back, wearing someone else's smile.

He staggered upright—then froze.

The reflection in front didn't match him.

It wore the circlet. Crowned in gold, grinning with fire in its eyes.

He turned. The mirror shifted.

Now the reflection clutched the vial. Pale light swirled around its ribs, and its eyes burned with something steady and kind—but hollow. Empty.

Another turn. The third mirror. This time, the reflection was just him. Uncrowned. Unhealed. Alone. But the eyes—

Those were the worst. Quiet. Watching. Judging.

A whisper came—not from the room, not from the mirror, but from within.

"Refusal is still a choice. Denial doesn't make you clean. Fear isn't virtue."

Aaryan clenched his fists. "So, what, then? I have to pick? You punish greed, but also punish restraint?"

The mirrors cracked in unison.

And beneath his feet, the platform began to sink.

He snarled. "What do you want from me?!"

No voice replied.

Only the steady descent.

Slow. Inevitable.

Like being judged by the weight of his own hesitation.

🔱 — ✵ — 🔱

The descent slowed.

Then stopped.

Aaryan stood alone on a narrow stone bridge suspended in blackness. No walls. No ceiling. No ground—just the faint sense of endless depth yawning below and above. Before him stretched a corridor lined with archways, each inscribed with glowing symbols in shifting languages.

A soft chime echoed, musical and cruel.

Welcome, Trickster.

He flinched, but no voice followed. Just the feel of a smirk—if rooms could smirk.

He stepped forward. The first archway rippled with illusion, revealing a spinning wheel of blades. Fast, sharp, impossible to cross.

Except—there. A panel in the floor, slightly raised. Pressure-based. He grinned, crouched, and tossed a loose pebble from his pocket.

Click. The blades stopped mid-spin.

He strode through untouched.

The second challenge was a shifting maze, walls grinding in jagged motions. But one wall shimmered faintly. An illusion. He walked straight through it, bypassing half the death trap in a heartbeat.

The third had a ceiling that dropped like a slab of doom. But above the door, barely visible, was a ledge. He leapt, caught it, and slid over the top, humming under his breath.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Every challenge—circumvented. Bent. Outsmarted.

But he never looked back.

Not at first.

Not until the corridor began to dim.

He paused after the fifth trial—something with flames and collapsing stones—and glanced over his shoulder.

And saw it.

A figure. Shadowy. Motionless. Standing where he'd started.

No, not just one.

Another at the spinning blades.

Two in the maze.

Three more where fire and rock had fallen.

They weren't moving. Just... watching. As if waiting for him to acknowledge them.

He swallowed, breath slowing.

Each one a choice. Each one, a price.

'This is absurd. I never made any choices that harmed others. All I did was survive—why should I feel guilty? Why do these choices haunt me?'

They looked human. Or they had, once. Faint outlines of robed forms, faces indistinct, all turned toward him like statues built from guilt.

He took another step. A shadow appeared behind him.

Then another.

And another.

He kept moving—because that's what he did.

But with each shortcut, each clever trick, the shadows multiplied. A silent procession of what he'd left behind by moving too fast, by choosing efficiency over effort.

At the final archway, there was no trap. No riddle. Just a smooth wall with a single black handprint. Waiting.

He placed his palm against it.

It didn't open.

A figure walked out from the wall.

Not a shadow.

A man—or what remained of one. Draped in robes that flickered like torn parchment, features blurred by time and power, eyes sharp with unbearable clarity.

"You laughed as you danced through rules," the figure said, voice like dry ink cracking across glass. "So did he. Until one day, he broke a rule that should not be broken."

Aaryan stiffened. "I never asked to be like this. But it was necessary."

The figure tilted its head. "Neither did he. We never ask. We justify. A laugh here. A twist there. A few saved seconds, a better outcome—for us. Until one day, it costs more than he thought he'd pay."

The shadows stood behind him now. Silent. Accusing. Not screaming. Not blaming. Just... there.

Aaryan lowered his gaze. "What do you want me to say?"

The figure moved back, fading into the wall.

"Say nothing. Just carry them."

The handprint glowed.

The door opened.

"Who was the man? And who... was the 'he' he meant?"

But there was no one to answer so he walked towards the gate.

And still, the shadows followed him through.

🔱 — ✵ — 🔱

The stone beneath his feet was cold, like the breath of death itself. The dim light ahead flickered as though it, too, hesitated to reveal what lay beyond.

Aaryan strode forward, the shadows behind him lingering, as if drawn by some unseen gravity. The corridor stretched on, each step echoing into emptiness, until at last, he entered the final chamber.

It was vast—so vast it numbed his senses at first glance. At the far end stood a throne of jagged stone, raised upon a dais that seemed to scrape the very skies. The air was thick with stillness, and as Aaryan's gaze settled upon the throne, a shiver crawled down his spine.

There, sitting atop the throne, was a figure—his own reflection, but aged, hardened. He was clothed in heavy robes of authority, eyes cold with the weight of power, the weight of solitude. His posture was stiff, regal. Unyielding.

But as he looked closer, the truth twisted in his gut. Around the throne were the ruins of everything he had known—broken pillars that once held banners of honour, shattered statues of those he knew—Dharun, Kalyani, Nayan, and even the old woman from Kamalpuri who fed him when he had nothing and many more, along with the burned remnants of house where he stayed with Grandma Kalyani, as if all had fallen to ruin in the wake of his ambition.

He moved closer to the throne, and his fingers brushed against the inscription carved into its side. Simple, yet the words sent a chill deeper than the cold air itself:

"You won. Yet you lost everything. Was it worth it?"

He took a step back, the words weighing heavily in his chest. He had no answer. It felt as though the very air in the room was growing thicker, more suffocating.

The words settled like iron in his chest, the air thickening as if the room demanded an answer

Then, from the shadows, they appeared. More of the silent figures. They emerged from the darkness at the edges of the room, each one a spectre, maybe a shadow of someone he had failed, or someone he might have left behind in pursuit of his own path.

But among them, standing tall beside the throne, was another figure—a statue. The stone figure had the same expression as the one sitting upon the throne, the same cold, unforgiving eyes.

'Is that the tomb's owner?'

Suddenly the truth settled over him like a stone.

He and the tomb owner were the same.

Aaryan turned, and suddenly the fragments of the past trials fell into place in his mind.

The mirror maze—Due to his over cautious nature, he didn't choose the obvious door which was right there in front of him but looked for a trap which was never there to begin with. He always thought that nothing is simple, someone's remark, a gift, a suggestion. Everything and everyone have to have a hidden meaning, an ulterior motive.

The betrayal—It had been the trial of his loyalty. Betrayed by Rudra, left to die, and yet he had refused to choose sides in a world full of treachery. In his refusal to trust others fully, he had isolated himself, like the tomb's owner, until no one remained who could truly trust him. Was that the cost of loyalty? To never trust? Or was it simply a lack of trust that led him here?

The treasures—It had been a test of his choices—he had avoided the temptation of the treasures, choosing none, but in doing so, he had made a choice all the same. His refusal had been as much of a trap as picking the wrong treasure. Fear of corruption had been his weakness, his attempt to remain pure had bound him in chains, to take the right path, the moral high ground, to justify his decisions, just as it had bound the tomb owner before him.

And then the last room.

Where he had exploited the loopholes to survive. Each decision had been made in the name of efficiency, to keep moving, to avoid being slowed by the challenges set before him. But perhaps every corner he cut left a shadow behind. Every trick played, every rule bent, had led to a cost. He hadn't just outsmarted the trials—he had left behind pieces of himself.

The tomb owner had danced the same dance, bent the same rules, played the same tricks. And in the end, they had won—at the cost of everything. Aaryan's heart clenched as he realized: He, too, was walking the same path.

"You won. Yet you lost everything. Was it worth it?"

The words echoed in his mind.

'Was it worth it?'

He swallowed hard, turning his gaze to the figure sitting on the throne. It was him. It was what he could become. It was what he was becoming.

The shadows gathered, silent as always, around him. They weren't just the cost of his actions; they were the weight of the choices he'd made, and the ones he would have to make in the future. They were a part of him now, woven into his very being.

Aaryan knelt before the throne, his chest tight with the weight of doubts in himself. He was not unlike the tomb owner. He had been so focused on survival, on power, on independence that he had neglected the connections, the bonds, that once made him human.

'Am I wrong?'

The voice of the tomb owner echoed in his mind.

"You laughed as you danced through rules. So did I. Until one day, I broke a rule that should not be broken."

Same words which he heard from the figure in previous room.

Aaryan closed his eyes. Many different scenes of his small life flashing past his mind, as he stood before the man who had once been just like him, who he might become in the future.

Aaryan stood, his heart heavy with the weight of the realization. The tomb owner's path had led to this—an empty throne, a soul fractured by power. Would Aaryan be any different? Would he make the same mistakes?

The door ahead creaked open, but he didn't move. The shadows remained, silent witnesses to his every step. The trial was over, but the real question remained:

Would he choose to walk away from this path—or would he, too, end up alone, ruling over nothing?

"No, I am not you."

"Huh". Someone exclaimed but too soft for Aaryan to hear.

"You're right—I don't trust easily. Maybe I am paranoid. But I've never betrayed anyone, never taken what wasn't mine. I have paid kindness with kindness and enmity with enmity. All those scenes were what you had chosen, and all this ruin is the consequence of those choices, your choices, NOT MINE."

"I am me and you are you. We may be similar but not same. You have already walked your path, and I will walk mine, and if I fall like you? Then I fall as myself. Who says changing would make me better?"

He took a deep breath, stepping forward into the door. But the shadows had disappeared.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.