I should have known better, but I was desperate. They told me it would be a good idea, that it would be an escape from the pain. Sure enough, it was an escape. The problem was I found myself detached from much more than just the memories of my past.

The Labyrinth is an eternity of endless near-sleep. I was at all times simultaneously out of my body and within it. As my corporeal form would lie there in the suspension chamber, my mind was free to roam the halls of the building. The years took their toll, but not on me. I could not age and would not die, so long as my body slept in that damned box. Instead, I was given the opportunity to watch as the people came and left, and the sun rose and fell, until the night came when the day would return no longer.

For me it was like slow-motion video. The terrified, pale-skinned people who lived in the commune began to fall to the floor, their hair losing color and their eyes becoming pink. They used to care for the others in chambers similar to mine, but I watched as they seemed to forget how to take care of the machines. Instead they began falling upon them, crying and spasming in some bizarre rite that I came to understand as prayer.

What was a slow, timeless blink of an eye was apparently years for them. A few minute’s time and they had become more like rats than human and I began to seriously worry if I would ever be able to return home again. Several of the other chambers had become as dark as the world outside the windows – only they were windows no longer. They had become metal barriers protecting the outside world from what lie within my room.

Without knowing how, I became aware of what lay beyond the steel doors and concrete walls. My mind touched theirs and it made them very afraid, so they retreated further back behind more walls until I knew that I was the center of a cube. They would keep me here for as long as it took for me to die.

The others had died several seconds ago. The rat men had fallen into piles of bones beneath the steel doors, where they had tried to claw their way to freedom. I thought that the other chambers had become dark, but there was one other still enveloped in the green light like my own. I knew that she was beautiful, whoever she was, and became lonely for a voice to be heard in this mute world of stillness.

“I never did mind the little things.”

Her voice was like rainwater falling on fluted glass and it reverberated throughout the Labyrinth. She had awakened from her sleep and rose from the suspension chamber. She stepped out of the green light and entered into a world of red and yellow vortices. She was never my mate, but nonetheless I possessed her heart. My restlessness had been enough to bring her from her stasis. She repaid my favor with a kiss that brought me back to my body.

“This is not what we had planned,” my voice was dark and rough as I crawled to my feet.

She looked upon me perhaps as strangely as I looked upon her. Something had changed our bodies so that we resembled something less bestial and something more divine. The minds in our bodies had died in the machine, leaving us to morph our vessels into what pleased us best. Her neck was like a giraffe’s and her face was as flat and lovely as the moon in the sky. As a boy, I had always been fond of the Minotaur.

Our arrival made the ones behind the walls very agitated. Having awakened, I had lost the patience of the Labyrinth and flung myself at the door. It would not open, so instead I struck at the walls. Yet I was powerless against them, despite the fury of my form.

She touched my shoulder and we both knew what was to happen next. There would be no escape until we died. She twisted and conformed, dislocating bones and stretching skin until I could no longer fight against her serpentine strike. She locked me back into my suspension chamber, operated the mechanism and thrust my mind once more into the stillness of the Labyrinth.

She fell apart before my eyes.

The horror of the Labyrinth is the inability to feel. I could only remark with curiosity as I saw her body crumple with age as the seconds rolled by, knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that some distant part of me wept in a forgotten chamber in the center of a dead city. In the minutes that followed, showing me the bones falling into dust, then only thought in my mind was a question – what was her name?

If it was any consolation, I could no longer remember my own name, or who I had been in whatever life that must have existed before the confines of the Labyrinth. My mind remained calm and still, focused on attempting to recall anything from the past. Days and days seemed to go by, as no body to feed or relieve gave me plenty of opportunity to think without disturbance. I thought about many things, both small and profound. But the greatest thought I had was the one that set me free.

I took my first step out of the suspension chamber and instantly became aware of something that had been missing for untold ages of time. I was out of the Labyrinth now, but my consciousness was still much the same. However, now I could sense more than intelligence and time. I could feel the warmth of the sun.

The scent was unlike anything that I knew, which unfortunately was not much anymore. Yet I knew enough to say it smelled of ash and ozone, moisture and decay. It was not entirely unpleasant, being the first thing I had smelled in approximately thousands of years’ worth of interment in the Labyrinth. Opening my eyes, I found something incredible.

The wind blew through my nostrils, giving me a scent reference to what I could now see before me – a great tear in the walls, breaking through layer upon layer of reinforcement that composed the cube which was my tomb. Out through this schism I could see a vast landmass below me, as if I were in some tower high above a plain. On the ground below were hundreds of moving, metallic bodies which struck each other, forming great balls of light.

Wings grew from my thick hide, grabbing the wind and furiously yanking it down to carry me up and outside. I soared through the opening and circled those below, letting them all know of my presence. Finding a perch atop a massive obelisk of twisted metal and concrete, I stared down at the world around me, a world seen through eyes unclouded – the world through a kaleidoscope of dreams.