Scael had not slept for 12 days.
As he stiffly walked through the stone halls, he determined that this might have killed the typical wanderer. He thought that a well adjusted person, sound of mind and heart, would have perished days earlier. Even with the weaving of protection magic into their very bones, a brain would degrade into delirium after this long without rest. The human body would have sagged into exhaustion until it was unable to move, wasted away without the rejuvenation of slumber and food and water.
But something in his belly dragged on, making him live. It was an unyielding urge and a drive that could not be described with words. It reached out and out and out, seeking in a way that Scael could not comprehend with his weak human mind. Legs had no choice but to move. Arms reluctantly balanced him as he walked on and on. Eyes peered into the dimness, lungs inhaled and exhaled, blood was pumped by his heart. But in the end, none of this was because of the vessel’s desires.
That hideous thing inside him squirmed and Scael was compelled to move.
“Just… end…” he thought. A ragged breath and a coughing sputter. “Please… die…”
Madness was not something Scael had known before coming to this place. Darkness had just been a lack of light. Silence was simply the absence of noise. But as the sunless days wore on and blurred, these fundamental facts shifted. What had been resolute had softened, stretched, and become other. Darkness began to move around Scael, prowling despite its stillness as it bristled past him while he shuffled along. The silent space of the halls, eyeless and mouth-less and senseless, drew close to examine him and tell him things. At first it was incomprehensible. Sounds and growls and partial words echoed around him, devoid of meaning, but they eventually came together into something recognizable.
“You should have turned left,” the halls whispered. “The Dynastinae will eat you.” Words with meaning were crammed together, but their ultimate purpose was lost on him. Nonsense, utter nonsense, was all he got from the maze and it filled him with despair.
Frustratingly, Scael did not even have the power to respond. Inside, his thoughts swirled in a tumult of rage, driven by a need to rebuke the squirming mass in his core. But his mouth was not his own. His body had been stolen and donned like a suit of muscle and bone. Everything it did was felt through a thick barrier of numbness such that the bones of corpses snapped beneath his feet and he could not feel it, only hear the sharp sound echo against the stone.
In this sleepless walking he had pondered where this invader had come from many times. His memories had been pushed just out of his reach, so speculation was all that remained and in that his thoughts followed no logic. “The courier dropped it off. He put it in my mind, my stomach, my blood.” Then, “It fell through the heavens into the hell of my gut.” Finally, “It has always been there, I just couldn’t tell.” Once thought, the words fizzled away into abstractions, poetic and gruesome meanings that he could not have articulated even if he wanted to. If another tongue had not replaced his own, if another mind had not pushed his out of the way, he would still be at the same loss for words.
All he knew was the maze of the dark. It was the only material thing that he could rely on.
“You should have said thank you. You should have opened your eyes. You should have- you should have- you should have been… kinder.” The voice had no qualities and no traits, it just was. It spoke from a place he could not recognize even as he felt it twist inside his gut like the snaking vines of anxiety. “Scael… so soft and virtuous.” A click echoed from the darkness.
Scael stopped moving.
His body groaned like overstressed wood, joints cracking and muscles spasming. Pain followed and for the first time since the nightmare had begun, he could feel what had been done to him. The endless walking and lack of rest was ruining him. Surprising even himself, Scael wished for that unfeeling squirm that had dulled his pain. The thought brought the ghost of laughter to his caged mind. In response, the thing made him let out a low, broken chuckle and began to move again. Pain receded like the water of a tidal wave and fear filled its place. He was certain that the crash of its return would drown him.
Scael had not slept for 19 days.
Darkness had long ago faded, departing with the silence which was its sister. The halls had not changed, but Scael’s mind had as he went longer and longer without sleep. Images had begun to flit from the darkness, the emptiness splitting to reveal furred creatures and scaled beasts and things for which he had no words to describe. They had filled the halls with chittering and snapping maws, words about a temple and the hubris of Scael.
Scael did not think of himself as arrogant or vain. He thought that what he used to be had been quite reasonable and bright. A wanderer, a traveler, a scholar. He had relied on the strength of his feet and hands to lead him to truth so he might learn that which had been hidden. He was the archeologist of secrets and the one who unveiled the obscure. He was a bringer of light. He was the holder of the past.
He had never expected that some secrets might wish to remain hidden. It had been a foolish mistake.
A small, ursine creature pranced down the color-shifting paving stones of the halls. It looked over its small shoulder and sneered. “Touch the reliquary and be burned. You’ve earned it.” As usual, he had no clue what this might truly mean.
Scael raged against the container of his body as it shuffled on. His left ankle had snapped the day before and he had been forced to limp forward, dragging his foot loosely behind his leg. Whatever it looked like, he was certain it was a grisly sight after so long being scraped against the stone.
A small raven flitted by, no larger than a sparrow, and landed on his shoulder to peck at his cheek. “Mildred will be terribly sad you missed her,” it said derisively.
Mildred? He wondered. That was a name he knew. Though he wanted to respond, fighting hard to tap into whatever part of him controlled his voice, he remained silent. But inside his gut, his captor squirmed in discomfort at the name. The creatures disbursed all at once, the color fading from the pavers and the walls rebounding towards him, replacing the misty haze with dimness and stone.
Once more, Scael stopped.
For a long, horrid moment, he was frozen in place, agony rippling through him. It caught flame like an oil spill on open water, spreading fast and hateful over the surface of his mind. Then it swept down into his core, burning each layer of him with renewed anger as if his flesh was rebelling against existence. Living in death, Scael could not move, could not scream, could do nothing but stand there and be pain. Yet out of that cacophony he heard a sound rise, a clicking that set his gut into ice. Like a massive insect or a wooden monstrosity, the clicking intensified. It was behind him. No, it was above him.
For the first time in 19 days, he and his captor were in alignment as his head tilted back, both of them wishing to see what was there.
Chitin. Serrated pincers. Membranous wings. Antennae. It moved with the titanic slowness of something ancient and hungry. In the darkness he could not see what part of it made the clicking, but he did not care. The monster on the ceiling, larger than he was, ambled by with the menace of unknown things, of those creatures which were barely perceived and therefor dangerous.
Inside, he heard the words, “Be still. Be Still. BE STILL. STILL STILL STILL STILL.”
When it was gone, the writhing inside him turned his body back the way he had come and he began to retreat. For the first time in this nightmare, Scael learned something new. Whatever was inside of him was afraid of something.
Scael had not slept in 38 days.
What would remain of a wanderer such as he? Surely at this point he was nothing but a skeleton, animated to wander the halls like the villain of a children’s story. He could not look, but truthfully he was not concerned. The stone halls had peeled back to reveal the sweltering infinity of psychosis and the insanity of no sleep. Reality had become untethered and in it he could only focus on one need, one desire: kill the squirming thing and escape this hell. Yet even in this, he could barely retain a solid train of thought, mesmerized by the shifting patterns of color and shape which the world had become. Yet as wondrous as it was, he hated each and every second of his time bearing witness to it.
“You should not be so cruel to me. I am you and you are I and together we are we. Together together together. You don’t need her.” The thing spoke acidly, but its words caused a tremor to pass through Scael. A flicker of something, the memory of a face, passed along his nerves and he momentarily hesitated on his next step, stumbling.
Did… I cause this? The darkness seemed to swell in all at once, pushing forward until the hallucinatory swirling solidified into stone walls and a paving stone floor, so very, very real. The squirming pushed recklessly, forcing him forward, yet that impulse to resist still lingered. He pushed on it again, prodding it with an imaginary finger as if poking at a leather bag full of air. Another stumble, and this time his body collapsed to the ground in a heap.
The pain was familiar and violently ripped him back into his own body. The blurry edge of reality clarified, sharpened, and tore him apart from within. Agony, blessed agony, reminded him of one core feature of this existence.
He was still alive.
Somehow, he had not yet perished. Was it the passenger in his belly? The strange, rustling darkness that flexed and surged around him? For a moment he wondered if he might be special, but as his hands moved of their own accord, still fleshy though obviously withered, he discarded that thought. He began to rise, mind wheeling. The thing had reminded Scael of something. Mildred. His partner, and the only one who might know where he had gone. She was smart and bright. She knew about the book, he had told her…
The book.
He froze again, collapsing as memory swelled inside and poured down the channels of his exhausted mind. He saw a bright tome filled with gilded words and ancient drawings, its pages promising goodness and health and vitality. He saw Mildred beside him, reading the volume with her feet in his lap. He saw a ball of worms, writhing and aching and whispering and-
For the first time in 38 days, Scael slept.
When he awoke, the silence was both inside and out. The movement in his gut was gone, stilled by his unconsciousness such that all that remained was the weight of it.
“Mildred,” he said, speaking for the first time since arriving. He did not recognize his voice, but it was his and that filled him with a pillar of fire. His rage was so great that he nearly tried to reach through the soft surface of his stomach to tear out the invader with his hands. It had not only been his body that had been affected. He had forgotten Mildred.
He had forgotten his own wife.
When he stood it was terrible. Everything in him hurt, yet unlike before when the pain had nearly shattered him, he was able to withstand the tide… if only just. He still did not know what was truly real, or what might reveal itself to be a conjuration of his mind, but he knew Mildred. She was real, real as anything he could think of. If she was out there then she would need him.
The thing inside of him squirmed and he doubled over as his limbs went numb. But he thought of her, that dark hair and those dark eyes. He pictured the way her smile curved upward and felt that pillar of fire surge. The numbness receded, the squirming becoming dormant. It was a short reward, for in his anger he again felt the urge to destroy the thing inside him with his bare hands.
But he did not. He had to get back to her.
Through darkness and silence and never-ending stone halls which snarled together in a confusing mass like the invader in his belly, Scael was only able to hold it together because of Mildred’s face. Each time the numbness encroached or his exhaustion threatened to take him down, it was that face which now moved his limbs and made him breathe. Wandering for so long, he had come to recognize parts of the maze and learned where he was not to wander, where the invader avoided going. That is where he would search.
There was no satisfaction when he escaped the halls, eyes burning from the light that cut apart the darkness like a knife.. There, just outside the entrance to the trap of the maze, was the dais that he and Mildred had read from. The book still lay open atop the altar at the heart of the dais. And on the steps were two large pools of blood with dark, grotesque ichor mixed among them.
Two pools of blood.
He grimaced and looked to his stomach, drawing up his tunic to peer at the gnarled scar that ran horizontally along the center of his belly. Then he looked to the entrance of the maze, dread as thick as a fog in his heart.
Scael had not slept for 4 days. He did not expect to ever sleep again.
With determination enough to burn down the world, he shambled back towards the entrance with Mildred’s face in mind. His foot was broken and useless, a withering husk at the end of his calf. His body was frail and thin, sustained only by the sleeping invader at his core. Yet he would not rest, not until she too had been saved.
And if she could not be saved… Scael was certain that he would wander those dark halls for eternity.
Author Note
This story was written for the Verdant Owl Battle 2026 for the writingbattle.com competition. The prompts were: Genre – Possession, Setting – Maze, Character – Insomniac
Cover image is ‘Azathoth’ by @danielmarcoart
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