I ran my fingers along another number 7, etched into an aged tree on the outskirts of the small meadow where the cottage stood in silence. My eyes had gotten so used to the dark that I could now make out shapes from over fifteen feet away. A small footpath of packed dirt weaved into the forest, where my vision ceased to extend. Another arrow pointed directly to it.
"We're close. I can feel it," I said.
"I hope you're right," Len replied. "I don't remember this path here from my childhood."
"Mothy must have created it, just like how she created all of this." I started down the path at a quick pace, and Len kept close behind.
"How do you know Mothy, anyway?" he asked.
"I could ask the same to you," I said.
"You still don't trust me?"
"No, but I have no doubt that my story is longer and more complex than yours." In almost no time, the path became obscured by branches and underbrush spilling into our way. My legs got scratched up, flecks of dust falling on the ground behind me. I didn't feel a thing. Only that violent thing writhing about within me, trying to break free but knowing that the object of its fury was not before it quite yet.
Len constructed his words carefully before he spoke. "When Rin and I were kids, we—when our father and mother died, my mother left this stone."
"She gave it to you?" I pressed.
"Well, no. She burned to death, and in the ashes, this stone was there. It was a form of… magic."
"I see."
"You're not questioning that? I just said that it was a magic stone from the cremated remains of my mother."
"Len, I'm not going to worry about the logistics. If I threw a fit every time a magic stone appears, I wouldn't be able to get anything done. I just want to know how Mothy came into play."
"W-Well, Rin and I did some research into it, and we found out it was something called an Original Sin. Our mother's sin… we didn't know what it was, but it was bad. So, Rin had the idea of taking a rock and smashing it to pieces."
The trees were growing thicker. I could no longer see the moon looming above our heads. We had to feel around in the dark for some kind idea of where we were going. "You destroyed it?"
"I thought we could have," Len explained with great difficulty as we fumbled about. All of a sudden, he crashed into me from behind. "Sorry! Um, we thought it would destroy it, but we ended up merely dividing it into seven different pieces."
"Pride, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth, Wrath, and Greed," I recited.
"Yes. The Seven Deadly Sins, they were called, evidently. We didn't want anything to do with them, so we cast them out. Just a short time later, a woman arrived on our doorstep. She's the one who explained to us what the Sins were and demanded to know where we had scattered them. Her name was Mothy."
"Did you tell her?" I pursued. Len fell silent a moment, and the only noise came from our own labored footsteps. At last, we managed to push through a line of bushes and were under the moonlight again. However, we were immediately faced with a new problem. In front of us was a cliff face maybe 15 feet high, and on it was another scrawled number 7 with an arrow pointing up. "You're joking."
"I think we'll be able to climb it if one of us hoists the other up," Len suggested.
Despite our combined levels of shortness, he was probably right. "Alright. Let's do it, then."
With a great deal of awkwardness, I managed to just barely reach the top by Len placing his hands on the ground and heaving me up. I was reminded vaguely of when he helped me get the doll of Miki down from the hook during the first leg of our journey through the labyrinth, but of course, I kept that to myself. Focusing all my strength into my arms, I pulled myself up from hanging on the edge to fully on top and rested a moment on the soft grass. Then, I peered off the ledge and held my hand out for Len. He ran and jumped as high as he could, latching onto my hand, and dangled there. It took two attempts to swing him onto the solid ground with me. Once we had both safely made it, we took a moment to catch our breath, lying down there and staring up at the fake sky.
Len was looking at me. "What is it?" I asked, the adrenaline finally running out of my system.
"Nothing," he replied quickly, turning away. After a moment, he stood up, somewhat panicked.
I pul myself to my feet as well. "What?"
"We know each other, don't we?" he said, pacing around the patch of grass and fidgeting nervously. "That must be it. There is no other explanation. Do we know each other?"
"Yes, we know each other," I answered quietly, heart pumping quickly in excitement. Maybe he was remembering.
"And we were—we were friends? Did you know Rin as well?"
"We were friends, yeah, and I knew Rin."
My answers didn't seem to satiate his panic. "W-Well, how long did we know each other? When did we meet? How old were we?"
"C-Calm down. These questions are difficult to answer," I said.
His voice fluctuated like he was about to cry. "No. No, they aren't. They're really normal questions. Boring, normal questions."
"Why are you freaking out?" I asked, trying to get him to cool down. It hurt too much to see him like this. It reminded me of how he sometimes was in the sixth period, when he got so confused he couldn't tell what was reality. I knew now that it must have been the timelines messing with his head, and it was doing the same thing now.
"I don't know," Len said. "I can't remember. I've forgotten something that's really important. I don't know what it is, though."
Gently, I approached him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. "It's alright. We're almost out, and then you'll remember."
"W-Why are you hugging me?" Len asked.
"Because I know you," I replied, keeping him close.
"I don't know you." His own arms rose up and snaked around my back. After a moment, he added, "My chest hurts."
A few minutes passed until I pulled away out of necessity. "We have to go now. We're almost there," I said.
"Right," Len agreed quietly, shrinking in on himself suddenly and turning crimson red. "S-Sorry, I don't know what came over me."
"Don't worry," I waved him off simply. "Let's go."
Where the patch of grass ended, the woods suddenly sprang up again. Another marker led us forward, though there was no longer any kind of physical pathway to follow. We traveled in silence, my pulse quickening the closer we treaded to the finish line. The exit out of this labyrinth. Victory. The wind had ceased howling and the farther we walked, the more insincere the trees and underbrush seemed compared to real life. Though we may never go back to "reality," I was sure that if there were trees in the Better Place, they would be look and feel exactly right. The moon would move in the Better Place. No one would try to torture us.
"How—How do you know Mothy?" Len asked after we had been walking for about a mile, urged on by the occasional marker letting us know we were going in the right direction.
"She hurt a lot of people I knew and cared about," I answered gingerly. "I confronted her about it, and now I'm here."
"The people who you knew and cared about, were they… all of us?" Quickly, he elaborated, "Miku, Meiko, Gakupo, Rin?"
"Yes. A few others, too."
"How did she hurt us?"
"She made you do things you didn't want to do."
"Why?"
"Because…" I thought about it a moment. "Because she wants to be entertained for as long as possible. Um, I asked you a question a while back that you didn't have a chance to answer. I was wondering if you told Mothy where the Sins were."
"Yes," he replied shamefully. "We did. She put them into some random objects. A doll, a gemstone…"
"I see. Okay. Thank you for answering my questions."
"It's no big deal. I just want to get out of here."
"Oh! I do have one more, actually. How exactly did your father and mother die?" I asked.
Len kept his mouth clamped shut, all of a sudden taking a major interest in everything not in my direction. After about a minute of fake contemplation and stalling, he suddenly snapped his head forward and pointed off in front of us. "Is that it?" he exclaimed.
I followed his pointing all the way to a small, pure white rectangle amid the foliage. Upon closer inspection, it was most definitely a door. A door in the middle of the woods pressed up against nothing. A door with a golden handle and small, square indentations along its front. A door. The exit.
A smile stretched across my face in an instant. "That's it, Len! That's it! Come on!" With the small reservoir of energy I still had stored up within me, I began to run, Len close behind. The implications of this miniscule piece of wood in this grand forest of wood made my smile grow wider and wider. This wasn't just the end of the labyrinth. This was the end of everything. The End. The final steps in a journey that had taken seven lifetimes.
A blink. A pale figure had appeared in front of the door. My heart, soaring above the sky, came crashing back down, down, down. A pale figure in a black dress. Long, golden hair. Mothy. She was smiling. I slowly came to a halt, confusion and fear all of sudden taking over. All of a sudden not feeling the presence of Len behind me, I turned around.
The look on Len's face: surprise. Limbs clasping onto limbs. Everyone—Kaito, Miku, Rin, Gumi, Luka, Meiko, Gakupo—was there. Everyone, yet I knew that it was truly only one person doing this, had hooked their arms around Len—his legs, his arms, his stomach. All the dolls, contacting him. Surprise. Their eyes, however, were locked with mine. Mothy's eyes were locked with mine.
And then they were gone. Well, Len was still there, and of course, he collapsed to the ground, his fingertips disintegrating into dust, falling to the ground like sand running out of an hourglass. In a voice I didn't know I possessed, I let out a guttural scream. "Len!" Rushing to his side, I lowered him to the ground gently. I felt like gagging, but it seemed like this body didn't have that function. I felt like self-destructing, but Mothy didn't install that one either.
Len finally understood what was happening to him and seemed to calm down considerably. I, on the other hand, was crying and shouting incoherently, clutching his shoulders like that could stop the disease from crawling up his limbs. "W-Why are you crying?" he asked.
"Because I know you," I replied. "Don't leave me, Len. Don't leave me alone for all eternity. Please. Please!"
"I have to tell you," Len went on. "Rin and I—we killed them. That's how our parents died. It was us. Wherever I'm going, I deserve it, okay? It's alright. Please stop crying." I refused, the clammy feeling of loneliness colliding hard with the hot sensation of guilt, causing my body to wrack with sobs. Wherever he was going, he would be agony. All of my friends, in agony. All my fault. I couldn't save anyone. "Hey," he went on. I grew quiet, daring to look him in the eyes as he spoke. His torso was almost completely dust now. It was almost over. "Can you tell me, when you knew me, was I… a good person?"
I nodded vigorously. "Yes," I managed. "The best." Before he could completely vanish, I skimmed one last kiss, and then there was nothing on the ground before me except ash.
That ugly thing inside me, that raging thing, that writhing atrocity burrowed its way to the very top. Standing up slowly, wiping dust off my lips, ash streaming down to the ground through my clenched hands, I turned toward Mothy.