An Exploding Ally XLVI.

"WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?!" Fatiba bellowed, her voice shattering like glass compressed to breaking. Her throat ripped with it, raw, spit-slick, thunder-tongued.

The dragonfly hovered just ahead of her. Wings motionless, beating slowly like a second heartbeat. Crimson light deepened with each syllable she hurled, each breath she spat. Then—slowly, almost gently—it replied.

"You can call me The Lamb."

She blinked, anger overwhelmed by confusion for half a heartbeat. "The what?"

"The Lamb," it said again, gentle as a lullaby but twice as loaded. "The one who forgives. The one who guides."

"Don't give me riddles." Her voice cut sharper now, steel behind the spit. "Say what you mean."

"I mean you, Fatiba Darvish," the Lamb said. "You, who already lived through the worst day of your life. You, who wept for your uncle in your room with Mugyiwara Shotaro, who figured out how to keep breathing when your lungs didn't feel like it. You endured that sorrow. With assistance."

Her fists clenched tighter. That roof—his silence, his stillness, those staring red eyes grasping her pain as something holy—it blazed through her head like lightning across an ocean at night. She'd fallen in front of him, and he hadn't caught her—he'd just been there, and that had been enough.

You've suffered what was done to you." The Lamb said, voice increasing by a breath. Not in loudness. In-depth. "Now it's time to suffer for what you have done."

She winced.

Her lungs rejected air.

"NO!" she snapped, baring her teeth. "NO, I FUCKING CAN'T!"

"YES," the Lamb said. Calm. Confident. Not blinking.

"NO, I CAN'T!"

"YES. YOU MAY."

"I WON'T!

Her knees failed her. The floor did not stop her—it just took her. Hard, silent, breathtaking impact that left her lungs empty. Her hands shook, palms open, as if she continued to expect someone to put an excuse in them.

"NONONONO—" she gagged.

"YESYESYESYESYES," the Lamb roared.

Not cruel.

Not wrathful.

Just categorical.

The voice echoed down the hallway like church bells in a deserted graveyard—ringing off stone and silence, boundless, unescapable. It wasn't loudness that made it torturous. It was veracity.

"You will look. You will face. You will witness."

"STOP—"

"You do not purify a Labyrinth by weeping through it," The Lamb bellowed now, wings aglow as if they had been hammered from a furnace of man-made mistake. "You purify it by standing in the mire. You purify it by calling the decay by name. You purify it by gazing at the most hideous reflection of yourself—and not looking away."

Fatiba did not stir.

Did not breathe.

Did not blink.

The world didn't fall apart. No wall broke. The floor didn't crack open beneath her.

But she hurt.

A sharp pressure burst under her ribcage like a knife without a blade, like shame in skin. Her body spasmed. Her arms wrapped tight around her middle as if she'd been stabbed—except she had no stabber. Only the pain of something she couldn't ignore anymore.

Then—

Something scraped across the floor. Metal.

She peered down, eyes burning, chest catching—

A key.

One iron key, made intricate and old, sculpted with designs that danced between Victorian flair and Arabic letters. Shining in two worlds, two eras, two realities. There was a small tag attached to it. Faded, but irrefutable.

"The Incident."

She did not want to reach for it. But her hand did.

"You are presented with a choice," the Lamb whispered overhead, hanging over her like prophecy. "Do or do not."

Her fingers wrapped around the key.

If you don't," The Lamb continued, "Mugyiwara Shotaro will find a way to stop the Labyrinth. He always does. He senses things when no one else even suspects there is something to sense."

Fatiba glanced up, still crouched, still pale.

"Maybe," the Lamb said, eyes aglow with inscrutable knowledge, "he did sense it already."

The air grew heavy.

"Maybe he sensed you."

She turned around, her eyes scanning the black hall—corners, shadows, blind spots.

"Maybe he's just around the corner," the Lamb whispered, "watching, waiting—to see if you have what it takes."

Her heart thudded.

"Maybe he bet on you," the Lamb said.

Then leaned in closer.

"Just as everyone bets on him."

Fatiba's breath trembled. Her knuckles turned white around the key.

The fourth door still waited.

.....

Outside the trial chamber, the corridor was war.

The air reeked of hot iron and seared feathers. Shadows lengthened and bled on the floor like oil that won't submerge. The walls heaved like lungs that've been holding breath for too long. And at the center of the madness—Amaya and Ikol, still on their feet, still fighting.

They were weakening.

Amaya's sleeves were torn, blood dripping down her arm in jagged red vines. Her breathing was harsh and ragged, her chest heaving like she was striving to keep herself in one piece by willpower alone. She stamped a nightmare's face with her heel and backed off, eyes gone wild, mantra sputtering and stuttering behind her pupils like a broken neon sign.

"How many more?!" she screamed.

Ikol didn't respond initially. He was occupied tearing the jaw off one of the nightmares mid-leap—Crow was boring like a drill through them. Feathers dissipated like smoke as the monster screamed and broke down—

Into goo.

Dark. Viscous. Alive.

It oozed over the stone like a stain trying to adopt a new form. Not dead. Transforming.

Ikol hissed, wings shaking. "They don't die. Not actually. They revert."

Amaya smashed another one. Bones cracked. But the body didn't drop—it dissolved. Another mound of that same dark muck.

Ikol swooped up—just far enough to avoid her grasp, wings thrashing hard, black feathers falling like cinder.

Underneath him, Amaya did not say a word.

She merely snapped her wrists shut.

Her chakras flared—a bloody burst of color and energy, spiraling from her spine like a sleeping serpent uncoiling after decades of repose. Her feet shattered the stone floor below her. Her eyes rolled white for half a moment—then snapped open, blazing violet.

She was drawing from two wellsprings now.

Sadashiva.

Parvati.

Two energies not supposed to inhabit the same body.

One of destruction.

One of regeneration.

And she contained both.

Her mantra came alive. It didn't sing—it screamed. The air ripped itself apart in curls of purplish-black power. The darkness around the nightmares started to twist—not like it was cast, but like it had life.

Each nightmare froze. Flinched. Started to quake.

Because their own terror had turned on them.

The violet shadows spread out from each like hands upreaching from another plane—clutching ankles, holding wrists, twining up their spines. And then—

SPINES.

Fifteen-foot-high shafts of solid mantra exploded out of the earth, javelin-like, through each of the nightmares. Not clean. Not surgical. Cruel. Shrieks sounded—not from mouths, but from the idea of pain itself.

It wasn't merely physical death.

It was "Death With No Return."

The type that doesn't leave a ghost. The type where the soul falls silent.

The corridor became a skewer garden—black flesh stuck like war trophies in an inferno constructed by wrath and chakra. The spikes blazed once. Then subsided.

Ikol floated above, blinking down.

"…Phew," he said.

Then Amaya fell to the ground.

And purged everything.

Her hands struck the stone as bile sprayed across the floor. Her stomach twisted, her back bowing, and her body shuddered as if it were attempting to shake off all of it—mantra, memory, and meaning. She struggled to catch her breath, sweat intermingling with tears, black sediment still smoldering on her fingertips.

Ikol descended alongside her, kneeling low, wings folding in.

"Okay?"

Amaya didn't raise her head.

She merely whispered, "She better succeed at that last test."

And fainted dead away.

Ikol struck with force, knees thudding against blood-splattered stone next to Amaya's collapsed shape. For a moment, he simply gazed at her—unmoving, inscrutable.

Then the feathers dropped.

His body shattered like broken mirrors regenerating in reverse, bones lengthening, form unwinding and re-forming. Wings tucked into the shadows, claws withdrawing into fingers, and the crow-boy disappeared.

In their stead—

Loki.

But not the courtly prince of myth.

This Loki was a terror wrapped in beauty.

His raven-black locks spilled down his back in wild tangles, threaded with glints of shining silver that seemed to throb like veins of wondrous starlight. Every whisper of wind made them dance like prophecy murmured through the breeze.

His complexion—too white for its own good, almost translucent in the unreliable Labyrinth glow—flickered with something other than holy. He was a man chiseled from lost prayers and vows broken before they could be honored at the earliest. 

No golden armor of Asgard. No kingly flourishes.

Just a coat—long and jagged and living—sewn from midnight silk and iron thorns. It changed colors with each breath, each blink. Forest green deep. Violet bruise. Black oil on water. The hem flashed behind him like a ripped flag on a war no one won.

His gloves—tight black leather—couldn't conceal the runes that seared through them. Old ones. Not engraved. Branded. Signs of guilt, sacrifice, and decision.

The tunic underneath was layered and sharp. Simple. But deadly the way a loaded trap is deadly. Belted in twisted silver chains, each link humming with silent menace. Not jewelry—restraints.

And atop his head—

A crown.

Not made. Taken.

Broken antlers, jagged and amiss, curved like knives and truth. Wet at the roots. A trophy ripped from something ancient. A symbol that didn't ask for respect. It dared you to attempt it.

Loki knelt by her side and wrapped Amaya in his arms with a softness that didn't have any right to exist in a place like this. Her head rested on his chest. Her skin slick. Her breathing light.

"Idiot," he growled. "You always burn too fast."

He coughed abruptly—blood flying from his lips, dark red against white teeth. He rubbed it away with the back of his gloved hand, scowling in irritation and something softer. Sadness, perhaps.

"Why do you keep doing this to yourself," Loki whispered, crouched beside her like a king in mourning, not scolding but barely holding his worry together. He brushed a blood-crusted lock of hair from Amaya's face. "You can't handle that mantra. Not yet. Not alone."

Amaya didn't stir.

Her body was limp, curled against his chest, faintly glowing with the afterburn of divine energy she was never meant to carry. A halo of violet shimmer clung to her like bruised smoke. Her face—so often full of fire—was slack now. Pale. Human.

He leaned in.

Forehead to forehead.

A gesture not of gods, but of fathers.

Just a moment. Just enough for the ache to settle.

Then he turned his head toward the fourth door.

Still open.

Still black.

Still waiting.

"Come on, Fatiba," Loki murmured. His voice was tired, frayed at the edges. "We're bleeding out waiting for you."

.....

Far deeper in the Labyrinth, a voice sang itself into silence.

"So will Fatiba Darvish confront her greatest terrors?" asked the dragonfly named Lamb, wings quivering like a heartbeat between breaths. Its voice lengthened, melodramatic, smug.

Then—pfft—it disappeared in a flash of golden dust and mock chortles.

"Whatever will she do… muahahahahaha."

.....

Fatiba stood frozen in the black corridor, the key to her worst memory still clutched in her dripping hand.

She gazed at her hands as if they were strange, shivering things. Her breath was stuck halfway between chest and throat. Her fingers would not close, move, believe.

Her knees shook.

Her eyes blazed.

And then—

She thought of him.

Uncle Ahmed.

The creak of his worn slippers on the tile of the kitchen. The ring of glass tea cups. The hum he used to make when he chopped apples. And that prayer he always whispered half-out-loud before dawn. "Help will come. Even if it's not the help you expect."

Her eyes drifted shut.

"Please," she breathed.

Then—

His voice.

Not actual.

Not imitation, either.

Resonating from some holy corner of her in which memory had not yet decayed.

"Help is you," he told her. Warm. Comfortable. Gentle. "Pick what you desire. Help itself will arrive. That is our Lord. That is one who always sends His greatest angel to direct."

She blinked away tears.

And she remembered.

That old fight. When little Fatiba had stood flaming-cheeked in school uniform, stuck between javelin throw and trek running. Her uncle had gotten down on his knees beside her, knocked on her chest, and said:

"The answer is inside you. Just decide."

Now—

She had two.

First: Turn back. Leave the Labyrinth. Wait outside.

Let Shotaro take care of it. He always did. He always does, doesn't he?"

She almost laughed.

Because that boy was her age.

Just a child.

Crimson eyes and unwavering shoulders didn't render him a god. Not exactly.

Second: Do it herself.

Because perhaps it wasn't Shotaro's cross to bear this time.

Perhaps it wasn't somebody else's burden to bear.

Perhaps she didn't need rescuing. 

She gazed at the black door once more. 

And stepped forward.