The world was an immense plain of nothing, miles upon miles of landscape meant to be avoided, colorless and void save for he and myself. For seemingly all of my existence, I had been searching for this place.
I could see it in the distance, across the gray valley, sitting on the crest of a hill that overlooked its surroundings. The structure, a cube half buried in the hill's protective soil, had proven difficult to find as years upon years had passed in my relentless pursuit.
Regardless, I had found it. I had felt it in my bones long ago that he could not hide this from me. Even if it took years, which it has, to find its location. The structure housed a secret, one that he had been keeping from me for ages.
The dull, pallid sides of the cube glowed ominously in the dark, barely but sufficiently standing out from the terrain. Within minutes I had glided through the gray valley and arrived at the western wall of the structure. It was not a large building, at least what was shown above the surface of the black soil, barely surpassing my own height.
I walked around the structure, perplexed at its simplistic complexity. Without windows and doors, how was I to gain entrance and retrieve the long-kept secret within? I returned to the western wall and stood before it. Disbelief began to overcome me. Had I come all this way only to be stymied by a structure with no way in?
With eyes closed, I lifted an open palm and placed it on the cold concrete wall. My elbow was nearly fully extended before I realized I was not touching anything. I opened my eyes and saw the concrete wall had engulfed my hand up to mid-forearm. I gasped in astonishment. Perhaps there were rules older than his securities, rules that granted my touch significant.
I stepped through the borders of the structure. What I had thought to be a cube half-buried was much larger as it seem I had walked into the top story of a skyscraper, lost and buried with time and dirt.
With the ceiling directly above my head, I looked downward, scanning endless stories of catwalks and stairs that reached far below the surface of the ground. Deep in the structure sat an enclosed, cube-like room, surrounded by a maze of metal walkways and pipes. The secret withheld by him was there, in that room that sat deep enough where one would need to commit to the menacing, dim-lit labyrinth in order to reach it.
Again, as if destiny itself was lending its direct guidance, I had found my way to the room as only minutes passed. I entered through the door, bringing my feet to rest before a stainless steel table. I had made it. I felt sure that whatever was in this room, whatever secret that I had long been pursuing, would soon present itself to me, at long last providing fulfillment from this endless game.
My eyes transfixed on the table, whose coldness upon my hands quickly enlightened me to an alarming observation: there was nothing on the table and nothing else in the room. As it was empty and starkly void of any relevance, I understood the room had cleverly been prepared for my discovery.
He knew.
My heart quickly passed the fleeting adrenaline of victory near at hand, sending echoes of grave error and an immediate need for flight throughout my body. I stood with mouth agape at the incredulous fault that I had not foreseen.
He knew that I would stop at nothing to find this place. He knew that I would find my way to the room, so far recessed in his labyrinth in blind pursuit of a secret I thought to be vindictive, that I would risk all and everything on obtaining it. Everything I thought to be of my own strength and advantage was used against me.
As the entire structure proceeded in its lockdown and the door to the room sealed itself, I only stand and watch, stunned as my own naive resilience passively resigns to his beautifully crafted abyss. Even attempting escape at this point would have been foolhardy.
Here I was, trapped within the earth by a maze crafted of my own confusion and stupidity and whatever cogent notions that drove me to this place now serve as the catalyst for my entombment. The only secret that this structure housed was that before I had even begun looking, he knew how best to trap me.
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