Chapter 7: The Price of a Lie

The tip of the knife was a silver shard of judgment aimed directly at her heart. The world, which had been a screaming symphony of heightened senses just moments before, contracted to this single, terrible point. Nyx felt the collective gaze of the masked figures, a physical weight pressing in on her. She could hear the faint, rhythmic whir of the brass mask’s clockwork mechanisms, the soft sigh of air through the eyeholes of the wooden one. From beside her, she smelled the bitter, charnel scent of burnt flesh rising from Rabbit, a pungent reminder of the cost of failure.

The figure in the brass mask, the designated inquisitor, took a mechanical step forward. His voice, when it came, was the grating sound of rust on rust. “The Call: A true story about water.”

Water.

Of all the prompts, all the words in the universe, it had to be that one. The game wasn't just a test of honesty; it was an act of violation, prying open the most carefully locked rooms of the soul. Nyx’s mind, a cold and efficient machine, raced. She replayed Rabbit’s story in her head: a sad, elegant parable about a key. It was poetic, metaphorical. And it had been deemed unsatisfactory. They weren't looking for fables.

Her own truth about water was a jagged, ugly thing. It was the memory that sat at the core of her being, the foundational event that had shaped the predatory stillness within her. It was the story of Lily and the little rabbit shoes, a story she had polished over the years into a shield, a weapon. But to tell it truly, to expose the cold, observant child at its center who had watched and wanted and done nothing… that was to offer them her throat.

No. She would not give them the truth. She would give them something that looked like it. Something raw and bloody enough to satisfy their appetite. She would give them the facts, but she would withhold the soul.

Nyx rose to her feet, her movements fluid, betraying none of the frantic calculation happening within. She walked to the center of the circle and knelt, just as Rabbit had done, before the brazier of glowing coals. The heat washed over her face. She fixed her eyes on the flames.

“I was eight,” she began, her voice a low, steady monotone, stripped of all emotion. “There was a girl. We were playing on an old, rotting pier that jutted out into a lake. The water was black and cold, even in the summer. You couldn't see the bottom. She had a doll, and she was holding it over the edge, pretending it could fly.”

She paused, letting the silence stretch, feeling the weight of their attention.

“I told her not to,” Nyx continued. “I told her the wood was rotten. There were splinters as long as my finger. She didn't listen. She laughed, and leaned out farther, her reflection a wavering ghost in the black water. The boards beneath her made a sound like a bone snapping. And then she was gone.”

She could feel it now, the memory rising up, sharp and clear through the haze of the drug in her veins. The splash. The sudden, shocking silence where a moment before there had been laughter. The widening ripples.

“I remember the cold,” she said, and this part, at least, was brutally true. “I remember the way the water felt, soaking into my shoes. I remember looking down, into that black mirror, waiting. But all I saw was my own face looking back up at me.” She took a slow breath. “I learned that day that some things don't float.”

Her story was finished. It was a perfect, self-contained tragedy. It presented facts, sensory details, a grim conclusion. It painted her as a helpless witness, a survivor scarred by a childhood trauma. A carefully edited masterpiece of a lie.

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the distant bass from the rave seemed to have been smothered. Nyx kept her gaze on the coals, her body perfectly still, waiting for the verdict. She had given them blood. She had given them trauma. It had to be enough.

She watched Tower from the corner of her eye. The obsidian mask remained a void, but she saw his head tilt, a gesture of almost imperceptible consideration. Then, just as before, he made the sign. A short, sharp, chopping motion with his hand.

Unsatisfactory.

A cold wave of pure dread washed through her, more chilling than any memory of lake water. She had miscalculated. She had offered them a curated truth, and their monstrous game had seen the hollow space at its core. Her shield hadn't just failed; it had shattered.

The figure in the wooden mask did not move toward the brazier this time. The punishment for her lie was clearly a different category of pain. Instead, the one in the whirring brass mask stepped forward. He reached into the long folds of his cloak and produced an object.

It was a machete. The blade was a foot and a half long, thick and heavy, its edge pitted and stained. And it was glowing. A deep, angry red pulsed from within the metal, a contained heat that made the air around it shimmer. This was not a tool for a simple, symbolic burn. This was an instrument of butchery, designed to sever, to maim. This was what happened to the owl who thought it could outsmart the flock.

The brass-masked figure began to advance on her, the heavy, glowing blade held low. The heat from it preceded him, a promise of agony that made the skin on her face tighten. Her mind, for the first time that night, went utterly blank. There was no plan, no calculation, no escape. There was only the approaching, incandescent steel and the end of the game.

But then, a sound. A scrape of cloth on stone. A sharp, agonized hiss of breath.

Rabbit moved.

They surged forward from their position against the wall, a blur of motion fueled by some desperate, hidden reserve of strength. In two staggering steps, they broke the sacred circle of the game, violating the ritual space, and threw themselves between Nyx and the executioner.

The masked figure stopped, his advance checked by this unprecedented interruption. The other masked figures shifted, their silent tableau broken.

Rabbit didn't plead. They didn't bargain. They did something insane.

They reached out with their uninjured hand and grabbed the flat of the glowing machete blade.

The sound was a wet, violent sizzle, a hundred times worse than the sound of the coal. Smoke and the thick, gagging stench of cooked meat filled the air. Rabbit screamed—a raw, tearing sound of pure, unadulterated agony that was ripped from the depths of their soul. It was the sound they had suppressed before, now unleashed in a torrent of pain.

But they didn't let go. Their grip tightened on the glowing-hot steel, their knuckles white, smoke pouring from between their fingers. They stood there, a trembling, defiant barrier, their body racked with spasms, both hands now hideously burned.

Through clenched teeth, they forced out a single, ragged command to the stunned executioner.

“Stop.”

Tower took a single, slow step forward, the obsidian mask seeming to drink the very light from the courtyard. The game was broken. The ritual was defiled. And Rabbit, the weary nerve cell of the system, had just overloaded the entire circuit.

They turned their head, and their pain-filled eyes found Nyx’s. The serene mask was gone, burned away by a pain so total it was transformative. In its place was a terrifying, raw intensity. Nyx stared back, her survival instincts screaming, utterly unable to decipher the look on their face. It wasn't the look of a savior. It wasn't the look of a martyr. It was something far more complicated, something wild and desperate and utterly unreadable.

Was this a rescue? Or had Rabbit just dragged them both into a circle of hell far deeper than the one she had been facing alone?