Marshall Sanchez the Forgotten. This is what he began to call himself. They promised that he would have a bed and food and clothes. He could exercise and rest until he was recovered for the next trial. At least here in the center of this diabolical maze, he had a sense of time. One week alone, again. No disembodied voice to guide him out. No cadre of giant men to pull him up and carry him away. Once again, his body dried and cracked until his skin no longer sagged. Now, it clung to his bones. He had become nothing more than a skeleton wrapped in skin made of the thinnest tissue. He wished he could die. He tried to start a fire from the bones and scraps of clothing leftover from the torso of the person who had died just as they reached this place of calm in the midst of the chaos of the fatal maze. He had no luck. The bones turned to dust, and the clothes disintegrated at his touch.
Marshall thought he had heard the the opening and closing of the walls and ceilings a few times, but he could have just suffered from the hallucinations of hope. The desire to be followed and found. He had tried to find a seam in the circular walls, but he could find none, not even in the place that had crushed his only companion. He tried to focus on the future and see a way out of this personal hell, but all he could see were the flames that held his ultimate freedom. He clawed against every of inch of wall he could reach, but, for all the blood of broken fingernails and raw fingertips he left behind, he had not made a scratch. Even the pain had gone now. His hands and feet grew numb first, but each day he felt less and less until he was sure that his whole body was dead, or at least as close as he could come.
He tried to cry now and then, but the cool, dry air of the center of this place had no moisture to give. He lost the ability to cry, to swallow, to speak. And so, Marshall Sanchez the Forgotten resigned himself to the fate he had been given. He had nothing to do now but sit and use the only part of him that still functioned. He sat in the center of his cylindrical cell with crossed legs and pushed his mind into the future as far as he dared, then he pushed a little farther. The pain was gone, the hope was gone, and the icy cold of a half-death had enclosed his heart. Stripped of all but thought, the Forgotten looked out and saw the paths he had walked to from there to here and here to there. He watched as the paths he would walk forward opened themselves and shut behind him. The words and songs of the people he would meet grew around him until he heard them with his ears. He felt the brush of their fingers and warmth of their breath. Time passed within him with no respect to the time outside. Finally, as he watched, he felt himself rise above his body and look down upon his life.
All that what he was and all he would ever be stretched out below him like a twisting line. He saw the moment of his birth and every step of his childhood. He watched himself at the first moment he saw himself die in the flames. He followed his timeline until the present. Here, in this place and this moment, he saw the flames surrounding him, engulfing him. Then the realization hit him with the force of a bomb. He sat now in the flames of this ultimate trial. Marshall Sanchez was burning away. The man within him cried for a moment then was silent. The part of him that had been Marshall fell away from him like baggage he had carried for far too long. And the Forgotten fell back into his husk of a body, filled with silence.
He looked around at the featureless walls of this empty room and looked forward to see the walls and monoliths part. He saw this future, not because it would happen, but because he willed it to happen. The walls shifted and moved and the way opened for him.
Through the door that Marshall Sanchez had stepped nearly two weeks ago, the Forgotten emerged free and clear.