𝐋𝐀𝐁𝐘𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐇 𖤓 - 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐧.

PÉNDE.

Lyssa had read somewhere, once, that a Labyrinth can be used as a pinnacle example when it comes to describing the relationship between man and the descent into insanity.

For the further you venture into the Labyrinth, the slimmer the chance is that you'll be able to retrace your steps and locate an exit.

Infact, it's more likely that you'll discover the centre of the Labyrinth's entirety, than find the exit.

And this is what resonates it to a humane perspective.

Lyssa, once she'd absorbed this information, realised that maybe this is the fate in which her brother had succumbed to. The Labyrinth of sanity, that he'd become lost in forever.

She could clearly visualise it. Him, frantic, seeking for escape - yet, he had only realised that he was trapped once it was too late.

And I suppose that that was when he'd shot himself. When he allowed his finger to twitch, provoking the trigger to their father's shotgun he gripped with white-knuckles and a violent tremor in his hand.

Pulling that trigger affirmed his fate, sealing his soul in the Labyrinth - left to roam hopelessly until his conscience deteriorates into universal matter, ready to be recycled into something new.

Lyssa liked to think of it that way. It may seem macabre to an extent, but to her, it provided a greater comfort than thinking that after death, you ceased to exist.

She hoped that if her brother were stuck roaming a Labyrinth in the afterlife, that it be a pretty one - like the Saltburn labyrinth.

When they'd discovered his body, the flesh on his head still had the indentations of where he'd compressed the tip of the gun with excessive force against the side of his skull - a distinct, intricate rectangular shape with a circular centre, outlined with green and magenta bruising.

This also provided a melancholy comfort to Lyssa. If he wanted to kill himself for certain, really loathed his entirety and his surroundings, hated his family, hated her, he wouldn't have forced the gun into the flesh of his head.

He surely would've just acquired the gun, and shot himself straight away.

No need to press the weapon you were so sure in using to kill yourself into your skin - so forcefully that it causes lacerations - unless you were going through a mental conflict that pissed you off, because you were so pathetically indecisive - dabbling with death like it wasn't your only option.

But, Lyssa was technically grasping at straws by conjuring this conclusion.

Because nobody really knew why Esther Sol shot himself in their family home's wine cellar in May.

Fucker didn't even bother leaving a note.

One of Lyssa's fondest memories of them together was last July, when Esther and her had decided to have a water fight.

The summer heat had plagued their garden to the point where it had become insufferable to merely step foot outside, and where lathering themselves in cold water had become essential.

She remembered his face, and the beads of water that wrung through his auburn hair, embroidering upon his freckles like pearls against a speckled ivory silk.

But this memory had become an unfortunate comparison.

Her most recent memory in comparison, was his deceased body.

His hair had become matted, stale with crystallised blood - the warm aburn replaced by a putrid dark brown, strewn in clumps.

Pearls of trickling water had bled into droplets of ruby, smeared against his now dull, greying skin - youthful freckles now looked like spores of mould almost, against his skin that had started to decay prematurely, because of the Maytime heat that had befell upon England early.