2238 WORDS

Warning: this is a work of homosexual erotic horror. It contains dark themes including but not limited to rape, torture, slavery, kidnapping, and some surreal kinks. It does not include any bestiality, piss or scat play, or underage content. Please read responsibly.

Avi woke up to a splitting headache. His throat was dry, and he was covered in cold sweat. A nightmare.

Of course, Avi was prone to nightmares. It had been a problem for his entire life, and now, at the age of twenty, he was used to experiencing these symptoms after a typical night terror. But this time, something was off.

Avi’s eyelids drifted open, the salty sweat on his face stinging his eyes as his eyes focussed on his blurry surroundings. It was dark. Very dark.

It was at this point that Avi realized that he was not in his bed, curled up next to his lovely Ryan. In fact, he was standing up. He was completely naked, standing barefoot on a cold, hard stone floor with his back against a stone pillar. His hands were restrained, chained to the pillar behind him. He had to shake his head to get his thick head of dark hair out of his eyes.

His surroundings were dark and hazy, but he could make out a few things. He was in what looked like a stone corridor, maybe four or five meters wide, with an extremely high ceiling. So high, in fact, that Avi couldn’t see the ceiling at all. The walls made of stone brick seemed to extend up into a thick vapour, like Manhattan skyscrapers on a particularly foggy day.

Avi could also see other pillars, just like his. Dozens of them. All of them were stuck in the ground, about three meters in height and stretched far along the length of the hallway.

Avi swallowed in fear. Okay. This was just one of those nightmares within a nightmare. He knew what to do.

“Hello?” called the frightened man into the darkness. As long as Avi engaged with the nightmare, it would end faster.

“Hello?” replied the darkness. It almost sounded like an echo, but within a second, another reply came.

“Hello?”

“Can anyone hear me?”

“Hello? Help me! Where am I!”

Avi began to breathe faster and faster as the scattering of replies turned into a shouting match. Up and down the pillars, voices were yelling. Avi could see movement now. To his horror, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to make out squirming and struggling among the pillars. Avi was not alone. There were dozens of other boys in his exact situation.

The second Avi closed his eyes, he heard another voice. A distinct, booming, yet familiar one.

“SILENCE!”

The hallway fell into complete stillness. Avi opened his eyes and looked up. His stomach turned over inside of him.

A few meters away from Avi stood Ryan, his loving boyfriend. He was dressed in a dark robe with a red interior. His distinctive blond hair was capped with a wooden wreath; a crown on his head. Ryan’s whole body glowed a bright golden yellow, illuminated the nude bodies and twinkling eyes of the chained men next to him.

“That’s better. Thank you all for joining me,” he says with a grin. He begins to pace around the columns, occasionally stepping out of Avi’s sight.

“Ryan! Help me!” cried a boy behind Avi. Wait, is everyone here a friend of Ryan’s? Avi didn’t recognize any of the dimly lit faces.

Ryan ignored the cries. “I’m sure you are all very confused. Let me make some things clearer. My name is not Ryan. My name is Haltus. I am a member of a religious order, far older than any of you, known simply as The Order. I have recruited all of you— your primary qualifications being young, queer, virgin males— and generously given you the opportunity to join us.”

Avi was beginning to hyperventilate, hardly listening to Ryan’s ramblings. This was too vivid. This wasn’t like his other nightmares. He needed to wake up. Now.

“Of course, you can’t join right away. That would be far too easy. You will instead go through the trials that myself and many others have succeeded in.” Ryan gestured down the hall into the darkness. “This is the Labyrinth. It is a structure of such incredible size that you might be tempted to call it infinite. It is filled with horrors beyond your imagination. But it is not a death sentence. You must venture into the Labyrinth, and find the exit. If you succeed, you may join our order, and you will be given immense power, eternal youth, and anything you desire. But if you fail, you will remain here forever as a victim of the Labyrinth.”

By now, Avi’s legs were shaking. Wake up. Wake up. For the love of God, wake up.

“Ryan!” cried a skinny boy chained to the pillar next to Avi. “You said you loved me!”

What? Are these all Ryan’s exes?

Ryan smiled, walking up to him. “Oh, Seth. I said that to everyone here. You were all desperate enough for love to trust me. And now, I’ve got you right where I want you.” He grabbed the young man’s chin, and gave him a delicate kiss on the lips.

Avi was freaked out now. Something about this was wrong. He began to struggle against the chains. Avi was twenty years old, of a thin yet lean build, but his struggling was useless against the metal of his restraints.

“There are one hundred of you,” said Ryan. “Any number of you can escape. But you must find the exit. There is no other way out. When your chains release, your trials begin.”

With a bright flash, Ryan suddenly disappeared. A split second later, all at once, the iron chains binding the hundred men all fell to the ground.

What followed was pandemonium.

Immediately, the entire room fell into chaos. Within a handful of seconds, Avi was able to look around and see his surroundings. Behind all of the pillars was a wall, seemingly a dead end in the corridor. The other side appeared to stretch for some distance, but apparently about half of the men had decided the best course of action was to charge the dead end wall and attempt to force it down, or climb it, or something.

Dozens of screaming nude men of all shapes and sizes began to pound on the wall. The oldest among them seemed to be in their early to mid thirties. The youngest were no younger than eighteen.

Avi had been taking all of this in from the floor he had been thrown to. It was cold. Slowly, as the mob continued to pound against the wall and cry for release, Avi got back to his feet. His first step was to distance himself from the calamity at the end of the hall, and begin to walk towards the other end.

The shaken and slightly bruised man began to fear that he wasn’t dreaming at all. Everything felt far too real for that. He was certain of everything he could see, hear, and touch. His body felt real, and he noticed all of his body hair had been completely shaven off. No, he wasn’t dreaming. He had been kidnapped by Ryan, or a Ryan lookalike, and brought into an abandoned warehouse or something. Yes, thought Avi. Just a serial kidnapper. The police are probably on their way right now.

A few nude men were beginning to approach the far end of the corridor, analyzing the three way intersection. The path split left and right at ninety degree angles. Some six or seven boys in their early twenties, wrists red from their chains, darted their heads back and forth at their two options.

“So what do we do now?” said one.

“I… I don’t know,” said another, breathing heavily. “I mean… What is he gonna do if we just stay here? Will he just kill us?” “Who said anything about being killed?” replied the first.

Avi interrupted. “Do you guys, like, know each other?” he asked, wiping some sweat from his brow.

The first speaker shook his head. “No. But it sounds like Ryan- er, Haltus- has been with all of us before.”

Avi looked at the ground, resting his forehead in his palm. His name is not Haltus. His name is Ryan. It has to be.

“Fuck it,” said another boy from the growing crowd at the intersection. “I’m going. I’m getting out of here.” Without another word, he took off heading left.

“No! Wait! D-don’t leave without me!” cried the second man who spoke, still breathing heavily. He immediately took off to the left after him.

The decisiveness of the first two sparked a trend in the other ninety-eight naked and afraid men. As the riotous crowd at the dead end, their fists scraped from the stone bricked walls, began to disperse, and more and more boys began to head into the darkness, some going left and some going right.

“Shouldn’t we stay together?” questioned one man, the skinny one that Ryan had given a final kiss to. His question went ignored as the crowd of one hundred grew thinner and thinner.

Avi decided that there was no sense in staying here. It seemed as though most of the hundred men had made the same conclusion, save for the handful that still stood or sat near their columns, either in tears or in pure shock. Picking randomly, Avi began to walk down the hall to the left.

Almost immediately, Avi noticed that he was still able to see within a radius of a couple meters despite there being zero light sources on the walls of the corridor. He walked straight ahead, and as he did so he encountered a number of hallways branching off to his left and right, some of them leading to intersections of their own.

This place truly was a maze. But Avi was still convinced that this was just an elaborate ruse. There was no other logical explanation.

He walked independently of the other boys, and as they themselves began to break off from the hallway and make left and right turns, the remaining men became more and more sparse. Avi tried to keep eye contact with them, like sporadic cars on a country road, but it was not very long until Avi was totally, helplessly alone.

When he realized this, Avi stopped in his tracks. He had made a terrible mistake. He should have stayed where he was. Right? Wasn’t the entrance the most logical place for the first responders to rescue him? He could just head back. He had gone in a straight line, hadn’t he?

Avi turned right around and began to walk. Yes, he had definitely kept to a straight line, he had just been walking for a long time. But how long had he been walking exactly? Had he been unconsciously following someone ahead of him and made a turn without thinking? If he had, then he could be far past where he originally turned. And he had definitely been walking far enough that he would have found the entrance enough.

Avi sighed, looking up. He was lost. Very lost. This would make his rescue considerably more difficult.

He felt his eyes begin to well up, but blinked to suppress them. No, he couldn’t cry. Not now. He couldn’t think about Ryan and how much he loved him, or how genuinely afraid he was, or how cripplingly alone he felt. He had to stay strong.

“Fuck!”

Avi froze. A voice. Someone is nearby! It was faint, but it sounded as though it was an exclamation, like someone had stubbed their toe on the unnaturally smooth stone floor or something. He began to walk slowly towards the origin of the voice, keeping quiet as though afraid to scare the other person off.

As he walked, he heard a more clear sound. A rattling, like a gate being opened and shut over and over again. Avi continued on. Was someone in trouble?

He rounded another corner, and peered down the hall. On the side of the wall was an entryway, open without an actual door.

Through this opening was a small room. It was plain, only about five or six meters on each side. It was entirely stone, but unlike the hallway it had a visible ceiling three meters from the floor.

Inside, Avi was for a half-second relieved to see people. But these people were not like anyone Avi had seen before.

Two beings were inside the room. One of them was lying on a leather couch in the corner, seemingly asleep. The other knelt facing away from Avi, fiddling with what looked like an oversized birdcage— it looked as though the handle on top had rusted and fallen off. The beings were naked, human and male in appearance, but their skin was a dark shade of purple. Their hair was a brilliant pure white, the sleeping person having long hair down to his waist and the kneeling one with something of a mullet.

Out of their heads grew small black horns, no larger than a ring box, and just above their bare asses, a thin purple tail extended a meter or so. The kneeling creature’s tail flapped around on the ground, like that of an annoyed cat.

Avi was more shocked than anything else. He let in a gasp. Suddenly, the kneeling creature turned around, staring at Avi with his solid white eyes. A grin formed on his purple face.

“Why, hello there,” it said calmly.