The Maze The Lost Labyrinth - By Jason Brannon Page 0,50
and messages all meant to give me insight, but at this point I felt like a donkey being led around with a carrot dangling in front of its face.
“All I want is a straight answer.”
“The answers have never been straighter,” Connie said. “In a place of truth, there are no lies.”
“Spoken like a true sage. If you give everything multiple meanings, then every interpretation will be correct.”
“You don’t want to get out of here, do you?”
“All I want is to get back to my family and make things right. I want to get my life back on track. I want to go toward that light and stay there. I’m tired of living in shadows.”
“So what’s stopping you from doing any of those things?” Connie asked.
“You are.”
“Remember, I told you that this labyrinth is a place of free will. Maybe you couldn’t go toward the light because you hadn’t convinced yourself that the light is where you wanted to be.”
I banged my fists on the walls. “I want out of here!”
“So leave. The light will come to you, but you have to make the first move. Remember, the choice is yours.”
“So I can go there now?”
“Ask your heart that question.”
“Thanks for the non-answer.”
Although I had tried it before, I walked toward the light. As I walked, I thought about my life and how I truly wanted to change. I wanted the chance to get out of this dreary place and reform myself. I focused on the good in my life instead of the bad. I had a good job. I had a great family. I had a nice house, friends, people who cared about me. My life was better than I realized, and I wanted to get back to it. Although it was still quite a ways off, the light actually seemed to get bigger as I trudged down the gloomy hallway. I was making progress now.
Still, there seemed to be a lot of ground to cover. I had no doubt that there would be more tests, more traps that I could fall into if I wasn’t careful.
Nothing reinforced that notion more than the sudden appearance of frost on the walls. The passageway made an abrupt right turn, and I could tell by the icicles hanging from the ceiling that I was about to enter a dangerous place, made all the more so by the fact that I wasn’t dressed for winter. I shivered and watched my breath erupt in white plumes of fog.
“The Hall of the Crucified Thief is just ahead,” Connie said. “I’ll tell you more when the time is right.”
“The Hall of the Crucified Thief? Now doesn’t that just sound like a perfect vacation getaway.”
Connie, however, didn’t respond. She was gone for now. I was alone again.
It was like walking into a deep freezer. My teeth chattered with each step I took forward. Everything was covered in a thick layer of ice, and I walked slowly to keep from slipping.
As I ventured onward, taking care to avoid the low hanging icicles that threatened to impale me, I thought about what I knew about the Crucified Thief. All the sermons I had heard preached on the subject referenced the Thief as a focal point of hope for lost souls. The Thief had led a sin-filled life and been condemned to crucifixion because of his crimes. It was only as he hung on his cross, directly beside the cross of Jesus, that he received forgiveness. His last-minute repentance showed that it was never too late to receive salvation, and that a man could be saved as long as there was breath in his lungs and a true desire for forgiveness in his heart.
That kind of joyous example seemed at odds with the frigid, mind-numbing hallway I had stepped into. There was no hope in this kind of place. In fact, the desolation was so extreme that my heart felt heavy and overburdened. Veins of black ice ran across the floor, spider-webbing their way up the walls. Where the hall should have ended, stalactites and stalagmites of ice had fused together forming a set of bars that would have rivaled those in any prison. The only way to get to the light was to go through the ice, and I didn’t have any kind of tools to use for digging.
It was only as I looked around, hoping for some way out of this newest predicament that I saw the Thief, frozen in the ice, nailed to that frigid cross. It was