Give

The silver-haired woman unfolded her hands at last. What she placed on the table was nothing physical. But the gesture made space for something, and in that space, the room felt changed.

"Every path has a cost," she said. "Not a punishment. Not a tax. A cost in the original sense — what a thing is worth, measured in what you trade for it."

"What do I have to give?" Maya asked.

The seven figures were still. Even the amber light seemed to pause.

"You will lose the ability to return to what you were before you came here." The woman said it simply, in the way of someone reading a thing already written. "You will remember this room. You will remember the map and what it means. The ordinary life you left outside this door — it will still be there. But you will no longer fit into it the way you did."

Maya thought about her kitchen table. The pigeon on the windowsill. The cup she'd left half-full of coffee.

"That's not a choice," she said quietly. "That's just what happens to people who learn things."

"Yes," said the younger man, and something in his voice suggested he had been waiting a long time for someone to say this.

"There is something more specific," the woman continued. "Something you carry that the path cannot carry with you. We will not name it for you. But you will know it when you find it."

"When I find it," Maya repeated. "Not if."

"No one who has sat in that chair has failed to find it." The woman paused. "What varies is what they choose to do once they have."

Maya looked at the map. At all those branching lines. At her own invisible position just outside the border of what had been decided.

"I accept," she said.

The map, very slightly, shifted.