The first time I found the Gilded Labyrinth, I was young enough to believe the door.
It rose from the plain like a promise: a gate of polished gold, guards in bright armor, banners whispering of honor and importance. The door spoke in a voice I half-recognized from brochures and grown-ups who said they believed in me.
“Come in,” it said. “Don’t waste your potential. Walk my halls, keep my secrets, and you will climb. Your life will matter.”
I took one step toward it and felt my chest tighten. The corridors beyond the gate seemed to tilt away into a distance that would swallow entire decades. I saw rules stacked on rules, oaths upon oaths, and myself shrinking to fit them.
Fear grabbed my heel. I turned away and told myself it was cowardice.
Years later, I came back on purpose.
This time I had words like “values” and “burnout” and “polycrisis” in my pack. I walked up to the same golden entrance to see whether the problem had been my fear, or the Labyrinth itself.
The door remembered me.
“You are older now,” it murmured. “Braver. You know how fragile the world is. Come in. Walk my maze. Carry out my orders. If you climb far enough, your children’s children will never worry about rent or medicine.”
I peered past the threshold.
I saw tired guards pacing cracked stone, analysts hunched over glowing screens in windowless rooms, engineers bracing failing pillars with their own bodies. Good people, many of them. People who had entered for safety, purpose, a chance to do “the right thing” — now woven into walls that could not love them back.
Far beyond them, rumor said, stood a Tower where the air was soft and nothing essential could be taken from you. Most would never reach it. A few might. And every so often, whispered stories said, someone simply arrived there by luck: a winning ticket, the right last name, an inheritance that vaulted them past the maze.
The thought hit me like cold water: if one of those shortcuts fell into my lap — if I woke up tomorrow already in that Tower, with all the generational safety and comfort the Labyrinth promised — what would I do with my life?
The first feeling wasn’t joy. It was a yawning emptiness where striving used to be. If the Tower could be had without decades of sacrifice, then neither the grind nor the prize could tell me who I was. Without the maze to fight through or the Tower to chase, only my values were left.
With that, the bargain cracked. Why sell my soul to enforce a story I didn’t believe, for a prize I wouldn’t want even if it arrived for free?
I stepped back from the entrance, throat tight with something quieter than fear: ennui, then clarity.
On the path away from the gate I met a traveler from another story, the kind of stranger who appears when you’re ready to hear them.
They looked from the Labyrinth to me and asked only, “If you didn’t need this maze — or its Tower — to feel safe or worthy, what would you grow?”
Their question stayed while they walked on.
I climbed until the Labyrinth shrank to a pattern in the valley below: a glittering snare of duty and decay. From that ridge I could see another slope rising, rough and green, carrying the first rows of young trees.
An Orchard, not yet thriving, but real — planted on the Mountain of Self-Sovereignty, watered by mutual aid instead of orders. A place where no one promised safety, but everyone practiced it together.
The maze wasn’t my destiny; it was my mirror.
Read the sequel, Base Camp Below The Mountain.
⛩️🖥️
