Chapter 10
FOR BETTER or worse, I don’t have time to think about the memory. We’re being carried by a flood of water through a tunnel, the top half of which opens up to leave us cupped within the channel of an aqueduct. Although it still whisks us along at a frightening speed, it at least allows me to frantically gasp for breath. I try to hoist Pogli up as well—I can hear him snorting and rasping and coughing. Above us is only darkness, as if we’re in a deep cavern, though there’s a faint glow providing barely enough light to see by. Daesra still has my arm, and we manage to catch each other’s eyes in the rushing chaos. He looks a little dazed. Disturbed.
“We’re about to fall!” is all he says before shoving me away.
“ What ?” I shout, but then the aqueduct simply ends , dumping us out with the water. And we are, indeed, falling, the glittering black surface of what looks like an underground lake rising fast to meet us. I curl around Pogli, protecting his little body with my own. Daesra was probably more worried about hurting me with his. His hooves could cut me and his horns spear me through if I were to land on them.
The lake’s surface is bad enough. I hit hard, feeling like every inch of my skin has been violently slapped, even through my tunic. Chill water floods my nose and mouth, and for a while in the cold, suffocating dark I don’t know which way is up. I let go of Pogli when he claws away from me. I struggle toward air myself, my arms having to do most of the work with my legs tied.
I break the surface, flailing and gasping. Daesra comes up next to me, spitting and whipping the hair out of his eyes. A vast cave yawns around us, stalagmites and stalactites lining the shadowy fringes of the lake like teeth, the outer reaches lost to darkness. Nothing looks warm or welcoming, never mind what might be lurking beneath us in the cold water.
Pogli is already paddling toward shore. I halfheartedly try to swim away from the daemon, mostly because my pride demands it.
“No, you don’t,” Daesra snarls, his hand shooting out to latch onto the scruff of my neck and haul me back.
I’m confident I would drown, anyway, with my legs still bound. I could have made it a short distance—certainly out of the cistern, had I wanted to—but crossing a lake would be a different story, and I feel half-dead, besides. I don’t struggle when Daesra pulls me against his chest, pinning me in place. He swims for shore with powerful one-armed strokes and kicks from his legs, his hooves not hindering him at all that I can tell. The water itself seems to propel us, forming a current around us. He must be able to manipulate it now. This water is just water. I let myself rest, because I can’t muster anything else.
When he reaches the shore, he doesn’t so much carry me as drag me out of the lake, like even he’s too tired to properly lift me. We both collapse on the slick stone ground, simply breathing the cool, cave-damp air. Pogli waddles up after us, his fur sodden and mane dripping, and flops down on his belly without preamble. He’s snoring within seconds.
I’m exhausted down to my very bones. I thought Daesra was devouring me in the most pleasant of ways, but it was really the pool devouring us both.
“If the flood hadn’t come, would we have just kept doing… that … until we died?” I murmur up at a ceiling that’s too high to make out. The top of the cave sinks between stalactites to depths as dark as the lake beneath it. I wonder how I can see at all until I realize there’s some sort of algae growing over the stone around us that glows with blue-green luminescence.
“Until you died, and that would have happened sooner rather than later, I think.” Daesra, lying on his back, sounds just as tired. “I’m not sure what would have happened to me. Perhaps I would have gone entirely mad. A creature of endless hunger.”
It’s somehow easier to talk about this than what happened after—what we both saw in the memory. Or maybe it’s only easy because we’re sprawled side by side in the darkness, not looking at each other.
“Apparently the maze wants us to stay together so much that it’s willing to kill us to make it so.” I laugh shakily.
That, or we fell into a trap like fools, and the maze flushed us both out of it—perhaps in compensation for Daesra’s taking me captive. I don’t want to admit I’m considering the possibility, because that means I should be escaping him as quickly as possible, and I’m too drained for that. Not to mention my legs are still bound.
Maybe we can both pretend we’re not opponents for a little while longer. At least until I manage to catch my breath and untie myself.
“I… apologize… for what I did back there, in the cistern,” Daesra says slowly. “That wasn’t you, wanting that. You didn’t truly grant me leave to do what I did.”
“Likewise. That wasn’t you giving me what I demanded, either.” We’re both quiet for a moment. Debating how true any of that is. Or at least I am. “Perhaps I forced your hand by making you get into the water,” I add, before I say something I might regret like I’m sorry, too or Thank you, I actually enjoyed what you did , because where in the gods’ names would that leave us?
“And I forced yours by taking you captive. We probably would have had to go through the pool, anyway, if that was the only path forward or down , in this case. Perhaps you were right, and the maze didn’t like the unfair advantage I’d taken over you, and so it drew us together in more… direct… ways.”
Or it washed us out of there because we were too close , I don’t yet say.
“So perhaps no one is to blame for what happened,” Daesra continues, still being so horribly reasonable. Not like himself at all. Chastened, almost.
“But you may have been able to resist me if I hadn’t thrown myself at you,” I say, somehow wanting to be reasonable myself. “You do hate me.”
It’s not a question. I would never be so obvious in seeking his reassurance, not anymore.
“Maybe—” he begins, and my heart catches in my throat, despite myself. “Maybe we shouldn’t fight each other so much for the moment. Maybe we both should bow to the maze’s strange whims and carry on together, voluntarily. A sort of truce.” And then he adds, ruining everything, “Not that I’ll be able to trust you.”
I sit up enough to stare at him in disbelief. “As if I can trust your promises! Never mind that you’ve betrayed me more times than I have you, you said you would forgive me back there at the cistern. You were lying.”
He props himself up on his elbows as well—making the two of us the most exhausted, half-drowned sparring partners I’ve ever seen. I would laugh, if not for what he was saying.
“I promised I would forgive you if you came back to me, and you didn’t. But yes, I was lying,” he adds, before I can accuse him again. “You were out of your mind, and I was trying to get you out of a dangerous predicament. It was for your own good. Besides, you’ve lost any right to receive the truth from me.”
“You’re blaming me for offenses I don’t fully remember, which already feels unjust,” I fire back. “And what if I lied to you for your own good back then?” But even as I say it, I doubt it.
The look he gives me says he does, too.
“Will you forgive me only if I let you punish me properly?” I say nastily. “ Beat me?” I know I’d wanted it in the memory, but it’s the most hurtful thing I can think to say. To take his gift and twist it around like a poisoned dagger.
His laugh is utterly devoid of mirth. “Only if you beg me first. And even then—no. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve anything you want.”
I have another dagger up my sleeve.
“You loved me,” I blurt.
So much for not staying anything I’ll regret.
Daesra’s red eyes narrow and his tone turns to acid. “I would think you would have guessed already, based on the strength of my hatred for you. My love has become something else, since.” He sighs, abruptly turning to my legs to begin untying them, not meeting my gaze. Perhaps he’s too tired to maintain his fury, or perhaps because he all too recently looked at me with hunger, and he’s worried his eyes might reflect that, still? “I’m not sure why the maze felt the need to show you that. It’s not relevant anymore. You never loved me in return.”
I’m glad , I remember spitting at him back when we first met—for the second time, that whatever it is you know of me from our past, I never spared any love for you.
No wonder he was so angry. Is still angry.
“Oh, look,” he says, coiling his rope once I’m freed, facing elsewhere once more. At first I think he’s changing the subject with awkward abruptness, but then he nods at where Deos is hauling himself out of the lake. The statue must have walked or crawled along the bottom.
“Deos,” I shout, sitting up fully. “You made it!” I can’t help but be relieved, even if the statue hasn’t always been my friend.
At the same time, I feel an odd twinge of regret that it won’t just be Daesra and me to continue sparring or… whatever it is we’re doing. And I, decidedly, am a fool.
Daesra doesn’t even help me up after he hauls himself upright, stepping away from me on soaked hooves. Worse, he commands Deos to do so.
Before the statue can finish lumbering over to me, I say to the daemon, “I still need a hand with something, and I don’t think poor Deos can manage it.”
The top half of my tunic has fallen open where Daesra tore it, gaping enough to partially bare my breasts, and I can’t do much about it myself, since he took all my rope. Part of me is pettily satisfied to make him fix what he did—to force him to look at me. To draw closer.
Daesra’s sharp jaw clenches as he stalks back over to me, hands unraveling one of the lengths of my gold-threaded rope from his belt. He kneels next to me and ties a simple chest harness to hold my tunic closed, looping over and under my breasts, but he keeps several fingers under the rope as he does, making sure it’s not too snug. Nothing for me to use—proving he doesn’t even trust me to wield any of my own power in his presence. He’s also entirely perfunctory, touching me as little as possible. I resist leaning into the gentle tug of the rope. It feels entirely too good while, at the same time, not nearly enough.
I know this uneasy truce can’t last, and yet that doesn’t keep me from missing his warmth. I try to blame the cold of the lake water, the damp chill of the cave, but I can’t hide from the truth anymore, as vulnerable as I am: Whatever I may have felt for him, I miss the feel of him. Skin to skin. Push to pull to pressing so tightly together I can’t find the dividing lines between us anymore. So much is shifting in so little time. It’s more than just the memories I’ve glimpsed, or even what happened at the cistern. My body seems to be remembering what I can’t. Dozens of nights with him. Hundreds, maybe. I miss his embrace like I’m missing a part of myself.
And maybe my flesh is also missing something with more bite and sting.
Fool, fool. For letting myself want him back then, when I planned to betray him. For wanting him still, now that it’s too late to have him ever again—not only because he hates me, but because I’ll need to betray him again. Perhaps it was clever before, to use such attraction, as potent and invisible as aether, to draw him in, only to stab him in the heart. And yet, as happens when playing dangerous games, I ended up cutting myself with my own blade.
Daesra is right. He’ll never trust me again, and I can’t trust him. He’s played me false almost every step of the way through this maze. He even admitted it, just now:
You’ve long since lost any right to the truth from me.
He’ll never forgive me. I need to escape him once and for all. Do what I came here to do. Be done with this impossible dance.
I can’t resist one last salvo. “Why didn’t you simply mend my tunic? If you can reshape a statue and make it dance or part a flood, you can do that much.”
Daesra pauses, staring off into the darkness. He obviously doesn’t want to answer.
“A truth for a truth?” I suggest.
He seems to weigh it, and then admits grudgingly, “I like it torn.”
His confession shouldn’t surprise me or make me blush, not after the memories I’ve relived or what happened at the cistern—but it does both. I guess he also wanted to tie it closed as an ex cuse to get closer to me, despite himself. To feel the pull between us both—literally, in the rope—just as I’ve been craving.
This could be an opening in his defenses, even if it’s also one in mine. A chance to once again use the knife that cuts me as badly as it cuts him. It’s the only weapon I can find at the moment.
“Now the truth from you in return,” he says. “What do you think of my idea for a temporary truce?”
I hesitate for as long as he did, considering. “It’s tempting. But a truce implies that I’m left with something. You haven’t offered me much. What can you give me?”
He regards me. “What do you want?”
“More.” A weapon , I don’t say, adding instead, “As well as an answer to my question, since you only answered with another question.”
“I can answer with more than words, if you’ll allow me.” His voice comes out rougher—perhaps with something other than anger texturing it. “And you’ll receive what you want in return.”
Does he mean access to my power or to him—or both?
I snort. “Which will only require my trust. I think we’re too far beyond that.”
He runs a length of rope through his fingers. “What about your surrender? Conditional, and just for now. If you give me that, you’ll have the strength you want.”
It’s beyond tempting, even as part of me still recoils at the thought of making myself so vulnerable to him. But I won’t be vulnerable for long, and I need some sort of weapon in this place. He’s willing to open this doorway to aether for me—to strength I might even be able to use against him. But at what cost to myself?
I’ve lost track of who owes an answer to whom, but I ask anyway: “Is this something that you want as well?”
His eyes seem to sink to a darker shade of red. “Yes.”
“I won’t beg or kneel for you,” I say immediately.
“I won’t require you to.”
I hesitate. “I don’t quite remember how this works.”
“You don’t have to. You need only to yield.” He holds up the bundle of rope in his hand. “At least to this, if not to me. And you decide when you’ve had enough.”
My eyes lock onto the rope. I want to give myself over to it almost as much as I want to gain the advantage it might bring me. “I think I can do that.”
He begins uncoiling the loops onto the ground, and the slap of fiber on stone is entrancing, sinking me into a focused sort of daze. Similar to that which pain grants me, scouring all else away. It’s just me and this moment, with nothing in between.
This state feels both new and familiar. Just as when I’m pain-drunk, I need to be careful. I could lose myself. Or maybe it’s that I’m so deep in my own skin that I could lose sight of all else.
I can’t let that happen. And yet, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to resist it.
Daesra kneels before me once more, but this time he’s not holding back, leaning toward me and taking my hands in his. Drawing me into him such that I could weep with how familiar and warm his body suddenly feels. I thought I knew how much I missed his touch, but I had no idea until meeting it again.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
“Yes,” I breathe. Am I? I can’t help asking myself.
He seizes my wrists in a firm grip, binding them together almost immediately. He slings the remaining rope over my shoulder, cinching my arms around me. Except the embrace feels like his.
“Don’t fight it,” he says, the words a whisper-light caress across my cheek.
“I’m not,” I murmur. And it’s the truth. I’ve already closed my eyes, forgoing my other senses, leaning in. Giving myself to the pull. I can’t even feel my legs, which were cramped and wet and cold against the stone ground. There’s nothing between me and this moment, not even my body.
A sort of dance follows after that. The tug of the line, Daesra’s hand on one end and me on the other, surrendering to his summons. I bend to him, feeling something strengthen in me at the same time. Even as he binds me tighter and tighter, I feel something within me freed.
Power. As much as I’ve ever felt through pain. Flame that I’ll be able to call forth even from the memory of this exchange, at least for a short time. That’s how potent it is.
But his potency is glaringly apparent to me as well. His ability to coax this from me. Giving myself over to a needle in my hand or even a blade doesn’t frighten me, but giving myself over to him does. I want to open myself up to him so badly I worry I could give him everything.
He’s the blade, cutting into me, despite the rope only barely biting into my skin.
I feel wrenched out of my trancelike state as if from a deep sleep, my heart pounding like a panicked bird’s. Which makes sense, since I’m something like a sacrificial dove in his hands. Except I fell into his clutches willingly, like an absolute fool.
My eyes fly open. “Enough.”
Daesra keeps his promise to end the exchange whenever I want. The tension drops almost immediately between the rope and my skin, between him and me. Despite my sudden alarm, I’ve felt so entwined with him that it doesn’t make sense to my flesh, at first, that there could be such space between us. He unties me in moments—or maybe it only seems that way as I claw myself out from under the weight of my surrender and the fear that’s drowning me.
I thought this would be worth the risk, that I could withstand the pull of him in order to gain power, but he’s an ocean whirlpool, drawing me down. The ease with which I sank into him terrifies me—my unconscious ability to trust him so thoroughly, when he swore he would never trust me.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with him, only this willingness within me to surrender, and some animal part of me has awoken to warn of the danger. It wouldn’t take much more than this for me to offer up everything to him—my better judgment. My ambition. The not-insignificant power I’ve already managed to scrape together with tooth and nail. Everything that makes me me .
I cannot lose myself so readily.
When I can move enough to rub my arms and look around, I find Daesra standing apart from me, recoiling the rope. It’s strange that he could simply withdraw the means of our connection without leaving behind any obvious sign, other than the too-loose tie holding my torn tunic together.
I still feel the tug toward him like a hook and line sunk into my chest. And, in exchange, I have power burning within me that I’ve hardly ever felt before. I doubt he realizes how much he gave me.
But I no longer think it was worth the risk.
I draw myself upright on legs that feel a bit shaky, if completely rested, hardly looking at him. I occupy myself by rousing Pogli with a thorough scratching and fluffing of his fur. I have no idea what Daesra felt—and I don’t want to ask. It can’t match how I felt. How part of me still feels.
This may have been a mistake, but the knife that cut me is still a weapon in my hand. I cling to that thought as I resist leaning into his pull once more, or even falling to my knees before him.
“Are you ready to move on?” he asks without looking at me.
He doesn’t wait for a response, starting into the cave and rais ing flame in his palm despite the soft blue-green glow around us. Deos and I follow, Pogli trotting behind, if not with as much bounce as usual. I step warily, as unsure of my new status as I am of my new environment. I am sure of how I feel about him. I sense as much distance between me and the daemon as ever before. But now it’s deeper, darker, and filled with teeth to match our surroundings. I wonder what’s lurking in both sets of shadows.
And yet, the distance between us isn’t enough. Not anymore.
As I walk, my certainty only grows: I can’t continue like this if I’m to reach the end in one piece. His ability to destroy me just became as painfully clear to me as the depth of our bond, and no flimsy truce can protect me from that. Opposing forces that are drawn together so powerfully can only explode in violence. I have to believe the maze never intended such a fate for me—out of a sense of self-preservation, never mind my desire to succeed in this trial.
There are no longer walls hemming us in, but stone formations that look like the jaws of some behemoth. I know they’re only stalactites, seeming to melt down from the distant ceiling and drip like wax onto the floor, sometimes so much that the points form continuous pillars that bar our way like a cage. And yet there are paths through the strange structures, the way lit faintly with algae, the rest of the cave sinking into toothy darkness like a waiting maw. Despite being in a cave, we have more freedom to choose our route than ever.
Perhaps the maze is giving me the space to flee.
Daesra chooses our path like before, but instead of keeping track of his movements, I trace a stream of water that exits the lake and flows through the cave, weaving to and fro through rock formations. Water always finds a way—forward and down. If Daesra chooses incorrectly or we get separated—especially by my own design—I want to have an alternative route already chosen.
I peer into the darkness, looking and listening for anything that might distract him, trying to still my shivers in my damp tunic. There’s only rhythmic dripping coming from multiple directions, the gurgling of the stream weaving in and out—and a rising, distant roar in the darkness. I hope it’s not another flood careening toward us. At least we seem to be headed for it this time, not the other way around.
It could be a waterfall. Perhaps the perfect place to lose Daesra.
My search causes me to notice something else: even stranger formations lurking in the shadows of the cave, lit only by that distant glow. Until now, the stalactites and stalagmites have been relatively smooth points or columns. The farther we go into the cave, the more… interesting… they appear. Knobby, interconnected. One shape in the distance looks like a horse with terribly stretched legs and bulbous knees, its elongated head and tail reaching up to vanish toward the ceiling. Another is like a hanging sack that’s emptied a pile of head-sized rocks on the ground.
“Wait, Daesra,” I say, my tone drawing him up short. I point. “What is that?”
I don’t want to exhaust my store of power before I have to. He has an endless font at his disposal, and besides, he’s the one who took the lead.
His eyes narrow slightly, like he’s trying to spot my deception, but what he finds in my face convinces him. He lobs his flame in the direction I indicated, waiting for it to land and sputter out before summoning another.
We both see it. The rocks are heads. Carved marble, but misshapen as if they’ve melted. Mouths hanging open, tongues lolling, eye sockets drooping. I remember how the statues were sinking into the stone bottom of the cistern. Swallowed by it, perhaps. It’s as if the strange stalactite had been devouring the heads before it vomited them out.
Hairs rise on the back of my neck. Daesra and I exchange uneasy glances.
“Can I have my needles back yet?” I ask.
“Not a chance,” he says. “I suspected you would reach for some excuse. Let’s carry on.”
I glare at the daemon, but he ignores me.
It doesn’t get any better as we move deeper into the cave. I keep spotting remnants of statues in fragmented piles or, worse, amorphous masses. Some of these formations only amount to what look like digested piles of shit, save for the eyeballs or mouths gaping all over the stone. Some are even more horrifying, one lumpy column made entirely of melted, screaming faces. Worst of all, somehow, are the figures off in the distance—stretched, enormous. I warily eye one humanoid form, legs planted wide, arms raised to the ceiling, but long and drawn in a way that causes a shiver to run down my spine. They all seem to be attached and unmoving, but I remember too well what the roots and statues have done.
And maybe it’s not just those that can come alive. Perhaps closer to the monster at the center, everything, even the walls themselves, become more monstrous.
I shudder to think what it will be like. The monster.
I need to grow accustomed to the idea that I’ll be facing it alone—not to mention the rest of the maze—and fast.
Daesra comments a moment later, his tone conversational, though his look is pointed. “See, this is what happens when you chew up something nice and spit it back out.”
I’m too on edge to snap back. I already wanted to be free of him, but my desperation is rising to a fever pitch. The daemon can’t be trusted, I can’t be trusted, and neither can the maze, which makes my situation all the more precarious. He’s not letting me arm myself with anything he doesn’t give me, not to mention he hates me, so who’s to say he’ll protect me if the journey gets too rough? I feel as if we’re in the tunnels filling with water all over again, except this is worse. He stayed by my side to help me then, though I still had my doubts about his motives. Now, my doubts are too loud to silence.
Especially when one of the stretched shapes in the distant shadows of the cave suddenly breaks a limb free of the ground. It happens so quickly, I almost don’t see it. But I hear it, the clatter of broken rock tumbling over stone, echoing. The thing freezes like it never moved. Trying to trick us.
Luckily, it wasn’t loud enough to make Pogli start barking. His cacophony would cause the wrong sort of distraction.
Daesra curses under his breath, his eyes narrowing in the direction of the sound. The shape. “You saw that, yes?”
But I’m already slipping away into the shadows, drawing a curtain of silence and shadow around me and Pogli. One ear is stoppered with a scrap of my tunic, and I still have access to the potential I gained from surrendering to Daesra—though it won’t last. Any offering, no matter how potent, will wither or rot on the altar eventually. I’m grateful Deos didn’t try to stop me while the daemon moved in the opposite direction, closer to the shifting rock creature. Perhaps Daesra wanted a better look, or perhaps to stir it into moving again. I’d rather be far away.
I dodge through the stone teeth scattered around me, as fast as I can jog on the balls of my feet. Heading for the stream. Its gurgling babble will mask the sound of my movements even more. My cloak of silence and shadow taxes senses, concentration, and strength I’d rather devote elsewhere, especially if more of the cave were to come alive, but I keep it close, for now.
Some of these new formations might gain the right number of mouths and legs to become truly horrifying. Perhaps the wrong number would be more accurate.
I only hear Daesra shout for me once through my one good ear, and then he’s silent. The glow of his flame behind me winks out. Either he’s taking more caution against our strange, living surroundings or stalking me—or both.
I risk setting Pogli down, extending my cloak of silence and shadow to the chimera as he follows on my heels, nearly underfoot. He can walk over the uneven ground better than I can, anyway, on his four legs.
As I skirt around stalagmites, I retie my chest harness to both constrict my breathing and to hurt. I debate using any extra rope to rig something restrictive for my arm as well, but full range of motion will better serve me in this dark, slippery cave. I can vaguely remember hearing of witches who flagellate themselves, but I always thought it a waste of effort. Although perhaps the effort makes the offering all the sweeter.
One rope. A dwindling reserve of power within me, one that makes me flinch every time I cast my mind back to the memory, reliving the feeling of surrender to access it. Tooth and claw. That’s all I have to fight my way through this cave.
And haste. Daesra is no doubt behind me—or even already ahead, though I hope his path has diverged from mine. The distant roar grows closer.
I dip into the stream only when I have to, my feet aching from the chill. And then I try something I don’t remember doing before—I deliberately walk in the water until my feet burn . Cold is its own sort of pain, enough for me to generate heat elsewhere. I warm my hands and core like that, even if my lower extremities feel made of ice.
Good thing, because in following the stream, I eventually have to get down on my belly and squirm beneath a stone formation that cuts across the top. It leaves me drenched to the skin and shivering once again. I have to drag Pogli underneath, the little chimera protesting and miserable. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that Daesra would never fit through the gap. Then again, he could always reshape the stone, so long as it couldn’t resist his attempt, like some parts of the maze have.
The most monstrous, most alive parts.
I want to warm myself again, except now my feet are numb, offering no more pain for me to use. It’s a useful caution that cold, while painful, can quickly become the antithesis of pain—unfeeling. Deadened. I pick up Pogli and clutch his wet, quaking little body to my chest, trying to warm him as he warms me. It’s only a mildly successful endeavor, though he does groan in appreciation.
Eventually, moving as fast as I can and looking constantly over my shoulder for the daemon or something worse, I reach a pool at the end of the stream. It’s not nearly as big as the lake, maybe thrice the size of the cistern. All the while, the echoing roar has grown ever louder, until now it’s thunderous even through my shield. I can feel the vibration in the stone under my feet. The cave has narrowed as well, shrinking in a downward curve to trace the fall of water. Mist obscures my view. It’s a waterfall, indeed, but I don’t know how far it plummets, or into what.
I release my shield, as masking my sound is unnecessary and I need my focus elsewhere. I step closer to the drop-off to get a better look, the cool spray soaking me to the skin once again. Why must it be so wet and cold? It’s a petulant, childish thought, but I can’t help it, even though I know precisely why: because it’s more difficult this way. The maze is a challenge, first and foremost.
I’m still trying to peer into the shadowy depths of the drop-off, edging ever nearer with Pogli at my heels, when I hear a strange click of stone behind me. It must be truly loud for me to hear it over the roar of the falls.
When I turn, I choke on a scream.
A stalactite like the one that vomited up the melting heads is squeezing out something far bigger—a singular shape of interconnecting segments and a bulbous middle—clicking strangely all the while. The figure unfolds as it drops, extending multiple long legs to support a larger body. Like a giant spider much bigger than a horse—no, several horses stuck together. Each leg is pieced together from human-shaped arms and legs. Its head is all eyes, its bulbous body covered in mouths, especially the underside where there’s one gaping, teeth-filled slit. Tottering slightly, it takes a moment to gain its balance.
I, or the maze, has brought this greater challenge to life—with the wrong number of mouths and legs to be truly horrifying, indeed.
It charges me.