Chapter 13: The Maze

  Cole and Faelen were lost.

  Every turn they made seemed to end in a dead end. The pair traveled for what felt like days. It had to have been days. There was no sky down here, no sunrise or sunset, no clock to check, no phone that still worked. Time stretched until it didn’t make sense anymore. Cole only knew they were still moving, still breathing.

  His hunger had gotten worse.

  At first it had been background noise. A nagging emptiness he could ignore while adrenaline kept him upright. But the maze had eaten that adrenaline. Hour after hour, corridor after corridor, it had ground him down until the hunger became a living thing.

  It was sharp now. It bit him.

  Before this point, he wasn’t sure he knew entirely what hunger really was. He’d skipped meals before. He’d been broke before. He’d gone to bed with an empty stomach and told himself it was fine because he’d eat in the morning.

  This was different.

  This made him stare at the little pebbles scattered across the dungeon floor and actually consider whether he could chew them. He was legitimately looking at stone and thinking, if I swallow enough of it, does my body stop screaming?

  He tried not to. He really tried.

  Sometimes his gaze would drift down and stick there anyway. His mouth would water, his body was stupid enough to believe that grit and rock could turn into food if he just wanted it badly enough.

  Faelen’s face had lost some of its color, and his movements had gotten slower over time. The poison was gone, the purge tonic had handled that, but hunger didn’t care about cure. Hunger was its own poison.

  No monsters attacked them.

  Cole almost wished they would.

  The thought made him feel like an animal, but it was true. If something jumped them, he could kill it. If he killed it, maybe he could eat it, profession or no profession. Maybe the Ethereal could punish him later. Maybe it would poison him. Maybe it would do something worse.

  But hunger had a way of making you accept bad bargains.

  Nothing came.

  Just torches. Old stone. The same faded brass and deep browns. The same air that tasted of dust and cold metal. The same oppressive silence.

  They hit another dead end.

  A flat wall. No seam. No crack. No obvious mechanism. No trick hinge. Nothing.

  Cole stared at it for a long moment, blinking slowly as if maybe his eyes were broken and reality would correct itself if he waited long enough.

  It didn’t.

  “I don’t understand,” Cole muttered to Faelen. His voice sounded rough. His throat dry with a coating of dust and sand.

  The elf shook his head, staring blankly at the wall. “We go one way, only to discover it’s wrong. We try another way, it is wrong. There are no clues.”

  The elf was right. They weren’t entirely stupid. They did look for clues. They checked the torches. They checked the floor. They ran their hands along the walls until their fingers were sore, feeling for grooves or buttons or any kind of mechanism that would make sense.

  Cole had even decided to go a particular way because he thought he saw a scuff mark, maybe left by another survivor who had tried to mark a trail. He knew he was grasping at straws.

  Dead end.

  Everything was dead ends.

  His mind kept trying to build patterns, and the maze kept breaking them.

  “We need to think about this,” Cole said. He rubbed his face hard enough to make his skin sting. “Do something different.”

  Faelen’s eyes flicked to him. The elf looked tired.

  “We’ve tried, Cole Rourke,” Faelen said. His voice was calm, but there was a thin edge under it. “What other different thing can we do?”

  Cole stared at the wall.

  His thoughts were slow. Heavy. He could feel the emptiness in his belly dragging at his focus. Even forming a sentence was nearly impossible.

  He forced the words anyway. “Maybe climb the wall?”

  It was stupid. He knew it was stupid the moment it left his mouth. There was nothing up there. No ledge. No balcony. No secret door that would magically appear because he decided to play mountain goat.

  Faelen shrugged, his face shifting into an expression of doubt that almost looked offended by the suggestion. Despite that, he stepped forward and tried scrambling up the wall.

  His boots scraped stone. His fingers searched for holds that weren’t there. He managed maybe a foot off the ground before his grip slid, and he dropped back down with a slight thump of feet on stone.

  Cole waited. Half expecting a new door to open. Something to reveal itself. Something to signal, congratulations, you figured it out.

  Nothing.

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  Faelen looked at him, expression flat. “Happy?”

  Cole didn’t have it in him to snap back. He just exhaled, slow and tired. “Okay. Not that.”

  He stared at the wall again, and the thought that came wasn’t clever. It wasn’t brave. It wasn’t heroic.

  It was desperation.

  “What if we turn around,” Cole said slowly, “go down the other path a few steps, then swing back around and try the same path again?”

  Faelen’s lips twisted. His brows came together. “Why? We know this is a dead end.” He pointed at the wall,. “This does not change if we walk away and come back.”

  “Why scramble up the wall?” Cole shot back. He wasn’t yelling, but the frustration came out sharp anyway. “Because we have to try something different. We’ve been wandering for days. What we are doing isn’t working and the Ethereal isn’t going to give us any help.”

  Faelen let out a long sigh through his nose. He looked past Cole into the corridor behind them.

  Then he nodded once.

  “Fine,” Faelen said. “If I will scramble up a wall, I will try this.”

  So they did.

  They turned around. Walked back down the corridor. Cole counted steps under his breath because he didn’t trust his brain to remember anything right now.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  He stopped. Looked at Faelen.

  Faelen looked at him, then nodded back.

  They turned. Walked toward the dead end again.

  And when they arrived, the wall was gone.

  Cole stopped so fast his boots scraped. For a second he just stood there, staring at open corridor where solid stone had been.

  His mouth opened. No sound came out.

  Faelen stepped forward, reached out, and waved his hand through the empty space where the wall had been.

  Nothing blocked him.

  The path went onward.

  Cole laughed.

  It wasn’t a joyful sound. It came out cracked, half breath, half bark. It sounded like someone who’d been pushed too hard finding one absurd thing to cling to.

  “All this time,” Cole said, and his voice shook. “All this time and this? This is what we had to do?”

  He almost collapsed, giggling like a mad man. His hands went to his knees. His shoulders shook. He felt his mind start to twist and fray at the edges. The relief, the absurdity of it, nearly made him snap.

  He pressed his forehead against his fist and forced himself to breathe.

  Maybe he should have thought of it sooner. Now that they had done it, the mechanic of going down a different path wasn’t a new concept. In a game, you tested things. You backtracked. You reset triggers. You tried the same action again after doing something else to see if the environment changed.

  But that was games.

  That was sitting around a tabletop, laughing, having fun, arguing about rules that didn’t matter because the worst thing that happened was someone spilled soda on a character sheet.

  That was staring at a screen with a full belly and all the time in the world to think with a clear head.

  For Cole, this was real.

  Adrenaline had been pumping through him. He’d been thrown into the fire, forced to try and survive. He’d fought strange and terrible things. He’d bled. He’d almost died. He’d watched Faelen nearly die. He’d made potions with a trembling hand while poison and hallucinations tried to pull him apart.

  If it weren’t for luck, quick thinking, Faelen, and literal super powers, he would most certainly be dead.

  No matter how powerful his spells were.

  Cole straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He swallowed, throat dry, and then nodded toward the corridor.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Faelen nodded too, he didn’t entirely believe the maze had just moved out of their way because they had walked away and come back.

  They continued down the path.

  The corridor stretched, turned, narrowed, widened again. Torches flickered. Stone changed slightly in color in places.

  After a while, they came to a fork.

  Two paths. Both lit. Both the exact kind of obvious choice the dungeon had been mocking them with for days.

  Cole stopped at the fork and stared.

  Faelen looked at him, waiting.

  “No,” Cole said slowly, and the word came out heavy. He stared at the two tunnels. “That’s the obvious choice. Take one of these paths.”

  Faelen blinked. “Yes. That is how forks work.”

  Cole almost laughed again. He didn’t. He pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth and forced his brain to stay sharp.

  “I think I’m finally starting to get it,” Cole said. He looked at Faelen. “Don’t take the obvious path. That’s the theme. Has to be.”

  Faelen’s expression shifted into uncertainty. He didn’t argue, but Cole could see the thought behind his eyes. This is madness. This is guessing.

  Cole pointed behind them. “Let’s turn back around.”

  Faelen hesitated for a heartbeat, then nodded. They had built a trust together over this long time, and the elf didn’t question him.

  They turned around and took a few steps back the way they’d come.

  The air changed.

  Cole felt it first, a subtle shift. The torches flickered. The stone underfoot seemed to breathe.

  Cole turned his head.

  The corridor behind them looked different.

  It was subtle, at first. But the angle of the walls was off. The way the shadows fell was wrong. The torchlight didn’t hit the floor the same way.

  Cole swallowed. “See?” he whispered, and he hated how relieved he sounded.

  They took another step.

  And another.

  The stone shifted to something smoother, the color turning warmer. The air lost some of its cold. Then, impossibly, the corridor opened into something that made Cole’s brain stutter.

  Grass.

  A strip of green ran between stone edges. Grass. Real grass, pale and alive, growing between dungeon stone.

  Cole stared at it for half a second, then his body decided for him.

  He fell to his knees and started eating grass.

  He might regret it later. It might be poisonous. It might be a trap. It might be a dungeon trick that turned your stomach into a knot and laughed while you died.

  Frankly, he didn’t care.

  He didn’t care about the gross taste or the way it slid down his throat. He just cared that something was in his empty belly. That there was something there besides ache.

  Faelen joined him without a word.

  The elf tore handfuls and chewed, face tightening at the taste. Cole could tell Faelen hated it. Cole hated it too.

  But hunger was louder.

  They ate until their stomachs stopped screaming. Until the sharp pain dulled into a heavy, uncomfortable fullness.

  After a few moments, they sat there, hands resting on their knees, breathing slow.

  Cole blinked, and the world steadied.

  Then he noticed something.

  “Uh,” Cole said, and his voice sounded strange even to him. “Faelen?”

  “Yes?” Faelen answered, still chewing like he didn’t trust the grass to stay real if he stopped.

  Cole pointed.

  “What’s that?”

  Faelen followed his finger.

  At the end of the grassy corridor, half swallowed by shadow, stood a massive door.

  The door that looked like it belonged at the entrance of a cathedral. Carved stone. Dark metal bands. Symbols etched so deep they looked like scars. The air around it felt thicker.

  Faelen stared.

  Then he laughed, low and tired.

  “That,” Faelen said, voice rough with disbelief, “that, Cole Rourke, is the boss door.”

  Cole’s gut twisted. It had nothing to do with hunger any longer.

  Boss. End. Home.

  Faelen kept speaking, and Cole listened.

  “One more fight,” Faelen said. “Just one more, and we are home free. Once we beat that boss, the rift will close while it recovers. It will send us back. I will return to Alastaria, and you shall return to Earth.”

  Faelen’s eyes stayed on the door as if he didn’t want to blink and risk it vanishing.

  “We’ve nearly done it,” Faelen said quietly. “We’ve nearly done it, Cole.”

  Home.

  Nathan.

  Cole swallowed hard. His throat felt tight. He tried to make his hands stop shaking. He wasn’t sure if he could.

  “Well,” Cole said, forcing the words out steady, “let’s do this, then.”

  He pushed himself to his feet. Faelen rose beside him. The two of them stood there on a strip of dungeon grass, staring at a door.

  Cole adjusted the makeshift curtain sack tied to his waist. He felt the glass vials in his jacket pocket clink softly. Mend potions. Purge tonics. A small comfort, a small edge, the only preparation they had been allowed.

  He breathed in.

  And then he started walking toward the boss door.

  I believe the story is stronger for it.