His velocity increased rapidly, propelling him towards the jagged stalagmites beneath him: this looked about as final as a finale could be. Nonetheless, he spared a brief moment to look up at where he fell from. He saw the child looking down at him, her face grief-stricken, her mouth moving. Was she saying something? Perhaps. Everything was so loud for Rowan, he couldn’t focus on anything. But she was safe. Good.

  The depth of the pit left him with little time for his usual brand of experimentation and the stalagmite at the bottom would leave him with little time to act thereafter. With the hole being relatively narrow, Rowan did the only thing he could think of and put his arms out to try and halt his descent—this worked for less than a second and did little beyond skinning Rowan’s palms. He yelped in agony before the collision with the ground cut his scream short.

  Blood leaked from…well it was hard to be sure. His hands were red and raw, something felt broken, and the blood trickling toward his mouth told Rowan his head wasn’t unscathed. But there was no impalement from stalagmites. Odd. He looked at the vi flickering overhead and begged wordlessly for it to cooperate with him. The Dura equation could heal injuries as severe as broken bones: this would likely be enough to save Rowan. Better still, it didn’t require a lengthy equation to write up. The Dura Equation typically only required a few seconds to write, but for Rowan it would be closer to a few dozen seconds. Painstaking as it was, it was still feasible.

  The vi was evasive but, with only two globules necessary to complete the equation, even Rowan’s bloodied, shaking hand was able to eventually write up the Dura equation. To the untrained eye, it likely looked like Rowan was going back in time or perhaps was a recipient of divine intervention: this was not the case. With each painfully slow crack of his bones and sharp gasp that followed it, his body’s natural repairability was pushed beyond human limitations. Fractured and broken bones were set anew as if they’d never broken in the first place, lacerated flesh came back together, and his palms resembled uncooked meat no more. Save for the blood loss, Rowan was okay. Better than okay: his nose was fixed up too.

  “Thanks…for the…help.”

  He heaved dense breaths, speaking to the silent globules, looking up at the hole he’d fallen through: it was too dark to see anything, like someone had filled the hole back up.

  Rowan pondered this as he waited for his breath to catch back up to him. None of the other traps in the maze reset after being sprung, so why couldn’t he see the hole anymore? If someone interrupted the equation sequence, that could explain things. They would have to be nearby to do such a thing, though. Mayhap the trap pit was designed to reset after springing? But why would that trap be the only one done up in such a way? The crushing trap in the maze didn't reset, after all. And where did those stalagmites go? Were they merely a hallucination brought on by the dire situation? Rowan felt his breathing settle as his eyes caught a bloody handprint on the side of the wall. He recoiled in disgust at the sight of his own gruesome attempt to stall his earlier drop. The blood dripped down the wall, drawing Rowan’s eyes to the vi imprinted below it. The sequence was obscured and its glow waning.

  Rowan sat up and looked at the small pool of blood from his impact: the sight made him squirm, but he ought to be alright. He shakily stood to his feet and looked around him: it was another corridor, but far more narrow than the maze’s pathways overhead. Rowan looked at his right hand, steeped in the ink of blight, and walked over to the unfinished vi sequence on the wall. Seeking to test his own hypothesis, he stood on his tippy toes and grazed the end of the sequence with his pitch black fingers. Rowan instinctively winced, the blighted skin screaming out at the slightest contact with anything. The pain on his face immediately dropped to make way for awe as he watched the imprinted vi character revert to a globule, drawn right into his blighted hand.

  The memory was unfamiliar and the voice couldn’t be placed, but—whoever they were—they were right. Vi was correct to fear him: Rowan could pluck it right out of a living person and snuff it out. Worse than that, it felt good when he did it, like he was feeding some insatiable crackjaw. But Rowan had an abysmally shallow vi reservoir—like a child who ate more than they ought to have, too much vi consumption would make Rowan spit it up. But, unlike the child whose mess is easily cleaned or perhaps even mitigated with a bib, Rowan’s proverbial overindulgence would yield a far more hazardous issue: vi toxicity. Scholars have various aptitude levels when it comes to vi; for some, vi toxicity was a reasonable concern, whereas it was more of a cautionary tale for others with boundless reserves. For Rowan, it was a regular threat any time he messed around with vi. Use up too much of his reservoir? Toxicity. Take in too much? Toxicity. Nonetheless, this was a brilliant discovery for Rowan. He couldn’t just draw the vi from living beings, no he could pull it right out of imprinted text. And if an equation is disrupted, then so is the gate: Rowan’s pathetic attempt to brace his fall with the walls didn’t fulfill his objective, yet it still saved his life.

  Though it was nice to not be impaled by stalagmites, the gate’s erasure also closed the hole back up, not that Rowan was going to climb his way out in the first place. He spied more screens like the ones hanging over the maze, except these were bulkier, flanked with accessories, and sitting on desks with chairs flushed against them.

  “These are caliboxes,” Rowan said, grinning as another memory shot forth from the offscape’s clutches.

  Caliboxes stored, retrieved, and processed information. Fancier ones performed other tasks as well, but generally, they were means of record-keeping for Scholars. The caliboxes before him were rather clunky: Rowan suspected they were models older than he was used to. Yet the question gnawing at him was what these devices were doing in the offscape in the first place. He couldn’t be certain—the offscape made sure of that—but Rowan found it unlikely for Scholars to have a strong presence here. If they did, there would be a spire and Rowan likely wouldn’t be here—looking for a veil to pierce—in the first place. So there weren’t Scholars in the offscape, but there caliboxes. Rowan flipped the switch on one, then the next, but neither hummed with vi. Whatever info they contained, they were little but oversized paperweights by the time Rowan encountered them.

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  Rowan felt himself losing his balance and leaned against the desk, his vision blurring. He took deep breaths, staving off his body’s reaction to the excess vi, hoping he’d shrug it off in time.

  “He wants us to gather up some extra rations.”

  Rowan heard a voice echoing off the walls in one direction of the two paths out of the small room. Rowan briefly took the room in, trying to find a place to hide: there were crates of various supplies, the room was likely being used for storage, but little else. Rowan prepared to sprint out of the room, taking his chances down the quiet corridor, but took pause at the small pools of blood from his fall.

  “Can’t leave this,” Rowan whispered to himself, hastily dropping to his knees, attempting to mop up the evidence of his presence.

  “Extra? Why?”

  The pair of voices grew closer, but Rowan didn’t see anyone down the path yet as he hurriedly used the rags covering his body to pick the blood off the nonabsorbent surface at his feet.

  “I guess there’s a food shortage in Arca: he wants to show up, play hero, and charge them twice the cost.”

  The two voices laughed as Rowan scanned for any other droplets of blood. Feeling content with his work, he sprinted down the hall and around the corner.

  “Hey,” a voice called out from the direction Rowan fled from. He leaned against the wall, trying to pretend that he didn’t hear anything. “When are we going to trash these things? They don’t even work.”

  Rowan breathed a sigh of relief and crept away from the two guards. He tried to ride the line between a hasty escape and silent footsteps. Rowan was far from a stealth expert, but the bowels of the labyrinth were relatively empty: most of the guards were likely too busy hunting for more goods to sell or running the maze. Oddly enough, the layers of hallways weren’t any easier to navigate than the maze above him. Rowan figured he’d just stay on the main path, looking for a way out. There was likely a plethora of info to gather in these secret tunnels, and Rowan was eager to poke his nose around. But he was also worried about the child, about the lives potentially being lost aboveground, about the nameless one—certainly, finding a way back upstairs was the priority.

  He tried his best to ignore curiosities he passed by; so much of the architecture in his rearview was unrecognizable. Was it native to the offscape? Or was it from the nameless era? Were the two mutually exclusive? His brain hummed with excitement at the questions, but the end of the hall demanded his attention. The door at the end of the hall was twice the size of the other doors he’d seen, but the architectural styling was identical. The door lacked a knob or latch so Rowan placed his hands on it, curious if he could push it open, to which the door hummed with power. The grooves in the door filled with the familiar cyan glow of vi, opening up automatically thereafter.

  “Intriguing. More imprinted vi, certainly, but what’s the equation?” Rowan muttered to himself as he stepped past the door.

  The inside of the room was the smallest thus far and was less of a room than it was a tube. The door hummed as it shut, though the humming didn’t cease. Rowan stumbled, catching himself on the wall of the tube, as the floor started to move. No, that wasn’t quite right. Mayhap the entire room was moving? Nameless technology was fascinating indeed. Rowan instinctively reached over his shoulder for his bag to take note of his observations, but was reminded of his current circumstance when his hand gripped at nothing. His bag wasn’t on his back, it was being sold at a stall for a steal. The room eventually stopped moving and the doors opened once again.

  Rowan stepped into the most decadent room thus far: piles of glittering shembals surrounded a quite comfortable-looking bed. Rowan sat down for a moment, unable to shake the desire to test the bed: it wasn’t as comfortable as it looked. Rowan let out a huff of disappointment and stood back up. The rest of the room was filled with the gaudiness Rowan assumed Mogrim to hold dear: linens, cloths, spices, arms, jewels, etc. a far less ostentatious fabric was piled with the more luxurious clothing. A cloak: Rowan’s cloak. Rowan smiled like he’d seen an old friend, racing over to it and hugging it close. As he hugged it, he felt a small object poking against one of his pockets. He reached in and pulled out a small cylinder. The texture was glasslike, but Rowan had no idea what he was holding. He couldn’t leave anything out of place for Mogrim to notice, so he put it back in the cloak pocket.

  “I’ll come back for you.”

  Rowan bid his cloak farewell and continued looking around the room. A large desk drew his attention, yet the windows behind it piqued his curiosity more so. Rowan hunched down and snuck up to the wall, slowly popping up to look through the window. He saw the maze, though he was now above it and closer to the screens than ever. Rowan’s eyes lit up with realization: he’d somehow found himself in the structure on the ledge he was looking out at before entering the maze. With one mystery solved, Rowan turned his attention back to Mogrim’s desk. oddities and paperwork, including Rowan’s own logbook, cluttered the surface. Rowan’s face flushed with embarrassment: his private thoughts and observations were just a recreational activity for that loathsome merchant. Rowan grumbled in annoyance as he popped the logbook open once more.

  Your name is Rowan Hightower.

  Pierce the veil.

  The offscape puts holes in your head.

  Read this often.

  Don’t forget the formula

  But there was no formula beneath the text. Also, the text wasn’t there before.

  “Serval’s equation?” Rowan whispered to himself, wondering why new messages were appearing in his log.

  Prior to the offscape, Rowan must have had a plan. So post-offscape Rowan decided he’d put his trust in that plan. He closed the logbook, looking over other documents on the desk. He didn’t know how much time he had to root through Mogrim’s belongings, but he couldn’t help but settle in at the desk and try to soak up as much info as possible. His eyes scanned the top of the document in his hands:

  Mogrim’s Record of Discovery: The Maze and the Maze-Maker