'"I owe you nothing," she snarled to a foe she could no longer remember, and who wasn't there anyway, drawing herself up the stone wall with the remnants of her ragged fingernails. The paths of the Labyrinth twisted and distorted before her eyes until up, down, left, and right became utterly indistinguishable from one another.
Her worn fingers skittered for purchase against the stones and found none. With a strangled cry of mingled despair and fury, she fell, sliding down the ever-shifting veins of the Labyrinth. Faster and faster she slid down the slick stones, yet no matter how fast or for how long she plunged, nothing arrested her movement. She could not even see what she might be falling towards.
As it happened, she never found out; as abruptly as the hellish slide began, it ended as a section of brick beneath her simply dissolved like mist, her fingers skittering uselessly against whatever chinks and gaps in the crumbling mortar she could still reach. Then, even that was gone. She landed with a soft thump in a bed of springy moss, with no more force than if she had elected to sit down rather abruptly.
Unseen birds chattered intermittently above her head. She blinked, still unused to the seamless, almost liquid transition of one setting into another. Straight-trunked trees loomed high above her, their branches intertwining in a lacy green canopy. Golden shafts of sunlight pierced through here and there, dappling the forest floor like carelessly thrown coins. She gulped in a greedy lungful of the fresh green air, reveling in the refreshment it offered her. A speck of gray caught her eye though, and she knew her reprieve was done.
A pair of smart, heeled boots dangled from the lowest branch on a tree some paces away, but when their owner spoke, his voice came from behind her. She was not particularly surprised.
"Sarah," he sounded bored, and faintly disappointed. "Are you ready to have done with this debacle yet?" His gloved hands moved fluidly, drawing a perfect crystal from nothing. He balanced it delicately on his fingertips, moving it with effortless grace from hand to hand.
"Forget about the baby," he urged, not bothering to hide how mechanical the offer was. Both of them knew it was doomed to be rejected time and time again.
She said nothing, but bit her lip and gave her head a sharp little shake, flyaway strands of her ebony hair sticking to her flushed, damp cheeks. She was no longer particularly afraid of the mystic king; she simply had nothing to say that a simple gesture would not cover. He nodded and sighed, as though he had expected nothing less. With a silvery quick movement, he tossed the crystal up in the air.
"Be on your way then, silly girl," he said without malice. The crystal swelled until it was nearly the size of the forest canopy above it. Then it came crashing down, bearing unfamiliar purple-tinged skies with it.