Seven || Elroy's Labyrinth

It was mid-morning when the trees suddenly opened up. The full force of the sun was suddenly bearing down on them, and Mint had to raise her hand over her eyes to keep out the worst of the glare. There was nothing she could do about the encroaching heat, though; under the canopy of the trees, with the cool of an early autumn breeze, it had been easy to pretend that they were not out in the tropics, but now that she had left the protective shadows of the forest she was finding it hard to forget.

She scanned the clearing, her roving gaze settling on something protruding from the ground. When her eyes had adjusted to the light again, she could see it was the rusting remains of a mine track.

"We're here," she said, and peered further ahead. The smooth, sandy terrain turned uneven and rocky up ahead, and a bit further than that the ground rose up into a definite hill. "The entrance is over that way. Follow the tracks."

She didn't check to see if Rue was still behind her, or that he had yet made it past the tree line or had any idea what she was talking about, when she took her own advice and started to creep along the tracks herself, following them as they made a gentle bend around the rocks before curving back to the hill. It was mindless, and it gave her a chance to think.

She hadn't expected any of that conversation. Any of it. She'd thrown out her ridiculous conditions under the assumption she could haggle down to similarly favorable but less overtly ridiculous conditions. It had worked before; a sixty-forty profit split sounds positively generous next to eighty-twenty, and after all, she was contributing her magical proclivities to the proceedings. What kind of special traits had Rue exhibited thus far? Certainly nothing that could hold a candle to her skill.

(Although she did still find it odd that he had apparently been diving into ateliers with Klaus for months – and maybe even some time before he had met Klaus – and didn't keep his own weapon on him. She couldn't make heads or tails of what that meant.)

So that had been her initial offering. She didn't expect him to take it, and she certainly didn't expect him to up the ante. And for what? First dibs and one shot at using the Relic.

That was intriguing, though. She knew exactly what she wanted to do once she had the power of a Relic in her hands, but the list was long and branching and had become filled with additional footnotes over the years. She couldn't imagine being able to select one single thing above all else that she would want. He must have been holding on to one hell of a wish. She'd have to wrangle it out of him before too long.

She came to a stop.

The tracks had brought her where she wanted to be; straight ahead of her was a cavern, artificially carved out of the rock face, the mine cart tracks disappearing into the darkness. Wooden boards, grown dark and moldy and soft from age and weather, had been attached to the foremost frame of the mines in a broad X pattern. Right at the front of the mines was a short stone wall, one side of its crumbling, bearing the remains of what had once been a wooden sign post, long since rotted away.

Pay dirt.

She easily hopped over the wall and strode up to the wooden barricade. there wasn't quite enough space for her to squeeze through either side, but the boards themselves were in a bad state of disrepair and one good knock to the rotting wood would make the whole thing collapse.

"Is that it?" Rue asked, emerging from around the corner. He jumped the wall, but didn't come any closer, watching as Mint deliberated.

"Gotta be," she said.

"The wood's rotten. We can probably pry it from–"

Before he could speculate further, however, Mint had already slammed her foot into the heart of the barricade, right where the wooden planks crossed each other. The impact exploded outward in a shower of grit and wood splinters; the wooden boarded cracked and groaned, visibly warped in the middle.

Mint let the cloud of debris settle a little bit before she kicked it again. The wood was too rotten to properly crack, but it only took one more kick to shatter the remainder of the barricade. The whole middle fell away, almost disintegrating under the blow. The corners of the X were still pointing inward, but it was a sad and useless expression of denial; the hole in the middle of them was more than enough for Mint to simply walk through now.

She looked over her shoulder and shot Rue a grin. "Come on," she said genially, and stepped into the mines. She heard him follow a few paces behind.

Sunlight was still streaming a fair way down into the tunnel, but after a few minutes it was starting to grow darker and harder to see. Torch brackets lined the walls and small lanterns hung dangling from the wooden support arches; they were dark, of course, but Mint was pleasantly surprised on reaching for one of the lanterns that she could feel the faint warmth of the spell remnants around her fingers. She tightened her hold on it, and the edges of the magic tightened and twisted anew, dragging in a beam of sunlight and capturing it in the core of the lamp.

"The spells are still there?" Rue asked.

"Yeah," she said. "They just got frayed. I can put 'em back together no problem."

Just the lanterns, though; when she tried one of the torch brackets, it felt cold and dead. Still, the lanterns were enough to see by; their warm glow extended far enough to at least illuminate the path to the next lantern. Even so early in it was rapidly becoming a necessity; as the mine sloped downward and started to curve, they left sunlight behind and plunged into the dark of the mines, the soft, pallid glow of the lanterns providing the only light.

At first, there was nothing of note; just raggedly chiseled walls, chipped stone, the scuttling of small spiders that gathered in the darkening corners and fled when the lanterns were lit anew. After what felt like a long time – oppressively long, although the darkness and the silence made it seem so much worse – the walls began to change. What had been battered stone took on a different texture, more natural and organic. The walls themselves changed color, too, from drab earth tones to drab earth tones mottled with flecks of blue and green. She ran her hand across them, her fingers dancing over the shifting texture of the rocks.

"Cobalt veins," she said. "This is about as far as they got."

And having said that, she slowed down, then stopped. Rue came to a stop next to her, and both of them stared ahead.

Not much farther ahead, the cart tracks ended, and there were no support arches to help hold up the tunnel– and, consequently, no more lanterns, no more torches. The light from the lantern hanging above them extended in a warm bubble up ahead, showing them the abrupt end to the man-made path. Beyond that, the darkness seemed almost to solidify around them.

Mint snorted. "Can't make this easy."

Rue stepped back and reached up for the lantern. He jimmied the chain, sending a light shower of dislodged rust onto his face. He looked away, keeping it out of his eyes, and yanked down hard. The lantern came loose, dragging behind it the whipping tail of its chain, the heavy nail that had held it in place, and a gout of moldy wood splinters. Rue quickly pulled himself back, getting out of the way of the worst of it, and once the cloud had settled he stepped forward again, holding the lantern aloft.

"Let's go."

"You gonna hold the lantern?" she asked.

"I can," he said. "Unless you want to–"

"I'd rather keep my hands free," she said. "Take the lead."

He nodded and moved in front of her, holding the lantern as high as he could to try and cast more light. Mint let him go, reaching behind her back and pulling her rings free. If Klaus was right, they were likely nearing the point where the mine broke into a monster den, and she didn't want to be ill prepared for the event.

The wall continued to curve around. The walls themselves were visibly streaked in blues and greens, and becoming more rugged– and more narrow. Where they had previously had more than enough room to maneuver, the tunnel was growing tighter and progressively more claustrophobic; there was still ample room, but the abrupt narrowing of the space around them was causing Mint's heart to beat just a little faster than she would have liked.

"How long does this thing go on?" she growled.

"I can't tell," Rue said. "It can't be much more, unless..."

He trailed off. Mint glared at the back of his head. "Unless what?"

"M-maybe there was a cave-in," he said. "Maybe the path is just... blocked."

"I'll break my way through it if it's 'just blocked'," Mint snapped.

"You'd probably destabilize the whole structure if you did that," Rue said quietly. "We might have to– ah, no, here we are."

She shifted to the side, trying to get a better look over his shoulder. The tunnel seemed to just about end up ahead, the walls suddenly closing up and meeting with each other again, but in the interplay of light and shadow a particular shadow caught her attention. It was tall and uncomfortably thin, but when Rue moved the lantern the shadows moved with it and the light dug deeper into the rocky tunnel.

"It looks like something cut into the rock here," Rue said. He took a few paces forward, placed the lantern on the ground, and stepped up to the edge of the rock. He placed his hands on the stones, ducked down, peered around. "Down here," he said. He was down on hands and knees, nearly pressed up against the wall, one hand feeling around for the lantern chain. He caught it and yanked the lantern back close to him, and in its stark light Mint could see a fissure running through the wall, the crack widening to an almost acceptable width at the base.

"See anything through there?" she asked.

"A lot of dark," Rue said. "I'm going on ahead."

Mint nodded. "Let me know if you get mauled or something."

"That won't be a problem."

He crawled into the opening and quickly disappeared. Mint waited a few seconds, listening to any indication of something going on beyond the wall – scraping, clanging, perhaps screaming, whatever – but all was still.

Then the chain of the lantern rattled, pulled taut, and then snaked away, the lantern following down the tunnel. Suddenly her only illumination was a thing triangle of light that escaped the opening.

"Hey!" Mint yelled. "You're not allowed to steal the light!"

Rue ignored her. "Come through. I think it's safe."

"You think?"

But she didn't let that ripple of indignation slow her. She tied her rings back to her belt, hunched down in front of the cracked wall and peered through the opening. The tunnel was short and the lantern was sitting conspicuously at the far side, just a couple of feet away. She crawled through the opening, shoving the lantern to the side as she did, and stood up the instant she had enough room to do so.

When she emerged, she found that the tunnel structure of the mine was gone; instead they stood in a cavernous hollow, the light from their lantern insufficient to see all the way across the room. But she could see, just out of her peripheral vision, the opposite wall.

"Gimme the lantern."

Rue handed it over, and she reached in and condensed the magic threads onto themselves, smothering the light inside them. The lantern turned dark; the room around them turned dark; and, after a few seconds, her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could actually somewhat see. It wasn't much, but the walls were actually aglow, casting faint blue-green luminescence around them. For a moment she wondered if the cobalt veins were somehow aglow, but slowly she started to feel the heaviness of the air, thick and humid; she almost felt damp just standing there. Not the cobalt, then; lichen.

She re-ignited the lantern.

"See anything?" Rue asked.

"Glowing fungus," she said, shrugging. "We'll have to go further in." She frowned to herself. "No monsters that I can see."

"Klaus said the mines were closed decades ago. The monsters might've moved on."

"Or just dug in deeper. Either way, standing here isn't going to help." She thrust the lantern back into his hands so suddenly he almost dropped it. Once he had a grip again, she pointed ahead. "Let's go."

Rue stepped forward, holding out the lantern, and the two started their slow procession down the tunnel. Space narrowed as they moved from the central cavern, but the tunnel itself remained wide enough that they could have comfortably walked side by side. Mint was alert for anything moving into or away from their bubble of light, but all she saw were spiders skittering out of their way. The path was leading them straight ahead, with nothing but the walls and the lichen and the occasional wooden support pillar to interrupt their walk.

At uneven intervals, she would hear a muffled sound, the dull roar of running water, and the floor would shine slick with damp, and the lichen colonies would become a little denser for the humidity. She thought they must be getting close to something, but shortly after the sound would fade and they would be back to hearing nothing but their footsteps again. Then the tunnels would widen into a cavern, and on the side there would be a continuation of the tunnel, and other than those two anomalies the whole thing was one long stretch of rocks and fungus and nothing.

They must have been walking for almost an hour before Mint finally reacted

"Come on!" she shouted into the mines. "How long does this go?"

Rue shifted uncomfortably, sending the light swaying. "It... has been a while," he said slowly. "Something's wrong."

Mint felt a strange chill run up her spine. "Turn around," she said. "We'll go back the way we came."

"No, hold on." Rue took a few steps ahead, trying to cast as much lantern-light ahead of him as he could; they were coming to another broadening of the path, another cavern, so the light didn't quite reach the walls. Suddenly he took off at a run, so abruptly it took Mint several seconds to realize what he was doing.

"Hey!" she shouted. "HEY!"

Fortunately, he didn't go far, and when he came to a stop Mint caught up to him quickly; she had to curb her frustration to avoid intentional bowling him over. That didn't stop her from coming to a skidding halt just behind him and slamming her hand down on his shoulder.

"What was that!" she snarled.

To his credit, he didn't overreact to her touch or her shouts. Instead, he looked over his shoulder, and with his free hand indicated the wall. "There," he said.

Her eyes followed his arm, down to where he was pointing, and for a few seconds she couldn't process what he was telling her. "What about there?" she asked. "It's just–"

She cut herself off as the visual suddenly gained cohesion in her mind. She hadn't recognized where they were at first, but with a little consideration it became clear that somehow, by walking straight ahead, they had managed to return to the crevice in the wall that they had initially crawled through.

Without another word, Rue passed Mint the lantern and ducked down, looking through the crack in the wall. He surfaced and accepted the lantern again, nodding.

"It's the same," he said. "This is where we came in."

"No way. We've been walking in a straight line."

"It must be a defense mechanism," Rue said. "Some kind of spell. We'll keep looping back on ourselves unless we can find a way out."

Mint folded her arms and shot an irritable glance down the way they had been traveling. "That's annoying," she grumbled. "How are we supposed to steal his secrets if he went and did a thing like that?"

"I'd think that was the point."

She snorted. "Gimme the lantern," she said. "I'm gonna have another look around."

He handed it off to her, and she turned on her heel to face the direction they had come from, the tunnel opposite the way they had come in. She took three strides toward it, then suddenly stopped dead.

Something shimmered in the air– not exactly a physical, visible something, but she could feel it ripple in the air, and the space before her eyes became faintly distorted for a fraction of a second. Tentatively, she stepped forward and held out her hand to where the anomaly had been, but whatever it was, it was gone.

"You feel that?" Mint asked. There was no response, and she called over her shoulder. "Hey! You see this?"

Still nothing.

Something lurking in her chest snapped, and she wheeled around, nearly hurling the lantern back behind her. "Hey, Artema! I'm–"

What, exactly, she was doing, she never got to say. The space behind her was empty. What's more, it was... different.

She made her way back to where he had been not thirty seconds earlier. Just as she expected, the space was barren and untouched. Additionally – and certainly not what she had been expecting – the space around her was much smaller than it should have been. The cavernous room they had started out in had shrunk down to the size of the tunnel she was working her way through, sealing the entrance back out to the mines in the process.

Slowly, forcing herself to remain calm, she went back to where she had seen the distortion in the air and closed her eyes. She sucked in a deep breath through her teeth, held it, exhaled. She extended her thoughts outward, feeling through the spaces between the air for remnants of magical energy, and, much to her dismay, she found them; coiled energy, tiny knots of magic slowly unraveling in the air, the remains of an enchantment dissipating into nothing.

She took a few more steps forward and decided to wait. If she had disappeared, maybe Rue had decided to follow her, and maybe he would be walking through the enchantment any second.

But the seconds turned to minutes, and minutes was longer than Mint cared to wait.

Besides, maybe she had done something good. Maybe whatever she had passed through would give her a clear shot to the atelier. In which case, well, she'd just have to regale him with stories of her triumph when she got back.

However she would get back.

Which was something she would worry about when she needed to get back.

She made one last half-hearted glance down the mine tunnel. Still no sign of him. Too bad.

She marched forward.

. .

Rue knew something had gone wrong an instant before it happened.

It was on the air; a rush of cold energy, like a frigid breeze whipping through the tunnels, but in spite of the chill sweat prickled his skin and his heart raced faster. He knew what the sensation was, although it took him a moment to place it; a flood of magical energy, pouring out from somewhere far down the tunnels.

He shot to his feet and tried to call out to Mint– it wouldn't help, but he might at least give her a chance to prepare herself. But before he was even entirely standing she was gone, blinking out of existence before his eyes, and not a second later he was gone, too.

He blinked rapidly, looked around, tried to get his bearings. His heart was hammering, his lungs aching from his manic breathing; he had to force himself to close his eyes, to very carefully draw in air, hold it, release. He pressed his palm against his forehead, willed himself to calm down. Inhale, hold, exhale. Inhale, hold, exhale. Inhale– hold–

He exhaled again and looked up. The flush of magic still had him on edge, but he could control himself now. His heart was beating fast, but no longer panicked, and though his lungs still burned he could at least use them properly again. He slowly lowered his hands from his face and looked up to where he was.

It wasn't immediately apparent that he was anywhere different, even as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, trying and failing to use the soft bioluminescence of the lichen to see by. He was still standing in a dark cave, still staring down what appeared to be a tunnel, still in the dark. He sent a glance down next to him, however, and saw that the lichen glow was closer than it had been before. Now he was standing in one of the tunnels rather than the room they had started in. To verify, he ran his hand against the wall next to him and found no sign of the fissure he and Mint had wandered through.

Spatial magic, then. He could still feel it in the air, and when he concentrated he could almost see the little unraveling knots of magic showing him the space he had just been in. No, correction: he could definitely see them, but it was so similar both here and where he had come from that, if he didn't know he had just been forcibly teleported, he wouldn't have been able to see the difference.

So he knew what had happened, at least on a superficial level, but he couldn't understand why. He ran back the moment through his head, then worked backwards. He and Mint had been walking in a circle for quite a while and had doubtless walked back through that tunnel at least a half-dozen times – probably more – before they realized what had happened. The only different action they had taken was Mint trying to go down in the opposite direction. Had that triggered a spell?

No. The source of the magic had been from elsewhere entirely. They had just been caught up in the burst.

That didn't help him.

First order of business, he told himself. Where am I?

Not hard to tell. He was still somewhere in the mines, or in the cave system the mines had ultimately opened out to. It was unlikely that he had been thrown elsewhere in the loop that he and Mint had been following– not impossible, of course, but that seemed like a powerful burst of magic to have such a comparatively minor effect.

It also had to have been intentional. If it had been a random side effect of something like a spell break, he had a much better chance of getting embedded in the rock than he did of landing so neatly in the middle of a pathway.

So, all things considered: he, and most likely Mint, had been teleported deeper into the caves. They had been separated, but it was clearly a calculated spell and they had been teleported to safe, if unrelated, locations. And neither of them had done anything to set off the reaction.

Okay then.

Having come to that conclusion, he knew that the second order of business would be to orientate himself and get to somewhere that made more sense to him. Giving a look around the room, he could only see the possibility of moving directly forward or moving directly backward, although the poor lighting meant that he might well have been missing something important. For the moment, however, it seemed as good a plan as any to pick a direction and start walking. It wasn't as though he couldn't just turn around and try again if there was a dead end.

The thought made him shudder. What if it was a dead end? What if they were both dead ends? What if he'd been sent somewhere in the middle of an isolated cave, and instead of just being crushed inside a wall he had the privilege of slowly starving to death, or dehydrating, or suffocating when the oxygen in the room ran out? Such pleasant possibilities.

He tried to ignore them.

He walked forward a short way before it became difficult to visually parse what he was seeing. Something emerged directly in front of him, a spray of wan, blue-green light, a patch of rock and lichen in what should have been the middle of the route. At first he was afraid he had run into a wall – dead end, as anticipated – but as he got closer it solidified, and he could see that the path was actually split down the middle, veering off to the left and right. Both of them, of course, faded into darkness well before he could make sense of them.

He needed to find some kind of light.

He flipped his rucksack around and zipped it open, digging through the contents and hoping his hand would land on something useful: a torch, a lantern, a firestarter. Tinder, even.

No good. The pack was mostly empty except for a few neat packages of food.

He grunted irritably and slung the pack over his back again.

One way was as good as any.

He pressed his hand against the wall and used that to keep himself centered as he walked. He tried following the left curve of the wall for a while, but after a fair bit of walking he realized that it was probably curving back on itself. Elroy had clearly designed the labyrinth to frustrate any attempts to traverse it through typical methods; Rue couldn't tell visually, of course, but he suspected it was under the same spell as when they had first walked in, linking him infinitely back to where he had started. He switched to following the right wall for a bit, and it seemed to get him somewhere else – the floor texture changed, the lichen grew in denser clusters, he felt the walls pressing down just a little harder around him – but when he came to another fork he was starting to realize that brute forcing his way through a magical labyrinth that he couldn't even see was a terrible, terrible idea.

What else could he do, though?

At least he knew he wasn't in a dead end, or at least the dead end he was in had the courtesy of being elaborate enough that it didn't seem like one. And maybe he could stumble his way through – he'd stumbled through plenty of ateliers and managed to come out of the experiences alive, after all – although it would have been much nicer if there was just something he could do to give himself an edge. Anything he knew to look for. Any indication of...

Light.

He stopped where he was and stared down the path. The right branch– he had seen something there, a little flash of warm color, a flit of flame. He didn't know if it was real, though; it might have been eyes playing tricks, he might have been seeing echoes of light. So he stood by, and he waited, and there it was again.

It wasn't flame, though it was orange-red. It was almost a sphere, and it wasn't so much illumination as it was a dull glow, but his eyes were so adjusted to the dark it seemed far brighter than it actually was. It was also moving, dipping in and out from behind something. What it coming his way? No, not particularly.

He watched it for a moment, making absolutely certain it was real. It disappeared behind an object a couple of times, but only for a few seconds before returning, cresting over what looked to be a jutting rock, twitching in the air, taunting him.

He had no idea what the hell it was, but it was casting something resembling light, and it was something to follow.

He set off after it, but very carefully, slowly, trying to make sense of what exactly he was seeing as he approached. It lofted in the air, wriggled, and as he closed in he could see that it was expanding and contracting in a long, slow rhythm. He edged close to whatever it was, closing the gap between himself and the object, and then came to a very sharp stop.

It wasn't terribly bright, but it cast enough of a glow that now, only a few feet away, Rue could make sense of what he was looking at. And what he was looking at was some kind of insect. The bulb of red was some kind of pulsating organic sack, visibly filled with liquid, stationed at the end of its bloated abdomen. The thing was facing away from him, but as it moved he saw hair-crusted, thin legs readjust and turn– it was too dark to see exactly how many were actually attached tot he creature, but he counted off at least six.

As it twisted around, its head came into view, massive multi-faceted eyes gleaming from its own projected light, the massive pincers of its jaws twitching open and shut. He couldn't make much sense of what he was seeing, but there were far more moving parts than he was comfortable with and suddenly standing behind the thing seemed a terrible idea. Though it was less terrible than jumping in front of it.

Which, he was starting to realize, he was going to have to do.

The massive creature was mostly blocking the tunnel, and since he hadn't passed by the thing before Rue knew that this was the one that would let him proceed forward. He had to get by the monstrous insect in order to do so, but he couldn't conceive of making it by without being detected. Not while it was alive.

Slowly, Rue reached for the sword at his side.

Slowly, the thing turned its huge body around. The bulbous sack of luminous liquid – some kind of toxin, no doubt – scraped against the opposite wall, twisting slightly as its contents sloshed and settled. Rue tried not to make any sudden movements, tried to move as slowly as possible. Insects, he knew, could feel the changes in the air when things moved; they detected motion without needing to see it. He had to be careful, then; he didn't know how honed this things senses were, he didn't know what kind of toxin it was carrying, he didn't know a lot of things and that worried him but he just had to exercise caution, move carefully, so close too close it had to know he was there he could see its mandibles a dozen little moving bits sharp-edged and jagged and little claws searching to dig into flesh.

It suddenly screamed and lunged.

Rue dove forward, snapping the sword fully into his hand, and twisted in the air, lashing upward with the blade to catch the thing under its thorax. The gladius' blade scraped against its solid exoskeleton, releasing a few snapping sparks on impact. Rue hit the ground on his shoulder, rolled with the momentum, and scrambled to his feet. He threw himself forward and wheeled around to face the monstrous ant again, but it was already yanking itself around to face him.

For such a massive body and such spindly little legs, it was dreadfully fast.

It slammed its forebody against the ground and yanked its abdomen into the air, raising the venom sack like a scorpion's tail. Rue saw it contract, pulse, and threw himself to the side just as the thing released a blast of distressingly luminous venom at him. The burst of liquid hit the ground hissing and sizzling, the rock beneath it seeming almost to boil.

Oh geez.

He had crashed bodily into the wall, and now shoved off, staggering backward to try and get his footing again. The ant lifted itself up again, this time rising up on its legs as though looking down on him, and then suddenly it moved, six limbs clacking against the stone floor as the monster skittered toward him.

Rue stiffened, his hand gripped the sword more tightly, and as the ant bore down on him he charged right back at it. Just before he crashed into its mandibles, he kicked off the ground and leapt up, jabbing the blade of the sword into one of its eyes.

It was an awkward move that sent him slamming down on the ant's head, but it worked for what he needed. Rue put all his weight behind the sword blade, and when he went down the ant crashed down too, the gladius tearing through its massive eye. The impact with the ground jarred him, and for a few seconds he was paralyzed, but as soon as he could move again he leapt to his feet, yanking the sword free of its target and stepping back.

He exhaled a long, shaky breath and looked over the blade of the gladius, coated in a thick, colorless substance that seemed to be seeping out onto the floor under the ant's head. He scraped it against the wall, trying to clean it as best he could, but it wasn't a terribly effective attempt. He'd have to wash it off properly once he got the chance. Placing it into its sheath would probably be a bad idea, too.

He turned away from the ant, starting to make his way down the tunnel, when a strange hissing noise came to him. He slowed, stopped, felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle, and without conscious thought hurled himself into the wall just as another stream of hissing venom spattered the ground where he had been standing.

He turned to look behind him and saw that the insect had dragged itself upright, its spindly legs keeping its body hoisted above the floor, its head twisted strangely, damaged eye facing the ceiling as colorless fluid continued to boil over, leaving a thick trail of blood on the ground behind it.

It took a half-step forward, a strange warbling hiss coming from somewhere deep in its body, and Rue stepped back tentatively, raising the blade again in case it somehow gathered itself to attack again. It couldn't possibly do that, though; the wound was too severe, there was just no conceivable way it could attack him again. Not like that.

Then again, he couldn't understand how it was still moving at all.

The back of its body jerked upward again until the bubble of venom reappeared, gleaming dull red in the darkness. It shifted itself around, spread its legs, tilted its head back again to send a thick rope of colorless blood oozing back to the floor. Rue steeled himself, and–

The insect's body torqued backward and upward, the venom sack constricted, and Rue threw himself toward the creature again, listening to the venom hiss through the air overhead. Wildly he swung again, trying to drive the blade of the sword through the open wound in its eye socket, or into its other eye socket, but the darkness frustrated his aim and the insect was moving faster again, yanking itself away from the sword blade and then lunging toward it when Rue pulled back.

Finally, he made contact again, executing a horizontal swing that cracked against the insect's exoskeleton– before immediately sliding off again. The insect let loose an annoyed hiss and drove itself forward, and Rue barely had any time to dodge to the side before it hit him. The thing smashed head first into the wall, cracking the stone on impact, and Rue decided that he'd had enough. While it pulled itself away and tried to recover, he turned around and ran.

He didn't know if this was even the correct direction, he had gotten so turned around during the actual fight, but he had to hope it was or else he would probably wind up looping right back to the monster all over again. When he saw the approaching fork in the path, he dodged left, dashed down the corridor, and came skidding to a stop. Something burning red up ahead. He came to a stop, breathing hard, lungs aching, and realized he'd gone the wrong way.

Then he squinted into the darkness and realized no, he hadn't. Or at least not enough of a wrong way to loop back on himself.

The thing up ahead was much smaller than the ant-king, its silhouette low to the ground and heavy rather than spindly and many-legged. It seemed to have heard him; the top of its head lifted up, and it opened its mouth, revealing the sliver of light that he had seen a moment before, a fiery burning from somewhere inside its body. It also gave him a fleeting impression of what he was looking at; something reptilian, some kind of fire-based salamander.

To confirm his suspicion, the creature suddenly exhaled, expelling a tongue of flame toward him, blooming the corridor in light. Rue was briefly blinded by the flames, but managed to gather himself well enough to duck down to the side and hit the ground. Heat grazed his back, but the fire dissipated quickly, before the lizard could turn its attention on him. When darkness and cold returned, Rue slowly looked up, taking care that his movements were reserved and slow. He was out of the worst of it, but if he could avoid being set on fire by this lizard creature, he would prefer to do so.

He reached up to the tunnel wall, gripped one of the jutting stones, and used it to ease himself back to his feet. The lizard shifted – he heard it more than saw it – but didn't seem interested in him for the moment. It opened its mouth again, puffing out another soft burst of flame, and then slithered past him, moving back down the tunnel.

He almost let himself relax until he saw the crescent of swishing red up ahead.

The ant-king was following him.

The lizard exhaled another plume of flame, and though the insect was not yet close by he could see the edges of its form in the burst of heat. His flight instinct kicked in, screaming at him to turn around and just go, but he held his ground, staring at the lizard and the ant-king.

The ant-king had stopped, and judging by the way the shadows lashed across the far wall it was even going so far as to flail in the lizard's direction, hissing and clicking madly. The salamander, in response, opened its mouth and shrieked, and suddenly its whole body was alight with flame. The ant's frantic clicking became even more panicked, and it scrabbled backward down the passage, dodging away from the heat.

From the light.

The salamander seemed rather content with itself, and had toned down its display, turning itself into a dully glowing ember in the midst of the darkness. It settled heavily on its legs, thumped its thick tail against the ground, and started to plod away, heading in the same direction as the ant but too slowly to be trying to pursue it.

Rue, in turn, moved after the salamander, fast enough to catch up to it but slow enough to keep his motions deliberate and quiet. If the salamander noticed him, it certainly didn't care, and remained blissfully ignorant of its pursuer right up until the sword cut through its back.

"Sorry," Rue whispered. "But I really need this."

A woman's voice whispered in his mind: Quick and clean. Don't waste your energy, don't make it suffer. Don't damage anything we can use.

He slid the sword out of the salamander's body, and the monster slumped forward, blood bubbling to the surface and running in a thin line out of the wound and onto the floor, dead before it even realized it had been struck. Rue knelt down next to it, pressed his free hand to its side, and concentrated.

A few seconds later, tiny pinpricks of light drew themselves up out of the trail of blood, and more points of light rose out from its body. They coalesced in the air in front of him, a small sphere of glittering points that despite its brightness failed to cast any light. He watched it for a few seconds as it continued to rise, growing in size until it was the size about the size of a songbird's egg, at which point the last light from its body faded away and was absorbed into the floating sphere.

"Come on," he said quietly.

And at his call, the core of light trailed over to him. He caught it out of the air and felt its warmth disperse against his palm, rush through his bloodstream, and gather anew just behind his temples. He shut his eyes – there was almost a moment of nausea and disorientation, but he'd found that closing his eyes helped keep it at bay – and then it was over and he looked up, stood up, and took a moment to make sure he knew where he was and where he had been going. Then he checked to make sure all his personal effects were firmly secured, called up the warmth and light he had just stolen, and released it.

He was swept up in a whirl of burning blue, searing at his eyes and causing a dull ache to throb in his skull. It only lasted a moment – the ache and the light both – before dissipating, and where previously a very human-looking young man had been standing there was instead a much shorter, squatter creature, reptilian and mottled red, balancing on its hind legs and looking slightly confused.

New transformation was always somewhat discomfiting; there was always something different, something weird, something he forgot to take into account when he psyched himself up for the shift, or when he completely forgot to psyche himself up. Even when he'd used the power more regularly there was always that moment of having to readjust, when the environment was suddenly so much larger by comparison or suddenly having to balance with four limbs instead of two or not having limbs at all, which was always an interesting adventure. But he was out of practice – those months traveling with Klaus hadn't given him much need or occasion – and suddenly being half as tall as he had been in an already dark and disorienting environment gave him pause.

But that was why he oriented himself before transforming. Now all he had to do was walk forward and burn.

He lowered himself to the ground, tentatively putting weight on his forelegs, testing his limbs. Short, stubby, but powerful, which was a pleasant surprise; if he needed to make a break for it he could probably get some decent forward momentum. Not much for agility, but he hadn't harbored any illusions about that.

Basics taken care of. He turned his attention inward and felt the warmth of raw, unbound fire energy dancing just under the skin. He might have been out of practice transforming – and in the process of testing a new body on top of it – but calling on that internal magic was still second nature. He willed it to live, and the fire ignited, coating his thick-skinned form in a layer of pale orange flame and casting a bubble of light in a wide arc around himself.

The lizard's eyesight wasn't particularly good – it was a subterranean scavenger, it didn't need good eyes – but just having the light was such a massive improvement that the tunnels being a bit blurry was no trouble at all. He made his way carefully down the tunnel, easing his way into the salamander's instinctive movement, and was getting into the rhythm of it by the time he reached the fork in the road.

He looked down the two paths, leaning his head forward and sniffing at the air. The left path smelled of mildew; the right path smelled, far more distressingly, of nothing whatsoever.

Left, then.

That was how he went from there, with the salamander's heavy gait carrying him through the tunnels, the fire providing light and keeping at bay anything else that could possibly live down here. It wasn't terribly fast, but it kept him safe and kept him moving constantly in the right direction.

There were a few more of those massive ant-like beasts roaming the halls, but they didn't dare get near his light; when one of them looked a bit too curious he just had to burn the flames a little hotter and it stopped being curious pretty quickly. The rest of his passage, then, went by without incident until he passed under a somewhat abnormal-looking path and suddenly the world opened up around him.

He was on a narrow pathway that had been carved into the wall of a massive cavern. To his right was stone; to his left, the path was just wide enough for two people to walk side by side before it dropped precipitously downward to a bottom he couldn't actually see. He could hear it, though; there was a sound of splashing, a waterfall meeting a lake, and a little further ahead he saw the waterfall cascading past his little path and tumbling down to the bottom of the passage.

He continued his slow, plodding walk until he reached the other end of the path and found that it simply smacked him straight into a wall. There had been no other passages along the pathway, either, at least nothing visible and nothing that seemed to demarcate a secret door. There was, however, something that looked like it had once been a sloping path leading left; it was badly eroded and crumbling, but as he stared at it for a moment it became clear that it was supposed to have been a ramp descending down to the bottom of the passage.

He scraped the lizard's claws against the rock, checking to see if maybe it could scale the wall, but it was no good; they weren't made for climbing walls. With an internal sigh of resignation he released his hold on the lizard's body and, with another wash of blue light, returned to his regular form, still on his hands and knees, looking over the edge of the cliff.

He didn't have the benefit of the firelight any more, but now he needed to be able to see distantly and clearly and at least he had an idea of the layout. Maybe the fall wasn't too far; maybe the water was deep enough that he wouldn't break half the bones in his body if he just fell down. Or maybe there was something else sitting in his reservoir of monster spirits, something with wings so he could try and glide down to the–

He snapped fully to attention.

At the opposite side of the room there was suddenly a flash, like a little ball of pale sunlight, followed shortly by a splash and a thrashing of water. Was that the lantern?

He shouted across the cavernous room, but his voice was swallowed into darkness. No good, then; he'd have to make his way down. But on the other hand it didn't look like the fall was as bad as he'd assumed, judging by where the lantern seemed to have landed, and there was ample water to break his fall. He'd just have to hang off the wall before dropping, chew up a few feet between himself and the water. The pack was going to get soaked, and the gladius, but the latter was in desperate need of being cleaned anyway and the food in the former was wrapped tight enough it could probably survive. Even if not, getting out of the mines would probably be far easier than it had been getting in; they would survive.

He paced along the edge of the drop for a moment, scanning to see if there was some indication of a good place to drop down, when he realized something was blocking the visibility of the lantern light, a massive shadow sitting idly around the middle of the room, near-ish to where he was standing. It took him a minute to make sense of it, but after a few more seconds of dedicated staring he realized exactly what he was seeing.

. .

Mint was still confused, and now she was tired, sore, sweating, and frustrated all on top of that. Bad combination.

She had been walking down the tunnel for a way before she came upon something different. Ahead of her she was at a crossroads, four paths all converging into one; behind her, ahead of her, to the left and right. A support pillar sat near one of them, its base covered by shattered rock, a sad and lost little reminder of the mines. Other than that, all four paths looked the same. She tried shining the lantern further down one of them, then the other, then the last, but as far as her light reached all she saw was more tunnel.

"Well this sucks," she growled.

She looked left, then right, then straight ahead, and then turned around and went right back down the tunnel she had just come from. She had been in enough bizarre magician's traps to know how these things worked; with no obvious clues to work with, the stupidest idea was usually the one to follow through with.

She walked down the tunnel in the opposite direction for a while, uninterrupted by anything that would be mistaken for 'interesting', until she came to another fork in the road– another four-pronged crossroad, with the same distinguishing features as the last one.

Well, that hadn't helped.

She hung right and made her way down the tunnel anew. It snaked slightly, but she seemed to be going on a relatively straight path, even on the faintest of inclines. It didn't make it any less boring, but she could start to picture the map in her head. Try to keep herself straight. Try to–

"Are you kidding me."

Another four-pronged crossroad, the route directly ahead of her bearing that lonesome, useless support beam. She growled to herself and hung a sharp left; if she went right, an this whole place was made of crossroads like this, she would eventually wind up somewhere near the path she had chosen not to take earlier. She was trying to move away from that, on a hunch, just knowing the directly she had been pointing when she'd started out. When spontaneously teleported, always go backwards before you go forwards. They always point you in the wrong direction. Just common sense.

(Perhaps 'common sense' was a strong term, but magicians seemed to like doing that. It was disorienting, it was odd, and if you weren't used to it you would inevitably fall into the trap and carry on walking straight in the wrong direction. She wondered how much treasure she had found just because the saps who had gone in before her hadn't had the sense to look over their collective shoulder.)

When she came to the fourth crossroad that looked exactly alike, however, she was starting to suspect something else was amiss.

She took stock of the crossroads. Left, forward, right; the path directly forward was held up by a support beam. Then, slowly, she turned and worked her way back to the last crossroad. Stopped. Same as usual; left, forward, right. Directly ahead of her was the path with the support beam.

But she'd gone left when she'd come into this room, when – again – the way directly forward had born the support pillar. It should have been to her left.

Ah, she thought. I see.

She walked into the middle of the crossroad and did a quick scan, then marched straight forward, past the pillar, and only a few steps further along she realized that something was different. The light from the lantern gleamed just a little more off the rocks; the air tasted just a little thicker. Dampness, humidity. She was working her way further inward.

The tunnel narrowed somewhat around her, twisted on itself, seemed to be constructed in such a way that it would pass through itself, although it never did. This section continued for a little way, more disorienting and bizarre than the last one, until it opened out again into a split path, only two ways this time. The two paths, to her eyes, looked indistinguishable at first, but after a bit of back and forth she realized something. Or at least suspected it.

She snuffed out the lantern.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and it became more apparent there; the glowing lichen on the walls continued a ways down both paths, but heading right she could see the gentle glow receding into the distance; leftward, it petered out and vanished. The right path was better built to accommodate the fungus, then– more humidity? Is that what she wanted?

She tried the left side first, making her way down the dark tunnel until she had to re-weave the lantern spell. After a few minutes, she came again to a fork in the road, and cursed herself slightly for her lack of foresight. She should have found a way to mark the wall just in case it also turned into a loop.

Although she didn't quite need to; now that she knew what to expect, it was obvious that she had managed to coil right back onto herself and was standing at the crux of the same fork once again. She moved right, and again she could taste the oncoming heaviness of the air. The walls ran slick again, and this time, echoing down through the tunnel and back toward her, she could hear a sound– a dull roar, and a hiss. Falling water, like what she'd heard on the other side of the wall, before she had been thrown into this new tunnel system.

She took that as a good sign.

She pressed onward, using every advantage she could if she came to another fork or a crossroads; looking for signs of humidity, for water along the walls, for implanted clues, for the sound of the falls. She seemed to be making some kind of headway, but after a few more repetitions of the formula she was starting to get frustrated again. She understood the concept; how much further did she have to go to prove it?

Eventually, after going gentle left on yet another three-pronged passage, the floor suddenly sloped significantly downward. She followed it, but very carefully; the rock was slick, the stone worn and a little too smooth for her liking, the decline surprisingly sharp. She was somewhat concerned with her current course, but she knew she was one to something, too. After a certain point, the walls became scraped and smooth, veins of cobalt coloring the passage in streaks of blues and greens, augmented by the clusters of lichen.

Her heart was racing. She knew she was approaching something, she had to be, everything was suddenly different here, the atelier was probably just at the end of the passage–!

Then she hit the slick part of the rock, where the moisture and the fungus had united into a soft blanket of gently glowing cyan. Her foot shot out from under her, and she slammed onto her back on the rock, knocking the wind out from her lungs and the lantern out of her hands. A jolt ripped through her, excruciating pain rocketing up along her spine and down her limbs, and before she had any chance to recover or react, gravity had already taken over. She went crashing down the incline, trying to curl up to mitigate the impact, seeing small flashes of bright orange light bouncing past her as the lantern followed her down, down, and–

She came to a stop with a splash and shoved herself upright. The actual impact had not been nearly as painful as she had expected; the fall had been broken by a layer of water a couple of feet deep; enough to absorb the worst of her impact, and enough to almost drown her on contact.

She gagged and wretched, spitting out the stagnant water that had rushed up her nostrils and into her mouth, and once she was free of it she gasped, held her breath, forced herself to relax. She was soaking, and abruptly cold and a little numb, although beneath the chill from the water she could feel her whole body pulsing in pain. The trip down had not been kind, but all the more reason to keep moving. She knew she was going to feel it the instant she let herself settle down for too long. Tomorrow in particular was going to be hell.

But that was a concern for tomorrow. For right then, she managed to coordinate her limbs well enough to get her feet back under her, and then shove the rest of her body up out of the water. She shook herself off as best she could, but with the water reaching partway up her thighs it would be useless if she couldn't get somewhere a little more dry.

She looked around, but wherever she had landed was cavernous and dark in addition to being wet. She spun, looking back the way she came, and saw a dull light still shining on under the water. The spell was holding up. Not that she expected her own handiwork to fray after a little liquid immersion.

Slowly, dragging herself against the water, she made her way toward the lantern. She contemplated what to do next. Maybe she could displace the water, making a little air bubble around herself, force the water out of her clothes and hair with magic and make a proper exploration of wherever she had landed. She could hear the dull roar of the falls somewhere nearby; they must have been elsewhere in the room, and by their sound she had a feeling that wherever she had landed, it was massive. There had to be something in there.

A few grueling paces away from the lantern, there was another splash from somewhere behind her.

She froze.

The noise did not repeat itself. She waited one beat, then two, and then stepped forward as quick as she could, snatching the lantern from beneath the water. From behind her, there was another sound of water displacing, something dragging itself through the water toward her.

She turned and held the lantern higher, infusing its light core with some of her own power. It flared bright hot for a second before settling down to a more tolerable light level, not quite so blinding but definitely more useful than the dinky light she had been relying on thus far.

The new light still wasn't enough to see the entire room by, but the temporary flash burst had illuminated a fair chunk of it. Not that Mint could concentrate on the room; her concentration happened to fall on something directly in front of her.

"Oh," she breathed. "Guess I found the monster."

That was all she could manage. Some of her muscles were trying desperately to react, but she was too sore to actually manage much more than stare.

The thing was sitting on top of a fractured pillar in front of her, suspended just above the water level, facing her. Its face was long and thin and sharp, the beak of a predatory bird with the benefit of also being lined with very visible teeth. It face was leaning in to her, but she could just make out the rest of its form moving backward; a long, snaking neck that curved upward and made a long, sinuous route back down, its tail eventually curling around the support of the pillar. Huge forearms ending in massive claws clutched the ragged stump of stone; hind claws dug thick, ragged furrows behind it. It was draconic and serpentine, and also entirely skeletal. Its empty eye sockets, made even deeper by the lantern's light, stared down at her across its tooth-lined back, already partially open in anticipation of sinking into her flesh.

Well, if she had to die, this was at least a kind of cool way to go.

But as she kept standing there, waiting for it to lunge, it simply sat on the pillar, looking threatening but failing to act on it. After a few more seconds of this, of this bizarre, silent standoff, Mint was starting to suspect that something was amiss.

She stepped toward the creature. It remained stationary. Still as a statue.

Which was exactly what it was.

The bone dragon, she saw, was not digging its claws so far into the stone they sank in; it was carved as part of the stone. It was, she had to admit, a remarkable piece of work, but that was all; just art.

"Mint!"

She looked up and around the statue in time to see Rue, looking just as wet as her, drag himself into the lantern light.

"Oh, hey," she said. "You made it."

"Y-yeah. Eventually." He pulled himself close to her and turned his gaze onto the bone dragon. "This isn't real?"

"Just some weird decoration," she said. "Dunno what it's doing in the middle of this room."

He regarded her for a moment, and when he spoke, it was somewhat slow and tentative. "You haven't seen it yet?"

That was a bit of a non-sequitur. "Seen what?"

"This is–" He stopped himself, then waved his hand toward the darkness behind them. "Flash the lantern again."

He must have seen that from wherever he'd been, then. She didn't bother asking questions or reprimanding him for ordering her; something about the tone of his voice sounded a little bright, and she didn't really know what to make of that.

So she charged the lantern with her own magic again, causing a temporary burst of light to flare out again. This time, though, not having to worry about the bone dragon, she saw what he was talking about.

Behind the dragon, toward the opposite wall, was a pyramid, whitewashed walls streaked with garish patterns. Mold and algae were trying to crawl up its sides, but the fungal life was clearing fighting a losing battle; most of the structure was still pristine, not even appearing damp. A magic barrier, then. One that had been sealed up properly.

She saw all of this in only a couple of seconds, then the light faded and the room was swallowed in darkness again.

"Elroy's atelier?" she asked.

"I'd bet on it," Rue said.

Mint grinned.

"Hold still," she said. "And hold this." She handed him the lantern, took her rings into her hands, and concentrated. Then, feeling their energy charge through her, she brought them together. The water around her and soaking into her clothes suddenly spread outward, pushed away by a thick tangle of magic threads, drying her off and providing a bubble of force that kept the water at bay. She re-focused her efforts and repeated the spell, affording Rue the same courtesy.

"Th-thank you," he said, a little taken aback. "That's– that's pretty impressive."

She waved one of her rings as though swatting away at his words. "It's nothing," she said nonchalantly. "Now c'mon."

She turned to face the pyramid and infused her rings with energy, allowing them to shine bright gold. It wasn't as convenient as the lantern – holding an enchantment was always harder than just re-forming one that already waiting – but she didn't want to rely on being too close to Rue if they both wanted to see something.

Thus, dry and illuminated, they headed toward the atelier.