The passage ahead is longer than you remember.
Perhaps it has always been this long. Distance has never been an especially trustworthy thing here.
As you walk, fragments of the Maze flicker along the walls: puzzles solved, passages explored, secrets pulled from places where secrets had no business being hidden. For an instant you glimpse equations burning across black stone. A scrap of concealed text. A curiously detailed employment application. A field of wheat. A Bag of Holding swallowing an economically irresponsible quantity of grain.
Other images follow—rooms you remember only dimly, challenges whose solutions required patience, ingenuity, and occasionally the sort of blind experimentation that becomes indistinguishable from genius if it works.
The passage ends in a circular chamber of pale stone. There is no furniture. No decoration. No obvious exit. Twenty-seven shallow depressions have been carved into the floor.
As you enter, seven of them begin to glow.
Words rise from the stone:
BREATH
DEATH
THREAD
BLADE
DEADLY
ENSURED
AND
You recognize them. You earned them. The Maze remembers.
A low vibration passes through the floor.
The remaining twenty depressions ignite.
For a moment they contain nothing but swirling light. Then clusters of letters appear within them—the rewards of challenges whose details the narrative, mercifully, seems content to leave unexamined.
- NIHTIW
- GEAC
- ROHE
- FO
- LACDEENOC
- A
- TEY
- SHTAP
- MIH
- TAHW
- STBAE
- HTE
- PEED
- GIDNIWN
- OT
- MNSTREO
- DLEH
- LTIUB
- EHT
- NIW
The letters writhe faintly within their depressions, occasionally rearranging themselves into combinations that look almost meaningful before falling apart again.
Writing appears upon the wall:
NUMEROUS TRIALS. TWENTY-SEVEN WORDS. ONE FINAL ANSWER.
The twenty scrambled collections of letters rise from the floor and begin slowly circling the seven completed words.
For several seconds, nothing happens. For several seconds, nothing happens.
Then Kardan’s voice comes from somewhere behind you.
“Numerous trials?”
He is leaning against the wall studying the inscription, although you are reasonably certain there was no one there a moment ago.
“That is an extraordinarily charitable description of events.”
He gestures toward the twenty newly illuminated depressions.
“As I understand it, you completed seven portions of the Maze, whereupon its creator became distracted by ancient demons, a modern-day civil war, roleplaying a pajama clad governor, and increasingly baroque ruminations on the proper relationship between citizens and taxation.”
He examines one of the scrambled words. “And he has exercised a little… narrative economy.”
A dismissive wave.
“You solved the remaining twenty challenges and thereby acquired twenty additional words. Or you would have solved them. Possibly you did solve them, in some branch of causality none of us was unfortunate enough to experience.”
He frowns. “Temporal grammar.”
Another dismissive wave.
“The official record states that you prevailed through ingenuity, persistence, teamwork, sheer luck, skullduggery, and broadly dropped hints. Fortunately, the official record was not required to specify the proportions.”
A pause.
“Think of all the time you’ve saved.”
He pushes himself away from the wall.
“Seven words honestly earned. Twenty more courtesy of the ancient and powerful magic known as the Game Master has other things to do.”
He gestures toward the circling letters.
“Try not to squander his distraction.”
And the Maze waits.