Wish upon the Stars chapter 927

The staircase down into the labyrinth was cramped and uncomfortable. The top steps were rough and had good traction, but they were incredibly short and small, making each step feel awkward and overly dramatic even when I was just walking normally. The stairwell was also narrow, so we had to descend one by one. It was deeply uncomfortable.

By the time we reached the bottom and emerged onto the ledge that overlooked the labyrinth, I was agitated and twitchy, ready to fight someone just from the sheer frustration. Despite that, the sight of the black glass labyrinth laid out below us like a sprawling tapestry of interlocking lines was breathtaking enough that I felt compelled to stop and take it all in, studying the dizzying and confusing trajectories as best I could.

Devlan stopped next to me, whistling softly. “That never gets less impressive,” he said in an awestruck tone. “Something about the jagged lines and the way the light bounces off it all. It’s mesmerizing."

He wasn’t wrong. The maze was filled with white flame torches, and the light refracted off the obsidian in strange and dizzying patterns, leaping to and fro to confuse the eyes and the mind.

“I assume there’s some reason we can’t just fly over it?” I asked, though by this point I knew better than to hope for such an easy solution. Nothing was ever that simple, especially not when obstacles like this were involved.

He pointed at the vaulted cavern ceiling above us, shrouded in shadow though it was. “Bats,” he said simply. “They have sonic attacks. The screams bounce off the glass. Just…don’t. Bat tides kill hundreds of people down here every year. And those are people specially selected to be allowed to be here.”

“Of course they do,” I said with a sigh.

Bethy appeared next to me, excited. “Wait, no! I can help! I can disguise myself as bats and live among them, slowly gain their trust and then convince them to let you pass. I just need ten years and a hundred thousand still living mice. Unless they’re fruit bats. I can’t talk to fruit bats, they’re obtuse.”

“What kind of bats aren’t obtuse?” asked Benny cautiously. I smirked, knowing the answer before he even finished asking the question.

Bethy shot him a pitying look. “Vampire bats. Duh.”

“Why is it that every time you open your mouth, I feel either very drunk or very stupid?” asked Benny mildly.

I grinned at him. “Well to be fair, you’re always at least one of those things. Luckily you don’t drink.” He flipped me off, and everyone else laughed. He spun on Celine, who was standing behind him, shooting her a look of absolute betrayal as a giggle slipped out at my comment. By the time he spotted her, her face was smooth as glass and her expression was blankly innocent, which only made the rest of us laugh harder.

Devlan shook his head. “I have no idea how you people manage to remain a viable combat force and still act like bickering children during peacetime. Don’t get me wrong, I kind of envy it, it must be relaxing not to worry about anything, but don’t you worry what people will think of you if they hear…this?”

“Can’t say as I do,” I shrugged. “At least not unless it directly affects my personality through recursion. But if the worst recursion I get is being dumb and immature with my friends, I can live with that. It could be way worse. I could gather recursion that made me into a sadist, or a torturer, or someone who eats steak well done. You know,a real monster. Now, where exactly is this guide? You’re supposed to be leading us to the person who will take us across, right?”

I hadn’t gotten a trial notification yet, so it probably wouldn’t pop up until we hit the labyrinth, but I’d been warned about going down there without the right guide.

“Why, I’ve been here for ten minutes,” said the urbane voice of the goatee’d man standing to my left. I froze. We all froze. Turning slowly to regard the man who none of us had noticed standing with us until just now. The last time someone had managed to slip by me so easily had been when Tilda did it back at the orphanage. I still didn’t have Murmur going, but it wasn’t an easy thing to do.

Then again, this guy was C-rank, so maybe he could just ignore my detection completely. Murmur DID work on higher ranked opponents, but only when it had time to take effect. The salt and pepper haired man with the goatee smiled. “Huh, I expected someone to jump or scream in shock. I like these ones, Devlan. They’ve got spine.”

Devlan just sighed. “Yes, that at least they have in spades. How are you Jack?”

“I spend most of my time in an underground cave where everything is trying to kill me,” Jack said brightly. “So by any conventional metric, I’m still quite mad. Though I suppose there aren’t very many convention C-rankers, so that in itself is a flawed conceptual model. What is sanity, anyway?"

“Probably not this,” Devlan admitted casually. “But we were the ones who came down to meet you, so I suppose the madness is universal.”

I rolled my eyes. “This is fascinating,” I said with a long sigh. “But I need to know what the hell we’re doing. We need to get going soon.” I pointed down at the labyrinth, or more specifically, and the multiple entrances within my eyeline. “The question is, where do we enter from. You’re the guide, so you have the path we need.”

He nodded amiably. “That I do. But while the walls don’t move, the obstacles do. Paths shift and need to be reworked. Traversing the labyrinth is as much art as science, you know? That’s why we don’t all just carry a map. Wouldn’t do any good.

“If you want to know which entrance we should take, the answer gets a bit complicated.” He pointed down the cliff to a wall of glass, a convex curve with irregularly spaced doorways leading to seemingly random paths. “There’s a fast way, a safe way, an interesting way, and the way that we should actually take.”

I raised my eyebrow at that. “Why wouldn’t we take the safe way? Or the fast way? What makes the last one special?”

“Fast is fast, but dangerous, safe is safe, but slow,” he explained with a shrug. “We’re looking for a good balance of the two. It’s fairly interesting as well, but I feel that might not be as big a priority for you in these circumstances, begging your pardon, my lord.”

“Lord, is it?” I asked with amusement. “You from the Empire, Jack?”

He laughed. “I’m not from anywhere, my lord. Least nowhere save these caves right here. But you’re a Wyndham, and there are still those of us who remember what this planet is here for. I suspect you’ve had some dealings with such as I.”

“So, this balanced path,” I said, trying to refocus on the trip. “Is it vulnerable to the bats? I heard if there’s a bat tide the whole place turns into some kind or megaphone or something.”

“The real danger in a bat tide isn’t the sound itself,” he cautioned. “It’s unpleasant, but survivable, save for in a few VERY specific places. The real danger is that the sound drives all the OTHER animals in the labyrinth mad. People too in most cases. The screeching has a hallucinogenic property. But the bats should be sleeping for a few weeks yet. They’re big bastards, and it takes a lot of energy to rouse them. During the tides they scoop up vulnerable creatures and swallow them like snakes, then spend a few months digesting. Last one was two weeks ago.”

My eyes widened with alarm, and I spun on my heel, pointing a finger at Bethy, whose face was lit up with delight, “No.” I told her mercilessly. “I know what you’re thinking, and you cannot try to turn into a snake bat and learn to swallow stuff whole.”

“But it’s the perfect combination!” she all but squealed. “I won’t have to feed so much, and I’d have so much time for activities!”

I decided not to bother with pointing out the various logistical challenges of ingesting a whole cow or whatever (I didn’t think Bethy was the type to want to eat a person unless they annoyed her first) and just told her no again, ignoring her pout as I turned back to Jack. “Well, you told me the path we need. I trust you to guide us, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Lead on.”

Nodding, he turned and walked across the cliff face, taking a sharp turn at the edge. It briefly looked like he might fall, but he turned out to have stepped into a divot that led into a cleverly concealed staircase carved into the glass. Seeing him standing on what seemed to me to be thin air and walk at a strange angle only to vanish below the cliff edge was odd, but I followed him over, carefully mimicking his steps.

Before long, we were on the ground, and I could see a variety of dangerous looking spikes littering the ground at the base of the cliff. It was taller than it seemed from up top, likely because of the deceptive size of the labyrinth throwing off perspective, and I could tell that no one dropping all that way onto B-ranked glass spikes was going to have a nice time.

In the dark around the edges of the maze, I caught the occasional gleam of light off the eyes of…something. I ignored it, because I was pretty sure they were ambush predators waiting for someone to be injured on the rocks, and we were about a thousand men strong.

Following Jack along the curve of the outer wall, we came to a small archway, and I stopped to wait for the others to catch up. As I did, I finally got the scroll in my vision I’d been waiting for, telling me about the trial I’d been waiting for.

“Announcement: The Mad Maze begins! Candidates will enter the labyrinth, struggling to leave in safety as the various traps and guardians attempt to waylay them. Points will be gained for each living candidate remaining in the maze when the candidate exits. Hint: you only get points for a living candidate who you have actually met or seen from a distance. Secondhand accounts and guesswork don’t count.”

I froze, taking in the information. “That is…surpisingly humane.” I said slowly. “It seems like they’re actively trying to keep us alive this time.”

Callie nodded. “Sounds like they’re taking the threat of the Void seriously. Trying to minimize casualties. Of course, this is going to make it MUCH harder to actually accrue points. I guess we could somehow try to detect a bunch of them and make a run for it, but the implication is that we need to find a way to sandbag a bunch of candidates on our way out.”

I nodded absently. She was right. I had plenty of environmental tricks, but Agares was going to be useless in this maze. Even with the staff boosting it to C-rank, this whole maze was made of B-rank glass. I had a better chance of juggling the sun than managing to turn any of that shit to dust. I’d have to work smarter, not harder. But luckily, I had some ideas about that. I grinned, checking my ring for something I’d picked up earlier.

Back on our exit from Yettin, we’d taken tunnels out of the city. I’d used Agares liberally to great effect, and more importantly, I’d made a not to actually KEEP some of that condensed stone on me, in case I needed it in the future. I turned to my wife after confirming I had quite a bit of it. “So, honey, how many shadows can you actively sense in this maze? Given all the crazy lights?” I was hoping it was still a decent amount. Because I had a wonderful, crazy plan.