“Maybe he found his head and left,” Fascina suggested, dodging the rubble I tossed over my shoulders.
I’d been diving through the wreckage for minutes, and so far all I’d found was the piano. The ruins of the cantina hadn’t fragmented like the rest of the labyrinth, probably indicative of its grounding in three dimensions. I picked up a length of timber and hurled it behind me.
“I don’t know if you have any personal experience with decapitation,” I said, tossing another to the side, “but craniums don’t generally come with homing devices.” I was hoping to find Mothrow crouching under the ruins, but in the cold, dead absence of my heart, I knew the search would be futile.
“I do, actually,” Fascina said. “Remember how I told you I became a hollow shell for a while? That was literal. But you are right about the homing.” She frowned. “He didn’t seem primed to shatter. Maybe he was taken up there with the rest of it?” Avoiding looking at her own, shatter-ready finger, she pointed to the labyrinth above.
I dug around a bit further, but shortly conceded defeat. Whether Mothrow was now up there or not, the fact he was missing was bad. If the labyrinth had secretly been all that had kept him in check, then everyone had bigger problems. “Chaos,” I spat.
“What did he do to make you hate him so badly?”
“All of it.”
“Enough you won’t let him shatter?”
That was a point, actually. I didn’t know all the rules – I cursed myself for mentally applying Fascina’s terminology – of the labyrinth. We trod in uncharted territory. For all I knew, the second fold had affected Mothrow differently. He didn’t have my curse, after all, or whatever was going on with my temporary companion. Maybe he had shattered.
Then again, there was still the unanswered matter of [ALL IN].
My problems were cascading. I made myself solid and shot out of the rubble, sending detritus flying in all directions before dropping in front of Fascina.
“You need to learn how to fly,” I said. “It’s a long walk to that border. We’ll disintegrate before we make it.”
“I already told you my stance on that matter.”
“I can stomach you being any level of repulsive,” I responded.
“Whew. I was worried you’d say you didn’t see a difference.”
“Learn,” I ordered sharply. “Or I’ll leave you behind.”
With a deft flip, Fascina held out the cistern lever cylinder and pointed its engraving towards me. I regretted my decision to give it to her. “If you do, I’ll be forced to use this. Want to guess what Intelligia’s dread sigil does?”
“If you keep wasting your extensions, you definitely won’t make it,” I said. “You’re about to crack; it’s written in the splitting seams all over you.”
If I could feel it, she would, too: warmth bubbling up from the inside. My whole tenure in the afterlife had been spent wishing it wasn’t so cold. Experiencing the alternative made me renege on it in an instant. It felt like something warm was trying to crawl out from the crevices under my skin and wriggle its way out into the wider realm. Which was a little surprising, because it didn’t match the usual descriptions. It probably had something to do with my curse.
A curse I didn’t want anywhere near my intelligence. I didn’t move.
Fascina held my gaze, expression serious. “If I could fix my disability, I would. It’s stronger than yours. And yours was hardly a pushover. Even time travel didn’t break mine.” She shrugged and waved the cylinder. “I tried this on myself while you were rummaging through the ruins. You’d think a dread sigil from a well that turned the afterlife on end would be enough.”
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“Just a ghost with a lot of dark magic pumped in. I know what it did to the living world. I’d rather not repeat it here.”
Despite myself, I was definitely curious. “What do you think you could do to the dead?”
Her face turned towards the second labyrinth. “Worse than that, for one thing. So it’s very important I focus on being a hero.” She grinned and turned her back on me, waving the cylinder one-handed in the air. “Are you coming?”
Groaning, I floated after her.
The labyrinth stretched out ahead of us, now a wasteland dotted with looming, fractured debris. The more I saw, the more I noticed signs it wasn’t completely helpless, even in this collapsed state. If it was listening to our conversations, it might come up with a solution to save us yet. I found myself scouring the second fold in case it was already a step ahead. The copy of the cistern drew my scrutiny like a beacon, and I traced the nearby paths. It didn’t resemble the passages I remembered; no water streaming through the tops, or canals running underneath.
Progress was achingly slow, made worse by Fascina’s regular pauses to turn over stones. The warmth under my skin verged on intolerable, but I didn’t bother scratching. Scratching never helped.
I noted other landmarks in the second fold. Most were more obvious than the cistern. A sector of towers and criss-crossing bridges; a green patch overrun with vines. A section glowing brighter than the others in a field of pulsing lights. Everything laid out for us to commit to memory, if only it would stay that way. I squinted at a clearing larger than the cistern characterised by radial spokes. Was that the equivalent of where the cantina fell?
From here, it looked like a wheel.
A cry jolted me out of my reverie to where Fascina balanced precariously. My gaze darted to the prominent hole in her thigh. Light oozed out of the hollow in trickles, fading into wisps that lingered longer than the rest.
“I’m alright.” She took a step forward on the leg. The movement left light trails behind her.
The fear was always the worst. Spectres realising their time was limited, and at best they could only eke it out a little. The ones who succeeded worked hardest, but at the cost of spending their final moments working to the bone. Shatterings shouldn’t be drawn out like this. They shouldn’t have to happen at all.
About fifteen minutes later I joined her, a section of my skull breaking off above an ear. Much to my great relief, the pressure hammering outwards at me blissfully abated. I doubted it would last forever.
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I caught Fascina staring at it as we travelled.
“It’s only light in there,” she commented. “How are we still able to function? I drank that wine at the bar. I can see. I can feel.”
I shrugged. “Memories. Plus Kaedhrakthys prefers us this way, I guess. What would you find more interesting – someone capable of acting and holding a conversation, or a ball of light that just bobbed there? As you already know, we can adjust some things when we want to. None of it helps with the cold, though.”
“It’s been getting to me,” Fascina admitted. “At least I’m not shivering.”
“But you could,” I replied, and shivered to make a point.
“So much for the forbidden tome on death. I’m beginning to wonder if all of them were useless. Do you know how much they were sought after? Continental treasures.” She shook her head. “It seems the only content of value in them was the sigils.”
“That appear in the labyrinth,” I murmured. Of course. “What did the tomes say about them, specifically?”
“I only read Charismo’s in full,” Fascina answered. “As potential targets for Aggranda, dividing our knowledge made us less expendable. Charismo kept the volume on curses, which is why I’m now the expert.”
Curses and sigils: both magicks operable in the afterlife had been written in the pages of those tomes. Maybe I’d been unfair to Fascina, and the real culprits were the books. “Where did they come from?” I asked her urgently. “Who wrote them?”
“I don’t know, exactly. They’ve been passed down and guarded since the ancients. They might predate the forming of the continents, but I couldn’t tell you for certain.”
That didn’t tell me much. I already knew time travel was a possibility in her chaos bubble. “No mention of the author?”
“Usually authors of forbidden texts don’t leave an easy trail for their pursuers.” Fascina’s tone was wry.
“Then what came before the continents?”
The spectre grimaced uncomfortably. “I’m not much of a history buff. That was Acuitas. He was constantly babbling about various pieces of ancient trivia, and I was busy prioritising what was currently relevant. All I know is that we had the Border Ocean and the System.”
I glanced at her sharply. “The System?”
“The progenitor deity who gave birth to the gods. Wait. Do you think it could have been Kaedhrakthys?”
I shook my head. That was one factor I was certain of. What surprised me more was the apparent level of historical detail. Chaos bubbles were typically based around concepts, usually poorly thought out. When it came to history, they were prone to descending into vagueness beyond the previous couple of centuries, or else became copies of mainline Soddit’s with the identifiers filed off.
“If it’s what I’m thinking of, the System is a… different concept,” I said. “You don’t have computers in your bubble, do you?”
“People who compute?”
“And you don’t have anything like floating screens or visions that display your attributes for you?”
“I think you mean attribute, singular,” Fascina responded. “There are illusion spells that could do it, but I don’t know why anyone would want to. It’s fairly obvious where we’re from already.” Her sockets widened. “Do people have multiple attributes on Vanilla?”
It took me a second to realise where she’d gotten the name from, and disguised a laugh. “Not in the way you’re thinking. You can lift things and move. That’s what other realities refer to by strength and dexterity, for instance. A System is a – I suppose it’s not dissimilar to a god – an artificial construct that regulates the distribution of those and other abilities. They’re not very equitable and tend to lead to the strong becoming disproportionately stronger. And no, Vanilla doesn’t have one. It’s a feature of another chaos bubble.”
And it showing up in Fascina’s, even in the distant past, was… odd. Maybe I was reading too much into it. “Overlap is possible,” I wrote it off for now. “Ideas can be reused.” Too often, in fact, as evidenced by the bandit problem. Even if it wasn’t bandits specifically, there was always a rash of raids. There was always a dark lord or villain. Soddit was always in danger. And there were always heroes.
“Which bubble are you from?” Fascina asked, looking at me oddly.
“What makes you think it isn’t Vanilla?”
“You talk about it like an outsider. Like I would.”
“I am one. The labyrinth is all I’ve known for a long time. My original home may as well be just another story at this point. And stories aren’t the same as living and breathing it. But,” I conceded, “it was… different. I don’t remember many of the specifics, or they get muddled with recountings others have told me. Hear a pattern repeat long enough, it eventually replaces your original baseline. It’s more subtle than you’d think, and the details I held onto were what I prioritised as relevant.” I pointed at the hole in my head. “There’s only so much room up here, and the old information gets pushed out with the new.”
“I’m sorry to hear,” Fascina said.
“Don’t be. I remember the important parts. As for my bubble, it –” I paused. If I’d be playing out the rest of my time with the hero, there were better ways to spend it than dancing indecisively around the issue. Better to pick a narrative and stick to it. I was already halfway there, anyway. “– was the one with the System.”
“Ah, hence your interest.”
I returned to the important topic. “And there was nothing at all in Charismo’s tome about the sigil?”
Fascina’s face snapped from sympathy back to focused practicality. “It covered what it does, how it works, and the grim commands to use it. Knowledge alone isn’t enough. You can’t just etch the sigil anywhere and expect it to work; inscribing one takes vast amounts of power. It’s why Aggranda had to consume the holy beasts before he could continue. Each of those beasts were highly attuned to their continent’s mana, acting like a reservoir.”
“Question,” I interrupted. “If there’s only one holy beast per continent, and they have to be killed to operate the sigils, why did your bubble have an ongoing spate of dark lords? Wouldn’t the critical resource be used up after the first one?”
“Well, they keep coming back, resurrected by the gods in a mighty celebration.” Her voice lowered unnecessarily. “Controversial opinion, but I wish they wouldn’t. Their absence might not shut down the dark lord problem, but it would make their jobs a whole lot harder. As you say, repetitive and frustrating. The beasts must be very beloved in heaven, because otherwise I don’t understand why the gods won’t learn.”
“Because Kaedhrakthys doesn’t,” I sighed in response. “And there was nothing about sigils interacting with other realms?”
“Nothing at all.” She stopped to turn over a rock. “Ah!” A piece of her arm splintered away, and she stared at it in dismay.
We were never going to make it to the second fold.
“Drop that,” I said, motioning to the rock. “Come here and grab onto my waist.”
“Oh, you’re going to fly me over?”
“Something like that.”
When she was in position, I reached a hand into my chest and curled my fingers around the cursed orb. Touching it never felt pleasant, verging on painful. The thrumming reminded me of the drums in the cistern – because it was connected, I recalled with a start; another minor detail I’d forgotten – and strongly resisted being handled at all. I had to make the flesh and bones around it tangible, which hurt like no one’s business and made me tremble.
“What are you doing?” Fascina asked, horrified. She grabbed at my wrist, but her fingers went through it.
“Hopefully getting us out of here.” I dug my other hand in for purchase. The disruption screamed with pain while I tried to keep my Schrodinger’s organs from bursting. It had taken me quite a few attempts and many descents into unconsciousness to master the intricacies of specific intangibility; my strong point had never been attention to detail.
“Ameri, stop.” Dropping an arm from my waist, she grasped for the sigiled cylinder.
“This will help!” I grimaced. “You want trust? Trust me. Just make sure you hold on.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she did, and I yanked at the orb.
The pain never lessened, though I’d done it a thousand times before. At first as experiments to see if various methods made a difference; then to test if overuse would erode it. Later, just for something, anything, to break up the boredom.
The curse tore. I tore with it.
I didn’t think it was much like shattering, since I was still very much present and conscious, just in many, many pieces. All of them in overriding agony.
Consumed with blinding pain, the world stopped making sense for a while. Until it suddenly did. Fascina let go of me like a hot coal and stumbled backwards into a heap, making a series of incoherent noises.
I floated, not sure which way up I was, until my mind once again started making sense of my vision. The brown stuff in front of me seemed to be timber, and the lines across them cross-beams of a ceiling. Vaguely rectangular lumps could have been tables, and in the corner, a piano.
All in all, it looked awfully like the inside of a bar.
will try and promote. These are:
Numbers Go Down - A LitRPG where, well, numbers go down. People keep telling me it's a terrible idea, but what do they know? (Other than how to be a successful author.) I've had this planned for a few years, and this is the year it's finally being written.
The Eight Fates of Cal - I adore time loops, but have never written one until now (I'm not counting DGW's death cube). This one's a little different to your standard looping fare. Whether that's for the better, I don't know. .
The Truck Effect Book 2 - It's in the works; Lamutri and adventures shall continue.
And lastly, a secret collab with one of my favourite RR authors. I don't know how much I can say about this yet, but there you go.
---
The bad news? I'm very slow compared to the average RR author. It will likely be a year or two before I'm ready to post another big story. I'm actually considering starting a dedicated Discord server for these projects mainly to keep me on track and just casually chat about writing/reading, but want to gauge interest first. I figure anyone dedicated enough to find Last Call Labyrinth is probably part of the right cadre to ask. No pressure - 'no' is a perfectly acceptable answer.
Would you join a Discord server if I started one?
