Chapter 212: Chapter 210: Maze Run

As it turned out, no one in Squad Four was secretly a scholar whose favorite pastime was solving puzzles, more precisely, mazes. No one really had a clue how to navigate through them. Not even Meneur, who came up with the idea, much less me. My grandfather used to do crossword puzzles to exercise his mind, and I helped him from time to time with a word or two, but that was it. I didn’t have any maze-solving skills, not even a small hint on how to get out of one.

“Well, let’s not beat ourselves about it,” Sergeant Pinescar said as he clapped his hands to stop us from needlessly racking our brains and to get our attention. “We’ll move with Grey and Idleaf going along one side of the path while Welkes and Palemoon go along the other.”

“And me, sir?”

“You, Breadbaker...and Ironhoof, will come with me in the middle.”

Since it made Harper feel useless, even helpless, with her life in someone else’s hands, she grumbled in response, but that was all she dared to do.

“Come on, people! Let’s get moving! When you notice a change, let others know. Don’t take any unnecessary risks!”

Pinescar didn’t bother going into the details of his reasoning; frankly, it wasn’t even necessary. Idleaf and I could best sense those damn walls of the maze, the misshapen space. Unfortunately, the spirit could not move more than twenty meters away from me, too short a distance for her to walk along the approaching other side, now much less than three hundred meters away. In other words, someone else had to take on the task, and against all odds, Stella and Freyde showed that close enough to the walls - not dangerously close - were second best for the job we had.

Well, those least receptive went through the middle.

In a sense, a good solution that, in theory, should work, and we ought to make rapid progress. 

And it worked, only the progress wasn’t as fast as I would have hoped and liked, given how much time we spent working out whether the misshaping really existed and was not just a figment of my imagination. Nevertheless, we followed the path, turning at corners and hitting two more dead ends before the maze shrank so much that I could hear the misshaping and voices coming from both sides at once while standing in the middle.

“Left or right?” I asked as we hit another T-intersection.

Meneur looked at his notes, or I should say, the map of the maze he was drawing. “Right!” 

It was a good idea he had to get a better picture of the size and layout of the maze and mostly not go through the same places twice. Sure, there was the Thread and its magic string. We should see it - and on a few occasions even could - winding through the grass if we were to come across a place we already went through once. But why find out that we retrace our steps only when we come across the string, when we could easily stay away from making the mistake altogether?

Not that it did us any good. We were still trapped in the maze, and there was no exit in sight, so to speak.

As told, I took a right, speed walking, practically running. There was simply no time to linger, so I moved as fast as I was sure I wouldn’t run into the approaching walls. “Corner, left!” I shouted to let everyone know and turned.

“Opening to the right!”

“Go straight!” Meneur shouted back, taking notes as he ran.

“Korra’leigh, the misshaping...”

“Opening to the left!”

“Take it!”

“Yes, Idleaf?”

“...it makes it hard to keep our bond. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to...”

“Four-way intersection!”

“Right!”

I knew what Idleaf was trying to say, that she didn’t know how much longer she would be able to pull me away if needed, to move me to her core in the heart of Esulmor, to safety.

“It’s okay, Idleaf.” It wasn’t. It absolutely wasn’t. But going with her, as much as I wanted to, I would regret for the rest of my life, especially should anything happen to the others.

“Corner, left!”

“Feel free to go, Grey. I won’t blame you,” Pinescar said as our end drew near. How close were the walls? Twenty meters? Too close for comfort. 

“Same here, Korra,” Meneur joined in, and Stella nodded.

“T intersection!”

“Left!”

“Well, I’d love to go with you, but...you should go,” Freyde threw me a smile. Even without glancing at him, I could tell just from his voice how much he struggled with the thought of staying behind here.

Harper, on the other hand, seemed to be in the clear when I laid eyes on her. “What?! Should I be happy that you’re going to save your ass, and I’m going to be stuck here forever with this bunch? No fucking way.”

“Shit! Dead end!”

Turning on my heel, I bolted off in the opposite direction, passing through the others and back to the intersection, now going straight through it. “Then you can be pleased to hear that I’m not going anywhere.”

“Korra’leigh?” Idleaf whimpered, her spirit slowly losing its clarity. 

“Don’t worry. Wherever I go, you’ll find me there.” I know, a damn cheesy thing to say and even more stupid to insist on staying here. However, on this one, I decided to go with my heart instead of reason and my guts.

“Another T intersection!” I shouted to Meneur.

“Left!”

In a sense, as the maze was shrinking and the walls were getting closer, the distance we had to cover was getting smaller, too. Following that reasoning, it should be easier for us to find the exit. It wasn’t. For that to be the case, we would have to know where we were in the maze and where the exit actually was. 

“Opening on the right!”

“Go straight!”

The minutes flew by, and the walls drew closer. My mind raced with thoughts of what more I could do. Turn into a beast? Being faster, I’d hit the wall, and brute strength wasn’t the solution. My heart? In a pinch, it did this weird time-stopping thing, but that didn’t seem like a good solution, either. Sage? Poisoning myself to death before the shit hits the fan sounded sweet to my ears. Could it work? No, my poison would have to be strong enough to do the job, which it wasn’t.

“Right corner!” I bellowed, further racking my brain. What else was there? My mane? No flames in sight and I was pretty sure freezing the space itself was beyond my capabilities. But wait! “Stella?”

“Yes?”

“Another opening on the right!”

“Take it!”

“Do you think you could punch a hole through those walls? You know, with your aura blast.” That one packed quite a punch. I knew that all too well from my own experience.

“I thought of that, too.”

“And?”

“That misshaping burns my aura like it’s made of kindling. I’d do shit to it.”

Well, that sucked. “Meneur?” He may not have been the most powerful mage, but I always found his ember magic impressive.

“I tried, Korra. It unravels the magic.”

The what now? Was that why my connection to Idleaf was fading? “Left corner!”

“Sir? Wouldn’t you...” asked Stella, and I cursed under my breath. ‘Shit! Pinescar, of course. Why didn’t I think of that myself?’ The man was at least a hundred levels stronger than Stella or me, way more powerful than Meneur.

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“You’re giving me too much credit, Palemoon. My sword can cut through many things, but messed up space isn’t one of them.”

“Isn’t it worth a try, sir?” Freyde threw in his bit.

“Fuck this! I should have done this a long time ago,” Harper said, pulling out her crossbow as she ran. A breath later, she fired a bolt into one of the walls of misshaped space. We all watched it go through and never appear on the other side. Cursing, she fired another bolt. Alas, with the same result.

“Bomb away!” she yelled as she threw one of her handmade flour bombs into the wall. It disappeared just like her two bolts. The difference was that a few seconds later, there was a faint thud from the wall. No explosion, no flames, just a muffled thud. As disappointing as it was, it spoke volumes about the fact that the misshapings in space were actually leading somewhere. Where? I had no fucking idea.

“Your turn...sir,” Harper muttered, greatly disappointed with the outcome of her attacks.

Pinescar let out a sigh, most likely thinking it was pointless. At least as far as cutting through the walls of distorted space was concerned, showing us that it was so was another matter. He knew very well that if he didn’t give it a try, he would lose our respect for him and raise doubts, or at the very least, our confidence in him would take a significant dent. So without stopping, he took a deep breath, focused, pulled his sword from its sheath, and executed a diagonal bottom-left-to-upper-right slash on the fly.

A bit regretfully, and as in the case of Harper’s bolts and bombs, I could only watch it all through my domain, as letting off my concentration from the approaching walls attacking my senses would have been a mistake, a huge blunder we would all pay dearly. Worse, since he was rounding out our group and running last, I could only see most of it through the outer domain, limited as it was.

Nevertheless, Pinescar’s sword never touched the misshaping. That would be a blunder on his part he would surely regret, and he was well aware of that. Yet, he didn’t swing his sword through the air just for the fun of it, to allay our doubts. As he executed the slash, the air around his blade rippled, and a wave of energy surged forward, the power of it making the hair on the back of his neck bristle. For one, I was sure Pinescar, one of the master guards, wasn’t holding back.

Alas, this air slash met the same fate as Harper’s bolts, and vanished into the jagged space, forming the walls of this maze without making a single ripple in it. To say it was disappointing was an understatement.

“T intersection!” I shouted, trying not to dwell on the failure for too long. Instead, considering the time we had flew by, and the walls came within fifteen meters of each other seemingly in the blink of an eye, with no exit in sight, I did my best to focus on finding another solution to get us out. 

“Right!” Meneur roared in response to mine, continuing to take notes in his notebook.

To my dismay, no matter how hard I tried, no other solution to save our sorry asses sprang to my mind “Left corner!”

“You can fly, sort off, can’t you, Korra?” Freyde asked. 

It took me a second or two to figure out where he was going with it. Sadly, I had to disappoint him. “These,” I fluttered my wings. “...are only good for gliding. Idleaf can, though.”

“Oh, yes, yes, I can fly. I don’t think this is a good place to learn, though,” she whimpered, warily watching the misshapings on both sides and me. Sometimes I wondered how her mind worked. Nevertheless, she was right.

“I agree, Idleaf. It would be great to learn to fly, but that is not what I had in mind. Could you fly up and tell us if the misshaping is there, too? Maybe it only reaches a certain height,” Freyde added in explanation.

The spirit’s eyes flashed with understanding. Without another word, she shot up, reaching a height of twenty meters, the maximum she could, limited by me, her anchor, in a few seconds. That alone told us that the maze had no ceiling up to that height. A good sign that gave us a little bit of hope. 

It didn’t last long, though.

“It’s still there,” Idleaf reported from up high, and dispirited, flew down. It was the first time I ever saw her so down and frustrated. “Sorry, Korra’leigh”

“You have nothing to apologize for.” She didn’t. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t find a way out there. “Honestly, I think it would be pretty stupid if it was that easy to get out of here.” 

“It was worth a shot, don’t you think?” Freyde grumbled, crossed by my remark meant to raise Idleaf’s spirits. While she found it fun at first, now her inability to help me was eating away at her. The urgency that long ago seeped into our bones and made an otherwise all-joking quarter gnome annoyed by my innocent remark got to her, too.

“It was, Freyde. I should have thought of it myself. But when you think about it, whoever set this up couldn’t be stupid and must have thought of that. No cheating. Though I have to say, I’d love to cheat right now.... four-way intersection!”

“Go straight!”

“You still can,” Freyde, apologetic and aware of his overreaction, pointed out the fact that I could still get away with Idleaf. Idiot! Just when I thought we were done with the issue, it raised the spirit’s hopes that I would leave with her in the end.

“Please, Korra’leigh,” she whined and leaped ahead of me, giving me puppy eyes. I almost gave in. It would be so easy to say yes, especially when I saw how transparent her spirit already was, a sign of how much her connection to me grew weak as the walls drew closer.

‘Oh, shit!’ Sometimes I could be really dense. She was panicking. This was the first time she was losing connection with one of her Guardians. That was why she was urging me more and more to go with her. She was terrified of losing the connection entirely and quite possibly forever. A warranted concern, to be honest.

But what do you say to someone like that when what they want to hear you don’t want to say? 

“You were awakened by my voice; your voice made me your Guardian,” I said after a moment’s thought and a few turns through the maze.

“That’s not how...” Idleaf argued, not understanding. I ignored her and kept going. “You heard me when you were sound asleep. So I’m pretty sure now that you’re awake, you’ll hear me wherever I go. Whatever this is, it will pass, and you will find me. I believe in you, Idleaf.”

She bit her lip, struggling not to move me despite my will. In the end, she didn’t and instead gave me a determined look. “I will, Korra’leigh. No matter what, I will find you...” Her words faded away, as did her spirit from my sight. 

It pained me to admit that I didn’t feel the loss of the connection, our Guardian-World Tree bond, as Idleaf did. Nevertheless, the fact that she was gone hit me no less, a fact that struck others, too. I could feel it, their elevated anxiety, their fear...my fear, too. No big wonder, though. Whatever we found ourselves in was capable of severing the connection between the World Tree and her Guardian, something the Labyrinth itself did not do.

And so, apart from the directional shouts between Meneur and me, silence fell over Squad Four.

“I think it’s time to reevaluate whether this is a trap...sir?” Freyde said out loud, the effects of the misshaping pushing hard on his and Stella’s senses as the walls closed to within five meters of each other. Too damn close for my liking, I had long since pressed my ears to my head and hid them under my palms. Not that it helped much.

“At this point, there’s no doubt about that, Pointy Ears,” Harper barked back at him.

“It remains to be seen whether it will trap us here or not,” Stella pointed out, and although she was basically right that we couldn’t know if it was truly a trap until we were...trapped, I had to side with the quarter gnome and the baker girl on this one. 

“Seriously? What else could it be? T-intersection!”

“Right!” Meneur shouted back as loudly as he could for me to hear his instructions clearly over the assault of voices on my ears.

“A test, for example, Korra!” Stella said, no less softly. 

“Could be!” Sergeant Pinescar joined in. “Labyrinths hide many such trials, testing seekers, their speed, strength, agility, wisdom, and so on...!”

First time I heard anything about that. My guess? It wasn’t specific to low floors like the one we were on, and so no one - ahem, Deckard - bothered to tell me about it. After all, a lot of things peculiar to labyrinths didn’t seem to be present on the first floors. No matter how dangerous those were, they were for seekers to familiarize themselves with the labyrinths, not there to face their onslaught in full force.

“And are all those trials as sick as this one?” Harper asked. “Because if they are, I’m never taking another one.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Freyde nodded. “Besides, if it is one....what is it challenging us for?”

Good question. What was this supposed trial about? Was it our smarts, our teamwork, our speed, or our will? I wouldn’t be shocked if it was about enduring the terror of this place. Anyway, I saw what the two of them, Stella and Pinescar, were doing. They were trying to bring some hope into the quagmire our minds were sinking into. This shit being a trial sounded better than thinking of it as a trap.

“And what happens to those who fail in them?” I asked because no matter how one viewed this maze, it looked like we were going to fail.

“Opening on the left!” I yelled as the walls came within four meters of each other.

“Strait!” 

“As far as I know,” Pinescar said, his strong voice drowning out the voices coming from the maze’s walls. “Any who failed were kicked out, bearing only the injuries they sustained during the trial. They’re by no means easy to take, Breadbaker.”

“No, shit,” Harper muttered and added: “..sir.”

There was no doubt that Pinescar wasn’t telling us all about it. Otherwise, he would have brought up the fact that this could be one of those trials a long time ago. There was some catch, something else that didn’t add up, telling him that this maze was anything but a trial.

“T-intersection!”

“Right!” Meneur shouted back, seemingly unshaken by the approaching walls, continuing to make notes in his notebook. My guess was that focusing on that, doing the mapping, was what kept him calm, while I felt panic cutting into my mind as sharply as the voices coming from the walls of the misshapen space onto my ears. They were so close now that if I spread my wings just a little, I would have touched them; one bad swing with Sage and I could end up on the other side of wherever that shit was.

In a sense, trying not to touch the walls was a wasted effort.

No matter how I tried to spin the whole mess, it looked like we were about to find out whether this was a maze or not, a trial or a trap, a purposeful function of the labyrinth, or just an unfortunate error in which we found ourselves, anyway. 

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