Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

The man awoke, gently as was possible, to a soft, soothing, pleasant hum. His eyes still closed, he listened to it for a moment. He felt deliciously comfortable, weightless, and almost perfectly warm. Vague images of a dream - of a dark, cavernous space, fires and explosions, and a friendly silver spider - flickered through his mind, but he could not hold onto them, already they were flying into tatters. Well, maybe I’ll just go back to sleep for a bit, the man thought. And maybe I’ll dream it again.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm - “SHISKA RAK TAK-ALAR, HOK! KEMMIL HESK SHRISCHA NAMHESST!”

The man’s eyes shot open. The gentle humming had been replaced by a hideous screeching voice barking at him in a language he did not know. Whoever was speaking, it sounded like they were doing so through a mouth full of broken glass.

As soon as his eyes focused, he felt a sudden sense of alarm. He seemed to be floating in some thick, green, gel-like fluid, suspended in a large glass tube. Glancing frantically from side to side, he could tell that his tube was only one of several, though the others he could see seemed to be empty.

He barely had time to process this before a harsh gurgling sound alerted him to the presence of a circular drain at the bottom of his tube. The green liquid in which he was suspended began dropping rapidly, and he with it. Such was the force of the drainage that the man began to panic and scramble against the sides of the glass, afraid that the pressure would snap him against the bars of the drain.

But before that could happen, the front half of the tube popped open - no visible hinges or seam in the glass indicated that this would happen - and an invisible force unceremoniously booted him out onto a cold, stone-paved ground.

“SHIST NAMA HOK HOK HOK TAK RAKKASTIR,” said the disembodied voice, apparently emanating from the tube itself. It finished up with a sound that sounded like three mouths spitting contemptuously, and then fell silent.

The man coughed up what felt like buckets of the green gel from his lungs, took a long, shuddering breath, and lay on the ground, staring up at the ceiling, for a long silent moment. He didn’t really see the ceiling. He simply lay staring at it.

Eventually, his brain kicked back on. The ceiling seemed to be made of an odd, bluish metal. “Seemed” to, because it swirled and bulged, as if whoever had made it had been blowing bubbles in it before it was cast. Glowing orbs of various sizes seemed to have been pushed into this metal, providing a hazy orange-yellow light. The floor he was laying on, however, seemed to be crudely hewn stone. Tilting his head back, the man could see that the adjoining wall was a yet different kind of stone, red brickwork. This seemed odd.

Finally, he sat up and looked down at his body. He was naked, pale, and slender, but his limbs were well-muscled and strong, and no mysterious aches or pains ailed him. His nails were long - very long, actually, so long he was worried he might cut himself with them - and his hair, looking almost bleached white, fell well past his shoulders, hanging in wet clumps most of the way down his back.

Perhaps a reaction with the chemicals in the rejuvenating gel, the man thought, and then, blinking, tried to catch onto that thought. He had no memories, and that thought had come unbidden, and seemed to carry with it some knowledge. But the more he tried to grasp it, the more it slipped away.

The man frowned, then shrugged, pushing this from his mind. He felt energetic; vital. He felt fresh. He got to his feet swiftly, his limbs bending easily, muscles propelling him upward trivially. He drank in oxygen, and more than thought, a feeling of joy swelled within him. “Damn!” he said, surprised for a moment by the crisp, commanding sound of his own voice. “It feels good to be alive!”

His exclamation echoed off the walls around him for a brief moment. He was in a relatively enclosed hallway - enough room for him to extend his arms and swing them around, but little more than that. And it seemed a chaotic mishmash of different builders had made it.

The floor on which he now stood was gray, uneven rock. But he could see, further down the hall, that it changed abruptly to smooth, polished sandstone. The wall behind him was red brick. And the wall in front of him, like the ceiling, was made of that strange, bulging blue metal. Into this was embedded the glass tube he had been expelled from - along with six brothers, four on one side, two on the other. Spiderweb cracks ran across some of these, and it looked like one of the little glass chambers had been entirely broken - though there were no shards on the ground or anywhere else to indicate it had been shattered. All of these were empty, with no indication they had ever been anything else - his was the only tube that still had some residue from the green gel running down the glass.

The man considered this. He tapped his long nails against the glass, enjoying the tnktnktnktnk-tnktnktnktnk sound. He wandered away, tracing the edges of the room, but before he had gotten far he came across a curious little object.

It was a clear globe - glass, or something much stronger - small enough to be held within one hand. Within it a pale blue flower bloomed, with petals that looked like little stars. Staring at it, the man felt a tug once again at his memory, but nothing came of it other than the urge to hold the globe to his ear. He did so, and he could hear, as if from a great distance, the sound of great bells chiming.

He took the oddity away from his ear, and frowned down at it. It felt so familiar, and yet he could remember nothing about it - any more than he could remember anything, he supposed. He couldn’t even remember his own name. He had nothing, nothing at all, except his wits and his body - not even clothes. He had no idea who he was, where he was, why he was there, or how he had gotten there.

“Well,” the man muttered to himself, straightening his back, “Before I think about all that I should probably try to find a way out of here.” Talking to himself, silly as it was, made him feel a bit less alone. He shivered - now that his adrenaline was dying down, he noticed just how cool the air here was. Clutching the little flower-globe in one hand - his sole possession - he set about investigating his current predicament.

The room had no doors. However, in the course of pacing about it, when he drew close to one corner he heard a popping, hissing sound. He looked up, and then jumped back in alarm as a black ladder came rattling down, extending from a hole in the ceiling. The hole, he noticed, looked as if it had been bored through the blue, bulbous metal that made up the ceiling, as if a perfect column of it had been carved out.

“Hello?” he called up, but there was no sign that anyone had lowered the ladder for him, and no light at the top either. He reached out and took hold of the ladder, which was made from some cool, black material that he couldn’t recognize. He shook it, and it seemed firm enough, secured to the ceiling above. With nothing else to do, and with one backwards glance at the room, he climbed.

The hole was cramped. The man was barely able to squeeze his shoulders through. While clambering up, he nearly dropped the flower-globe, and an unusually strong sense of panic ran through him as he worried that it would shatter. Eventually, he made it to the top, which seemed to be solid - except that when he pushed on it, it gave a little. The top was a hatch.

It was a struggle to open - it was heavy, and seemed stuck. But the man found that there was more strength in this body than he had suspected, and by pushing up against it with his back, he managed to unseat it and then, with jerks and starts, push it aside. Fresh air - sweeter than the chamber below - greeted him. He quickly pulled himself up and out of the hole.

The ground was awkward and uneven to stand on - made of the bulging blue metal, it was far from a flat even surface. But at least the glowing orbs embedded in it provided this room, which was similar in dimension to the room below, with some light as well. This room, too, seemed to be a strange agglomeration of different construction materials and styles.

The man turned to the hatch he had just been struggling with. It was a thick disk of the bulging blue metal, once again looking as if it had been perfectly sheared away. It had been very heavy - he was still sweating and panting with the exertion of moving it.

But still, out of curiosity - and because he thought it might be good to have a place to hide if necessary - he moved the hatch back to the circle he had removed it from, and rotated it so that it matched the pattern of swirls and bulges that surrounded it. Curiously, though it was very heavy, once it was seated back in the hole it came from it rotated quite easily. Once he had it in the proper place, he stood back, impressed. The seams were very thin, and difficult to spot if you didn’t know what you were looking for. If he had to hide in the chamber below, so long as he could figure out a way to get the hatch back into the right position, then it would be very useful-

Suddenly, he gasped, astonished. Before his very eyes, the seams were disappearing, as if the bluish metal was healing itself. With a shout he crouched down to try to pull the hatch out once more, but it was already too late - what had once been a hole already looked like a completely innocuous patch of floor, impossible to tell from any other.

“Damn,” the man muttered to himself.

At the very least, this room did have exits. It opened up onto another hallway, which branched off into other rooms. The strange, bulbous blue metal with its glowing orbs was not in any of these other rooms, though - he got the impression that this was a strange structure that had been built around by all the other makers of this place. As such, unfortunately, the hallway that led out of this room was unlit by anything, and he could not see very far at all before it became pitch black. The little flower in the flower-globe that he held onto glowed blue in the darkness, but not nearly strong enough to light up anything.

As the man was feeling forward in the dark, running his hands over the rough stone walls and trying to push the boundaries of how far he could go - perhaps if he went far enough he’d come across another light source - he froze when he heard a sound echoing down through the unknown halls.

Clank-scrape.

It was faint - just barely at the edge of his hearing. It sounded like someone striking the stone with something metal, and then dragging the metal across it. The man strained his ears and held his breath.

Clank-scraaaape. Again.

Unnerved, the man retreated from the dark and made his way back to the room he had come from.

He couldn’t find his way out here without some kind of light. And yet the only light he had seen in this place were the glowing orbs embedded in the strange blue metal that made up the floor here. He crouched down on the floor, next to one of the orbs about the size of his fist. Could there be any way to remove it? He tried to pry the orb free, breaking one of his long nails in the process, but it was stuck fast. Maybe he could break it, and the shards would still glow? But the glowing orbs were as solid as stone. How, exactly, were the damn things glowing anyway?

How…

As if in response to this question, the faint ghost of a memory echoed through his head. Flashes of pain, of a towering pillar of white crystal…rooms carved into the crystal itself - all full of holes, the memories clearly incomplete. A voice, he could remember a voice. A harsh voice, though he could not recall the face it belonged to or who they had been.

“To bring forth light is unsophisticated - almost purely an act of will. Not all are born with the spark…”

The man’s fingers twitched, though he was unaware of them doing so. His eyes closed, he felt almost as if he were in a trance, trying so hard to grab hold of that memory drifting up through the dark…

“Concentrate then, child. One day this Art will be second nature to you…”

The man realized that, almost by instinct, almost as if it were out of his control, his mind was racing, concentrating - something that was almost as simple as breathing to him, but which had slipped out of his mind. Unbidden, behind his closed eyes, the image of a floating white ball of clear, hard light formed. And when he opened his eyes, he found that this light was still there, floating less than an arm’s length from his face.

He stared at it for a moment. It wobbled slightly in the air, but otherwise did not move. He rose to his feet, and it rose with him, keeping itself level with his head. He reached out, tentatively, to try and touch it, and instead found that the light danced back from his hand. This way, the man discovered, he could move it around. The light seemed to know when he wanted it to dance at the edge of his fingers, and when he wanted it to float next to him. He briefly wondered if he could do something like stick it to a wall and have it remain there while he walked away.

“Well, best not chance it,” he murmured to himself, smiling as he waved the light before him. He hadn’t known he could do this, after all, and who knew whether he’d be able to reproduce it. He thought he likely could, though. It felt as if some old muscle memory had come back to him. And so, with his little floating light, he set out to explore. Before he did, though, he paused on the edge of the doorway and listened.

Clank-scrape. This time, whatever was making the sound seemed closer.

Well, at the very least, if I come across it I won’t be in the dark, the man thought, and was off.

Though the light by his side was bright enough to stop him from stumbling about in the dark, and enough to illuminate most of any room he stepped into and banish the shadows to the corners, the hallway he stepped into was long enough that the light could not meet the end of it.

He quickly found that this place was much larger, and exploring it far stranger than he had imagined. In all places it was an eclectic mix of building materials that had been stacked together in a manner that seemed often bizarre, leaving him wondering at the foolishness of the people who had made it. In some places it was cold gray stone, in others it was sandstone, in some places well-worn and sturdy logs, covered in lichen and moss, and in others rotten, rickety wood that seemed as if it would snap if he put the slightest weight on it. In some places brick, in yet others weak, crumbling plaster that he could punch a hole through, and in yet other places this maze was made of no material he could name. One room he came across seemed to be made of coarse yarn stretched taut over some gigantic boxlike frame. Another seemed to be unnervingly made of bone - though the bones of no creature that he could name, the walls lined with a large, elongated skulls with what seemed to be at least five eye sockets and a mouth full of jagged teeth. One part of the halls seemed to me made of pallid pink flesh, moist and reeking, as if he were in the guts of some unimaginably large creature. This he retreated from quite quickly.

Worse than this, though, was that the place was an impossible warren. It changed around him. Never in his sight, never while he was watching. But he’d trace his steps backwards to find that what ought to have been a left turn was now a right turn, or what should have been a clear passage was now a dead end. He worried that this place was trying to steer him in a certain direction. And all the while, he could hear that clank-scraaaape sound. Sometimes far in the distance, sometimes so close that it sounded like it may have just been in the room below or above him. But then he’d walk further into the darkness, and mere moments later, it seemed further away than it had ever been.

Many times, the rooms were empty. But sometimes he’d find things in them - furniture, wooden tables or chairs, signs that this place had been lived in once. It all seemed ancient, though from one room he was able to salvage some threadbare sheets from what looked to be a prison bed. After a moment’s consideration, he did his best to tie these as comfortably as he could around his waist, forming a sort of long skirt that nearly dragged along the floor. He had to occasionally hitch it up, but at least now his shame was covered and his legs were somewhat warmer.

Other rooms were much stranger. In one room he stepped into, the air immediately lit up with lights, forming glowing shapes that crowded around and sometimes through him. He thought the shapes must be some form of language, but he had no idea what any of them meant. In another room, he found a statue of a nude woman being devoured from the legs-down by what looked like some awful coiling worm with a gigantic maw of razor-sharp teeth. The woman, however, appeared full of good-natured exasperation, looking down at the worm with a wry smile. One room was empty of everything except for a box that seemed to be carved of blue crystal, and which faded away and disappeared as he approached - and which would slowly fade back into existence as he backed away.

There was little progress that could be made with the shifting nature of this place - though how would he even know what was progress? What if I starve here? The man tried to fight off this sense of dread. He settled on a strategy of trying to go upwards whenever he could. There were flights of stairs in these halls. If the hallways shifted around him to lead him downwards, he’d wait until they shifted back. Up, he figured, should at least eventually lead him to the sky. If there was a sky here to be seen.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

It took some wandering to find flights up; and sometimes he did find that he had to wait, in the darkness, with his only companion that distant clank-scraaaape sound to accompany him, while he waited for the halls to shift and lead him to a way upwards. He wondered if that noise was, perhaps, simply the sound of these hallways rearranging themselves around him somehow. Though it seemed to him like that it should be much noisier.

But this strategy did allay some of his fears. He had begun to worry that this place was malevolently trying to confuse him, but it didn’t seem as if it was particularly trying to stop him from making his way up. And it did seem that the further up he went, the less this place twisted and changed around him. Much less often did he trace his steps back only to find that the path he had walked down had closed off. And it seemed to him that, in the rooms which showed signs of habitation, at least, the furniture seemed less rotted, less ancient. Still abandoned, and in complete disrepair, though. And there did not ever seem to be much more than just the furniture left behind - if there had once been more interesting or valuable things in these rooms, they had long been taken by someone else.

And more curiously, it seemed the darkness lessened as well. Though there was no visible source of light, the darkness lessened to what you might expect on a moonlit night, then dusk, then twilight. He could see clearly now, even without the aid of the glowing orb, though it did still help to dispel the shadows. The man thought that this must certainly be a good sign. The only thing that worried him was that no matter what, he still seemed to be able to hear an ever-closer-

Clank-scrape.

Soon, though, this was not the only noise the man was hearing.

It took him a while to realize it, at first, so accustomed had he become to the quiet patter of his footsteps and being lost in his own thoughts. But as he was traversing down a long hallway made from giant slabs of carved gray stone, he began to hear the echoing of voices ahead. Once he realized what he was hearing, a jolt shot through him. Voices! He felt like a fool. How long had they been there? He had given no thought to what he would do if he met people, or what sort of person he might meet here.

He tried to listen to what they were saying, but the echoing made everything sound like an incoherent babble that he could only snatch glimpses of meaning from. He couldn’t even say for certain that they were speaking a language he understood.

Not knowing what to do, and with the voices growing steadily closer, he ducked behind the doorway of a nearby room and hid. It wasn’t long before the echoes calmed and he was able to make out what they were saying - and it was in a language he could understand, even if not everything that was said made sense to him.

Clank-scrape.

“...stupid, is what it is. We’ve been down this part of the Tangles before and ain’t never heard that sound. They’re stable this shallow, so you know what that means? It’s something from deep in the guts clambering around. Let the brass boys handle it, why us?” A woman’s voice, strident and somewhat hoarse, and also with a real undercurrent of nerves and fear.

“If you don’t quit your bitching,” came the reply - a gravelly voice, flat with threat - “I’ll cut your throat myself.”

“Pfft. I don’t think so, Sark. We only have one throat to be cut, not like you. You’re expendable. Chief doesn’t want to lose us.”

And then the man heard something that made him freeze. A third voice popped up - soft, yet deep, throaty. “Stop here,” it said. “I sense someone…ahead of us. Hrmm. An…unusual mind.”

“A mind?” snapped the gravelly voice. “What sort of mind, besides ‘unusual’?”

“Human. I think. Hrmmmmm. Tastes…strange.” The odd speaker paused for a moment. “I think they hear us.”

Clank-scrape.

“Is that you, making that sound?” the gravelly voice called out. “You have ‘til the count of five before I come find you and put a knife in your ribs. If you’d rather wag tongues you’d better come out now. One. Two.”

The man considered making a run for it, for a moment. But how fast are they? And I’d probably have to say goodbye to my dignity, he thought forlornly, fingering the little sheet-skirt he had found himself - no way to run in that. They were at least offering to talk. And so he stepped out from the room in which he hid, slowly, trying to appear as unthreatening as possible. “Hello,” he called, hoping he sounded friendly.

Three figures stood down the hall, close enough that the man knew they could probably see him shaking. The first of these was a man - or at least, he assumed it was a man - garbed entirely in a long black cloak, which draped him from the top of his head to his floor. Not an inch of skin showed on him, and in one of his black-gloved hands he carried a long dagger whose blade seemed, alarmingly, to sizzle the air around it. The only thing on him that was not black was a silver mask, which was of an astoundingly ugly man whose face was contorted in an absurd grimace.

“Come here!” the black-cloaked figure snapped, gesturing with his blade. “Keep your hands where I can see them. And wink out that witchlight!”

“Um, what…?” the man asked, not quite understanding that last order. “I’m sorry, I’m just a bit confused. You see-”

“The witchlight, get rid of it,” the black-cloaked figure hissed, jabbing with his knife agitatedly. His mask seemed uglier than it had a moment before. “Unless you want your guts on the ground-”

“Stow it, Sark.” This came from a short, red-faced woman with frizzy, graying hair that stood out in all directions. She wore a lumpy vest into which dozens of pockets seem to have been haphazardly sewn. Her pants and even her boots, too, seemed to have had pockets added to them of all kinds, open, buttoned and zippered. “We aren’t here to bleed every poor fool who wanders in the Tangles.”

“Hrrrm. He does not mean us harm.” This came from the most bizarre of the three. Very small - the man thought the creature wouldn’t even come up to his waist - it looked like some cross between a lizard and a rabbit, with a skin of pebbled orange scales and two flapping ears so long it looked as if they might drag on the ground. It stood upright on its hind legs and wore what seemed to be a very elaborate little blue dress, complete with delicately tied bows and ribbons. It looked at him with three bright purple eyes and flashed him a grin full of razor-sharp teeth.

The man had managed to figure out that he was being asked to get rid of the little floating orb of light that he still had hanging over his shoulder. He found that the moment that he thought he no longer wanted it, it winked out of existence. “I really don’t, I promise you,” he called. “I-”

“Shut up,” snapped the black-cloaked figure, which the man supposed was called Sark. “Come here. Walk forward. Hands out. Who are you?”

The man did as he was told, nervously eyeing the sizzling blade in Sark’s hand. “I don’t actually know myself,” he began.

Clank-scraaaaaape. Loud, now, almost as loud as he had ever heard it. And he could hear additional sounds now, too. A softer scraping sound that followed.

“Are you making that noise?” Sark interrupted him. “What is it? Tell me now.”

“You idiot, how is he supposed to be making that noise when he’s right in front of you?” the woman snorted from behind him. She was, however, glancing around nervously.

“I’m not,” the man replied. He had stopped just outside of the range of Sark’s blade. “I don’t know what it is, either. I’ve been hearing it banging around down here for a while.” He affected what he hoped was a friendly, disarming smile. It felt more like a grimace. “I’m really quite lost-”

“Keep walking forward,” Sark hissed, and the man noted it was not his imagination - the silver mask really did warp and change to become even uglier. “Wait - what is that you’ve got there?”

The man looked down. He had almost forgotten that he had kept a hold of the little flower-globe, still clutched in his right hand. “I, uh,” realizing that he wasn’t giving many answers, “I don’t know.”

CLANK-SCRAPE.

“Give it here,” said Sark.

What the man meant to say was Of course, violent stranger threatening to disembowel me, whatever you command. But as he began extending his hand out towards Sark to drop the little flower-globe in his waiting black-gloved palm, a strong impulse called out to him from the foggy depths of his mind. Something within him really didn’t want to give up that flower-globe, something within him said no, this is important, this is yours, this belongs to you, you can’t let anyone take this treasure from you.

“No,” said the man.

Sark was silent for a moment. His odd dagger hissed and popped. “What?”

CLANK-SCRAAAAAAAPE.

“Well,” the man stammered, his mind in confusion - one half of him was screaming to comply, and the other half of him was demanding that he hold onto it. “It’s, well, it’s nothing dangerous. As far as I know. It’s mine, I’m not going to use it to hurt you. You can’t have it.”

Sark had been advancing on him, cocking his head curiously as he listened to the man’s nervous explanations. “Right,” he said, his voice suddenly devoid of emotion. “You’ve got one last chance. Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Well,” Sark said, lifting his blade and coiling like a snake, “Time to die.”

“Sark, stop!” cried the woman.

CLANK-SCRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE.

The noise had now reached a cacophonous crescendo, and all four stopped immediately as its source finally revealed itself, dragging itself from around the corner down the all.

It was a confusion of bones, gray, withered flesh, and gleaming machine, all fused together so that it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. It was clear that whatever had once been living on it was now dead, and the machine part of it was also heavily damaged, much of it scorched black - but clearly still operable. It created the clank-scrape sound by extending its one working, crab-like leg and dragging itself along. Even crippled and broken, it stood half as tall again as any of them.

The moment it rounded the corner, it was as if a shockwave traveled down the hallway. The man could hear a voice in his head. Though it was not so much a voice - it didn’t speak any language - as it was a series of images, senses and emotions that communicated to him:

Newborn/unfinished/potential meal! I am mother/guardian/tormentor. I have been looking/hunting/mourning for you. I will protect!

Sark realized what was about to happen before the man did. He scrambled backwards, then turned to run. “Shit, shit, shit shit shit -”

He got three steps before a boiling red light lanced out from somewhere within the tangle of bones and metal. It touched Sark, and in an instant, where he once was, he was not anymore - just a few motes of drifting ash remained.

The woman screamed, and the lizard-rabbit creature began babbling panickedly in some hissing, growling tongue. The man heard the patter of their footsteps as they ran away. But he could not tear his eyes from the abomination crawling towards him, the rotting corpse of something inhuman (too wide - too many mouths - too many arms) dragging lifelessly behind it, and the sputtering, sparking machine part of it extending a forest metallic tendrils in his direction as it drew closer.

I will destroy kidnappers/eggsnatchers/war enemy/interlocutor/lovers, the monstrosity thought at him. Within it, a red glow began to build again.

“Get behind something!” he shouted, and moments later another hissing beam of hot red light went screaming over his head. Finally he managed to look away, to turn around and start running himself. That shot went too high. Didn’t it? He couldn’t see either the woman or the little lizard-creature any more. He hoped they weren’t dust now.

A sense of relief pierced through his fear and panic when he saw the little lizard-creature poke its head out from behind one of the rooms that led off from the hallway. It narrowed its three purple eyes at him and flared out a frilled crest from around its neck. “I hear - it talk to you, yes! In your head!” it screamed at him. “You tell it to stop!”

The man heard. The thing did seem to think it was his mother? He wondered if it had something to do with the tube he had awoken in. Or - he shuddered - maybe the thing really was his mother. “These are - they’re friends!” he shouted over his shoulder. Well, they’re not so much friends, he thought, but they didn’t seem to want me murdered, and one good turn deserves another.

The skeleton-machine abomination made no sign it had heard him. Instead, he felt a cold, metallic tendril wrap around his ankle. He fell to the floor, the breath going out of him. He scrambled to turn around, only to find the leering snarl of bones and machine looming over him. It moved deceptively fast.

“Not like that!” screamed the lizard-creature. “In your head! IN YOUR HEAD!”

The man only stared stupidly for a few moments, unsure of what she meant. Then something in him seemed to realize he might very well die if it didn’t get his brain kickstarted again. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind of the whirlwind terror and panic that roared through it. He found it surprisingly simple to do so - almost as if it came naturally, all emotion drained away, leaving nothing but a void. He tried to fill that void by thinking as hard as he could about calmness, friendship, happiness, safety.

He felt the wretched monster’s confusion as it touched his mind. Newborn/snack/unperfected is trust-bond-safe-love with impure/murderer/lowly ones?

The man opened his eyes. The awful thing was very close to him, nearly on top of him. He could smell the stench of death from its rotten biological half. And he could see the broken shell of its machine half, a melted hole having been torn through it. And within, something spitting out blue sparks.

And then, all at once, the world seemed to fall away. Something in his head, less than a memory, the ghost of a memory, seized him. This seemed familiar - he had the sense, the overwhelming sense, that whatever it was spitting blue sparks was what kept this monster alive. It was the last thread keeping this puppet dancing.

And before he knew it, it really was threads. He could see them, the threads that held this awful thing together, once woven so sure and so strong that they could never be separated, now ragged and torn and burnt. All except for one little thread, still barely hanging on.

Newborn/half-thing/darling is full of wrong/broken/bent thoughts, the creature was whispering into his mind. Newborn/cherished/savored must be malformed/corrupted/contaminated. I will grant/demand/impose on you mercy/death/meal preparation.

From somewhere behind him, the man heard the distinct whine of a whirring blade. Fear rippled across the surface of the unnatural calm he was feeling. But it was alright. He reached out and snapped the thread.

The skeleton-machine horror shuddered. The blue sparking within its metallic shell immediately stopped. All of its limbs slumped, and then with a din of rattles and clangs, it fell over backwards.

The man breathed heavily for a few moments, remaining still. Then he kicked away the tendril the thing had wrapped around his ankle and scrambled backwards from it, still on the ground. He bumped into something and spun around, and was surprised to see the three purple eyes of the lizard-creature staring at him.

“Well done,” it purred at him. He flinched as it leaned towards him, and for a moment he thought it was going to bite his face. Instead, it merely brushed its dry, rough lips against his cheek. It was giving him a kiss, he realized. It was very coarse.

“I don’t really know what I did,” the man replied, struggling to his feet. As he got up, he was glad to see that the gray-haired woman with all the pockets was alive as well. But she was standing a good distance back from him, eyeing him warily, patting her pockets as if looking for something. Like maybe a weapon to point at me.

“Alright,” said the woman, looking much paler than she had before, “Who are you, exactly? You aren’t just some dumb bint wandering around down here. You’re clearly no slouch as a dweomer.”

The man fought down a surge of exasperation and annoyance. He thought he was actually being very good-natured with these people. Very reasonable, considering their companion had threatened to eviscerate him. At least the little lizard-thing had expressed some sort of gratitude. “I’m sorry, a what?”

The woman perhaps sensed his irritation, because while her face remained hard and suspicious, her tone softened. “A dweomer. A dimmalaich. An arcanist. A weaver, an Artist, mage, wizard, sorcerer, he-witch.” She pointed with one shaking hand at the now-still horror that lay topped behind him. “I don’t know what you did, but you did something with the Art to stop that thing.”

Some of those names she said had sounded familiar to the man. I think I have memories of being called some of those things. “I suppose I did do something,” he replied, glancing down. The little lizard-rabbit creature was standing very close to him, and its twitching tail was lashing his leg. “And perhaps I am what you say. But I couldn’t tell you what it is I did.”

The woman just stared at him, disbelieving. She had gray, hard eyes. He coughed, suddenly, and shuffled awkwardly. “I, er, would have done it earlier, if I could. Sorry about your friend.” Though, to be honest, he wasn’t all that sorry.

Something about that seemed to relax her for some reason. She sighed and ran a hand through her frizzy gray hair. “Sark? He’s nobody’s friend. And he’ll get better.” She didn’t elaborate on this cryptic comment.

“You can trust him,” said the little lizard-rabbit creature, beaming up at the man. “I taste no lies in him. I hope you do not mind, sir, but I have been tasting your thoughts. You may call me Paravel.”

“I suppose if you trust him, then I ought to as well. He did save our hides.” The woman huffed, then placed her hands on her hips. “Well. My name is Zhura. And what do we call you?”

“I don’t really know,” said the man. And then, perhaps simply because the two of them seemed friendly enough and he was still lost, he found himself telling them everything that had happened to him. Waking up in the tube without any memories, learning that he could summon light, wandering around in the dark where the halls seemed to change on him. When he was done, Zhura and Paravel exchanged glances.

Finally, Zhura whistled. “You sound like you came from pretty deep in the Tangles, my man. You’re lucky you made it out.” She cocked her head at Paravel, who was clinging tightly to the man’s leg. “You think he might be what we were looking for?”

“He might be,” rasped the lizard-creature. She (or at least, the man thought of the creature as female, with the little dress it wore) did not sound very happy about this.

“Were you looking for me?” The man asked excitedly. “I don’t suppose you know who I am?”

“No,” replied Zhura. “But, well - look. We can explain on the way. For now, let’s get you out of here.”