I’d never really been a thief before. I mean, sure, I’d stolen all kinds of things from Tom in the past - hair, pictures, passwords, old clothes - but never anything he would have missed. That’s not real thievery.

Now that Cadoc and I were plundering the manor, loading our packs with our spoils, I realized that I had been missing out. Robbery is a damn good time.

Cadoc was laughing heartily, and the noise filled the room. “I knew joining up with you was the right decision, friend,” he said. He was mock-cheering with a golden goblet he had found in a chest. Then he closed one eye, examined the goblet, turned it over in his hands, and then stashed it in his pack.

Meanwhile, I was grabbing handfuls of silver coins, and my laughter joined his. “I am going to be fucking rich!” I thought of all the people I would brag to when I got home, with not just my debt paid off, but as a newly minted millionaire. “I’ll make them lick my fucking boots to get a piece of this, and I’ll dangle the money in front of them and make them beg, and give them nothing!”

It felt so good. Part of me knew this probably wouldn’t be enough to actually pay all my debts, but I let myself fall into the fantasy. I needed it. Deserved it. Times had been tough.

And this was going so well. Sure, we were being a little noisy. But we had the map. We watched as it updated our location like a GPS, and watched especially the little “Berenguer” circle, which sat unmoving in a bedroom on the other end of the mansion.

What did we have to fear? The map showed us that there was no one else in the house, and the owner was clearly out cold, and far enough away that even our boisterous celebrations wouldn’t reach him, so long as we kept our distance.

It felt good to win, for once.

It wasn’t long before our bags were full, and we could carry no more. We had decided we would divide up the loot later - after all, it was pretty unevenly distributed just then. Cadoc had grabbed at least a couple of books, for instance, while I had grabbed none. On the other hand, I was certain I had more things that we could sell in my pack. We would figure out how we wanted to split it all.

But I didn’t let our good fortune spoil my desire for revenge. As we went looting from room to room, I made sure to plant fingernails in choice locations - among a dusty pile of parchment, or dropped into potions that I hoped were flammable. Not all of the nails would catch, in all likelihood, but enough would. It seemed a shame to burn down the mansion with so much left to steal, but we weren’t about to press our luck and come back for round two.

So when it came time to leave, my veins were filled with the blood of a joyous man.

“Hey Cadoc,” I said. We were walking back from near the center of the mansion, just to the side of the great entrance space, where the front door was. That was where we had stopped. We hadn’t dared move past that spot - pressing further into the mansion would have meant drawing nearer to our involuntary benefactor.

“What is it?” Cadoc asked.

The mansion was not always the most straightforward place to navigate - rooms being attached oddly to other, unrelated rooms, such that you could only reach the potion brewing chamber by first passing through the kitchen - but we could see on the map that, from where we were, the way out was a straight shot, down the hallway and through a couple of intersecting rooms. We talked while walking, as relaxed as two robbers could be.

“Do you think Berenguer will come after us?” I asked. We passed the scowling faces of angry statues, as if the furniture itself already wished us dead, and was trying to answer my question using their facial expressions.

“He was already searching for us.” Cadoc replied. “What would change?”

I thought about that as we walked.

“Good point,” I said.

We were already at our exit. We stood before the door we had entered in. I could taste the final victory on my lips.

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I had been sure to place many fingernails along the outer edges of the mansion, where they would hopefully burn and attract attention quickly. This might not have mattered if we were content to burn the building from a distance, but we wanted to ensure that our exit was as easy as our entrance. What better way than to busy the guards with the important work of fire fighting?

“Besides,” Cadoc continued. “How will he even know it was us?”

I frowned. Part of me wanted him to know. But I supposed that was asking for too much.

“Well,” I said. “You ready for the fire?”

Cadoc nodded.

Lighting my nails was as easy as thinking - even lighting multiple nails would happen as fast as I could think about one, then the next, then the next. All the same, I wanted to revel in it. So, when it was time to light, I snapped my fingers. I could feel the mana draining from me, but that wasn’t what drew my attention the most.

The ground trembled as a distant explosion rocked the mansion. The noise was deafening. I was looking back down the hallway we had just come down, but I couldn’t see any fire from where we stood. I could only assume that I had dropped a nail into the right potion. When the initial shock subsided, I smiled.

“Mission accomplished,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be great if he burned up in his sleep?”

No time to gloat any further. All that was left was to walk off the grounds, and maybe steal a few glances back at the opulent burning corpse.

I turned the handle of the side door, opened it, and felt again a rush of air that chilled my bones. I saw the darkness outside, and it enticed me with the promise of silent and unseen escape. We walked through.

And as we stepped through the threshold, the chill ran through me again, and before I even had a chance to think twice, the manicured lawns disappeared from my view.

And were replaced with fire.

My eyes darted around, panicked and confused, trying to figure out what had just happened. It felt like what had happened before, with the baths. Cadoc was beside me, equally confused.

My heart sank.

We were still in the mansion.

I recognized the room. This was a little study, with an elegant little desk beside one wall. The wall with a door in it that, if I remembered correctly, had led to the storage closet, full of blank scrolls and ink bottles.

Both the desk and the wall were ablaze. Of course they were. I had left the nails in that closet myself. I saw black smoke creeping out from beneath the closet door,

I pulled out the map-book again in a panic. Sure enough, we weren’t at the side door. We were nowhere near it. Somehow, that wasn’t the most concerning thing I saw.

Two things had it beat. One was the little circle of Berenguer. Or, should I say, the lack of that little circle. I scanned the map - quickly, as we need to leave that room ASAP - but I couldn’t find the circle anywhere. Did he leave? How?

While this disappearing circle was worrying, the other, perhaps even more concerning thing was what was added. A new circle, this one labeled simply “monster.” It was just in front of the exit, where we had been a second before.

“What happened?!” Cadoc yelled.

“I have no idea!” I yelled back, though grim thoughts were beginning to dampen my good spirits, as I imagined what this might mean.

“Is it Berenguer?”

“We’ll figure that out later!” I said. “Right now, we need to get out of here. And look!” I brought the map up before his face, pointing at the new circle, as I simultaneously made my way out of the study, through the door opposite the burning wall. I was already starting to sweat in the heat.

And because Cadoc was a psychopath, he smiled back at me, and even as I walked past him and into the next room, I could hear his laughter following close behind.

“It’s never easy, is it?” he called from behind.

The next room was a spare bedroom, thankfully spared from the fires, thus far. I took a moment to consult the map and make a plan of escape, quickly.

“I suppose we’ll need to be ready for battle,” Cadoc said, hand on sword.

“Shut up, Cadoc. I’m trying to think.” I tried to spot another way out of this death trap.

The front door would involve getting through the guards, while the side door held a monster, apparently. The left wing of the mansion seemed abandoned now, but I knew where I had placed the nails well enough to know the way there would be burning and impassable.

I couldn’t see any other way out. I was sweating from the panic now.

“That’s it!” I yelled, realizing something. “We’ll make our way to a window. We can bust through. The noise won’t attract much attention in this chaos.”

“Won’t the guards see us?” Cadoc asked. I suspected he might poke holes in any plan I came up with that didn’t involve killing the monster, now that the specter of violence was on the table. Or maybe I heard a little bit of hope in his voice, like he wanted to fight the guards.

“We’ll go out a back window,” I said. “One that overlooks the back garden. No guards back there.”

“That we saw,” Cadoc finished.

I ignored him. The way was clear now. I ran through the next door, into a massive dining room, with one of those huge wooden tables that kings in movies would feast on, and a high-backed chair twenty feet tall.

Cadoc followed. Next, through another door, into a library.

The library. Dread. I checked the map. We were adjacent to the monster. Did I turn the wrong way? I doubted it.

I ran through the door to the baths. Beyond it, another door, and beyond it, another. The fires raged around us as we ran, growing and growing until nearly every room we entered was sweltering hot. Sometimes we would have to change course, avoiding a room that was engulfed in flames, but we continued onwards. Eventually, coughing, we were forced to the ground, and beat our retreat on our stomaches.

-

We entered another doorway, which led into a hallway.

There shouldn’t have been a hallway there. I looked at the map, and saw that we had moved again.

“Fuck!” I yelled. But I calmed myself quickly. This was actually good luck. We seemed to get transported when we walked through a door. This hallway led front to back, rather than left to right. We could make our way to the back of the building from here, and not have to go through any more doors. There would be a big window at the end, I remembered.

It also seemed that the fires hadn’t reached here yet, and we were able to get back on our feet. Finally, I thought. A lucky break.

We ran down the hallway, and occasionally I felt a chill, a strange sensation in that ever-warming house.

Then, coming into view in the distance, I saw it, and I groaned.

It wasn’t a window.

It was the monster.

I checked the map. Sure enough, we had moved again, and without even opening a single door. Somewhere along the way, we had switched hallways, and we now faced the monster, guarding our original entrance. I turned to run the other way.

But there was nothing there. No hallway, no door, nothing. Just a wall. I looked at the map, as if that would help, and saw that desperate reality reflected there, too. The rest of the hallway had simply vanished.

I felt like, at any moment, I would break down and start crying. Cadoc, however, was laughing again.