Warmth.

Serene heat surrounded her body, sliding across every nook and cranny. It felt like she was being embraced from all sides by an entity much larger than her, protecting her, shielding her from the evils of the outer world and chasing away anxieties and blackened thoughts.

But, alas, as all things do, the warmth started to come to an end. As much as Alice resisted it, she had to eventually let go of the warmth and return to the cold, dark world outside.

Alice softly breached the surface of an immaculate white fountain, its pearly white stained only by the onyx-black liquid that gently sloshed within it. Alice sat on the bottom of the fountain, only the upper half of her torso breaching the surface.

Surprised, Alice gently made some waves with her arms, the black liquid behaving as if it were water and slime at the same time.

Strangely, there was no otherness to it, despite clearly being some sort of otherworldly substance. Only now did Alice notice how her wounds were no more, the tortuous way her legs and left arm had been mangled beyond usage felt like a faraway memory covered in thick banks of fog, and she struggled to recall anything else.

There had been a fall, then light and pain. So much agony, so much… something. There was something missing, and she couldn’t tell what. It bothered her immensely, but she could tell the stone room she found herself in probably had something to do with it. She remembered a door, a building, and falling once again.

Then, there was Lillian.

For some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about her. An icy hand gripped her heart every time she recalled her face, all smiles and carefree love. Alice shook her head, not wanting to dig up memories best left dead and buried.

Looking around, Alice tried to reach a conclusion. Had she crawled inside the fountain?

She appreciatively looked at the piece of furniture and its life-saving liquid, wanting nothing more than to kick back and be covered head to toe once again, but alas, it was not to be. She could already feel the gnawing edge of hunger, even if her thirst had been somehow satiated. Probably the fountain again.

Alice stood up, and the liquid slithered back leaving some threads attached to Alice’s battered armour that eventually broke and fell to the fountain once again. Strangely, she wasn’t wet at all.

One thing that worried her though was how the now restored flesh that had been chemically burned, bruised or punctured all across her body was now paler than the rest of her complexion. Pinching one of said zones, it felt a bit tougher too, if slightly alien to the touch. She didn’t know how to describe the feeling she experienced each time a hand grazed one such spot, so she boxed the issue and kicked it to the back of her mind, resolving to deal with it ‘later’.

Looking around the completely barren room, she found neither her backpack nor her weapon, which was worrying. Perhaps they had been left behind where she had first fallen? She’d had to backtrack her way across whatever this building was, then grab whatever had survived the fall. She hoped that at least the canteen and some of the rations made it, otherwise, she didn’t know how she was going to survive more than a couple of days.

There were only three things within the room apart from herself, and that was the fountain, a human-sized wooden door of a strange pink-purple pigmentation, and a source of light that came from somewhere within the ceiling, powerful enough to illuminate the room but not enough to dispel every shadow.

She started looking up before a piercing chill slashing downwards from the base of her neck advised her otherwise as Alice broke into a cold sweat.

“Got it, don’t look up, don’t look up…”

A ping distracted her enough to get her mind off the stupid ceiling, and she checked it over, noticing a new level in Initiate Explorer.

Closing the notification, she resolved on assigning everything later. Right now, she needed to assess her surroundings and find a way of getting food and water. She doubted the fountain would last forever, and as inviting as the black ooze looked, she wasn’t too keen on drinking it.

Alice felt naked without her sword, as incompetent as she was with any kind of melee weaponry. Having something she could poke holes with into anything trying to eat her had been a small assurance, but a welcome one.

Walking towards the door that fortunately had a handle, she put her ear on the wood, trying to hear anything and everything outside her own little pocket of silence, broken only by her own breathing and beating heart.

Alice waited and waited for what felt like hours but had probably been something like five minutes, legs itching and hands twitching. She hadn’t heard anything outside the room so far, but she was sure there was something prowling the building. It just made sense to her.

Giving up after another minute of fruitless listening, she carefully opened the door which thankfully didn’t make a sound when moved slowly, not like the one she had in her old room.

That had gotten her into so many problems back home.

The corridor in front of her was made of the same polished grey stone that made up the fountain room. Careful to not look up too much, she scanned the length of it until both ends reached a turn. They had the same illumination as the fountain room, so she could still see everything, albeit with a bit of squinting.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Torn, she wished she had some sort of coin or die she could use to choose which way to go. Both passages appeared exactly the same, and both passages appeared to turn towards the same direction. Another minute of careful listening yielded nothing more, the corridor as devoid of noise as it had been before. Not any of the corridors elicited anything within her, neither one felt like it was more dangerous than the other one.

Shrugging, she turned right and started walking, [Torment] and [Oppress] both ready at a moment’s notice. If something ambushed her, she only had to release her spell and let it do its job.

Turning around the corner with all the care she could muster, she saw another, completely identical corridor connected to it, followed by another turn, this time to the left.

Carefully, she glanced back before continuing to walk, not trusting that the fountain room would not disappear on her the moment her eyes left it or she got too far away, whatever happened first.

Once more, no monstrosity ready to tear her throat out and chew on her corpse popped from thin air, and Alice didn’t know if that made her more nervous than actually having something she could fight and kill. The stress her own mind was putting itself under was worse than the physical danger of an actual threat in front of her.

There was a small, visual ‘ping’ in the form of a blinking see-through light at the corner of her vision every so often, but she couldn’t bring herself to focus on her status right now, wary of ambushes.

She kept walking, and turned left, the same old passage welcoming her with its stone-cold walls. She walked and walked, and turned and turned.

But then, she stopped, a thin sheen of sweat on her brow.

She had turned left more than six times now, and she should have crossed the fountain room door by now, given that each corridor felt like it was roughly the same length.

There was something strange going on, and Alice didn’t want anything to do with it.

She had received more notifications as she explored the sterile passageways, but she ignored them in favour of maintaining perfect focus on the task at hand.

Carefully, she started turning around.

Alice had to stifle a shriek as she found herself face to face with another wooden door, this one black, that was, clearly, not the one she had been looking for.

Her path back had been lost.

Alice stopped breathing, an idea sparking within her synapses. Something about the strange geometry that governed this place had dug up a memory. She couldn’t recall voices or names, but she could recall something about non-euclidean videogames someone had ranted at her.

Alice turned around, taking care of doing the turn in the same direction she had, and started walking backwards. She closed her eyes for a moment, expecting her back to hit solid wood, but it didn’t, and Alice almost cried then and there in pure relief. She had a way back, supposedly, even if it was a dangerous and strange way of getting back to her safe spot.

If something ambushed her with her back turned, she risked getting trapped, and she couldn’t have that.

She made her way back towards the fountain room, sighing in relief once she found the same door she had exited through. Taking a quick peek inside, she confirmed that it was the room she expected and not some wall of flesh mimicking a door or some other ghastly horror.

This time she chose to go the other way, and upon turning the corner she immediately turned around, finding herself face to face with a tall, wide arch that gave way to a spacious, well-illuminated room. Eyes wide in awe, she gazed upon the room’s contents, disbelief in her mind and greed in her heart.

There were four long, wide tables that looked taken straight out of some medieval lord’s castle. There was enough room within each table to sit a hundred or more attendants with space to spare.

The most incredible thing about the room though, was that the dishes atop the tables, enough food for a banquet thrice over, was still succulently wafting steam. Entire roasted chickens, rotisseried meats, sweet juices, cold brews and perfectly baked cakes with more than five floors each.

Alice’s mouth watered, and she almost took a step forward out of pure want. But something at the back of her head stopped her at the last second. There was something incredibly wrong with the whole scene.

It was only after a whole minute of silent observation, her desire to ravage whatever plate was nearest growing with the second, that she noticed what had stopped her.

Alice’s pupils shrunk into paired pinpricks as she stepped backwards out of pure fear.

The foods in front of her all wafted steam and looked downright sinful, but her careful minute of investigation had revealed that the smoke always came back to the exact same pattern every forty or so seconds. And even then, she noticed another detail. There was no smell.

A banquet of that calibre should smell strong enough to make her stagger, but there was nothing but the cold, stale air she had been breathing this whole time.

It was then that Alice noticed footsteps behind her, coming from the turn around the corner.

In dreadful anticipation, she turned around after exiting the room with the banquet that was marked by the arch, her twist making it disappear.

A lonesome figure staggered around the corner, just ten paces or so away from Alice.

It looked like a human-sized puppet made of cracked porcelain that leaked a strange reddish slush, the joints made of some unknown black material, but clearly flexible enough to provide mobility. Alice stared at the thing in front of her, loudly lamenting the loss of her blade within the confines of her mind.

“Hi?” Alice hesitated, intent on turning on [Torment] at any moment and letting the aura do its work.

The puppet stopped when it heard her voice, and raised its head. Alice took a step back when she saw that the usual features of a human face had been somehow turned around a hundred and eighty degrees, leaving the mouth within the forehead and the eyes at the height of where the mouth would be. There was a long, jagged crack running all the way along its face, and Alice swore that something within the puppet was looking directly at her.

The puppet suddenly fell on all fours and started charging at her in a jerky, twitchy manner that made Alice’s hair stand on its end.

Activating [Torment] out of pure reflex, she sighed in relief when the creature came within its range and missed a step, looking like it would fall over and slowly die as the spider had done.

Then it dashed towards Alice in a burst of speed, grabbed her arm, and twisted, eliciting a nauseating crack.

Alice screamed.

Trying to take back a step only made things worse as the puppet punched her thigh, making it contract on pure reflex and bringing Alice to the floor.

When the construct climbed atop her and started punching her face and chest with enough force to take her breath away and make her see stars, she understood.

I’m going to die here.