The building was bigger on the inside.

It was a moot observation in retrospect, but Juniper hadn’t preoccupied herself with the sheer immensity of the space she was entering when first with Del Marin. Her eyes were caught by the glitz and glimmer of the opulent displays that she’d failed to grasp the size of the hallways and lights and paintings on the walls.

She couldn't tell how many corridors she'd passed, how many pristine images she'd note, their frames lightly coated in gray dust. Juniper only knew that she was making some progress because of the growing tautness in the golden thread guiding her to her evidence.

And the way that the reenactments depicted were altered slightly in detail, vaguely, until there was nothing but a garbled mess of pigments in a facsimile of a battle, its combatants soft and amorphous. Landscapes turned into a brown muddy mess. Uniformed colors distinguishing prince from pauper entirely unrecognizable, identities lost to the reiterative nature of the world she walked through.

It was always a pain traveling through domains, much less one so thoroughly rooted in the world. The griping wouldn't help alleviate the growing sourness of her mood. She knew that she had no other option when traversing through the domain, unless she wanted to locate the progenitor of the building and ask for their permission to access a section of the wider space.

No, she'd take the long way to her answers.

It gave her time to think of the repercussions of her actions. She didn’t know the parameters of the threshold she’d crossed and whether time was immaterial inside of the building. Domains functioned primarily under the constraints of the astral, which meant peculiarities akin to tropes in dream logic.

Time was immaterial and yet ever-present. Travel from one point to another felt endless if the traveler paid attention to their route.

Juniper knew that this parameter was alive and well when she squinted too hard at her golden thread and the hallway began to rotate and twist like an image caught in a pair of mirrors.

Violence wasn’t off the table and since she was an intruder to the space without the proper invitation of the building owner, she’d be more defenseless than she already was.

Which left the time question and the issues of escape up in the air.

What would she do to escape? And if she escaped, what time would it be in the wider world? Would she find herself incapable of making use of whatever she found at the end of the line because too much time had passed?

No, it was likely that she’d need to do something she hadn’t done since the night Magnolia…

“Fuck this is such a pain.” Juniper grumbled.

Wait.

Juniper blinked once, twice, and found her surroundings began to adopt that muddy pigmented nature that the art pieces had. Her string held firm but the space was shifting and shifting with a purpose.

The elaborate wall trims and framed paintings melted into the background and in their place came the rattling of chains, the wet drips of water on damp gray stone, and the haunting melody of the harp she’d been hearing from the main hall. Her exit was upended from behind her, only darkness and the distant glint of half rusted iron bars foretelling what awaited her should she retreat.

The once faint glow of her thread grew in luminance, shirking off the encroaching darkness with its radiant golden light.

This was both a good and a bad thing.

It was a good thing for Juniper because without that light, she’d have to start walking around the nascent dungeon space with no one to guide her and nothing to reveal the dangers in the dark.

It was a bad thing for Juniper to keep her thread out in the open because if someone or something was making modifications to the domain, then it meant they had enough of a mind to follow her thread to its source.

She was defenseless. No bag of tricks. No innate combative abilities. Just raw athleticism and a few martial art moves picked up from the more interesting wayfarers that crossed Savannah to keep her defended.

Not the worst situation she’d been in but bordering precariously on that scenario.

Juniper considered whispering for any signs of life and fought against the urge. Anything that existed here was either a victim in some wider conspiracy she had no pieces, or plans, of solving or the dreaded security system she was certain any paranoid Incant with enough connections and power to maintain.

The only option she had was moving forward and she did so in reticence. She passed by empty cell after empty cell, with nothing but scratchings in the grooves of the walls and errant articles of clothing to denote the lives of the victims.

She expected skeletons and found dungeons. It’d have been a laugh and a half if it weren’t so morbid and foreboding of the fates of those that disappeared under the Matrons eye.

That woman had to be complicit.

“Ow.” Juniper winced. Her slips were not up for the occasion, the hard stone underneath her feet causing the backs of the lightly worn shoe to chew at her ankles.

This night would only grow in discomforts if she prolonged her stay.

She pulled at her thread for an update.

The thread was snagged.

She moved her arm around to tug at the snare and found the ability to do so became harder as she pulled.

Whatever was holding it in place was approaching and approaching at an even pace.

Her guess materialized into audio cues as she began to faintly hear the sounds of a heavy liquid slap onto the stone floor. The light from her thread in the distance did not show the entity off but she knew it was there.

“Fuck me…” Juniper groaned. As silently as possible, she walked up to one of the cells and ducked inside.

She curled up into a ball for good measure.

With regret, she dismissed her golden thread and waited in the darkness.

She held her breath as the creature approached. The warden of this pop up dungeon ungulated as it passed, the rattling of the chains on the walls temporarily subsumed in its translucent spongy flesh before those contents were violently spat back out onto the wall with a wet slorping noise.

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There were bones and clothes and pocket trinkets suspended in the center of its frame. Its core jiggled and trembled with each motion.

It dragged itself down the hall with pseudopods.

It did not have eyes, or at least she felt it didn’t have eyes with the way it disinterestedly passed the cells around it to travel further into the hall. If it simply was the width and height of the dungeon halls, any unsuspecting soul would need to cross paths with it and find themselves in for a nightmarish experience.

Once the sloshing sounds became distant, Juniper uncurled herself and investigated. The residue it left behind on the walls and floor and ceiling did not burn or hold a particularly acrid scent. It was a sticky and translucent film, similar to its whole body.

Despite the painful reminder of her shoes digging into her ankles, Juniper refused at this point to take them off and finish her work barefoot.

No, she disregarded her safe approach after having the warden pass and ran as fast as she could down the darkened halls.

Juniper flicked her wrist once more and the golden thread sprang to life, racing faster towards the final destination. Her heart thundered and quaked with each loud step towards the source.

The thread turned the bend towards a simple door and Juniper burst her way inside with a shoulder tackle.

The door was busted open to reveal an empty room on first inspection.

No.

Juniper's eyes adjusted to the glow of her thread and she stood there, horrified, to see clumps of clothing on the floor. The taut golden thread tied itself to the handkerchief her client had handed her, along with a skirt and blouse. More clothing scattered in the corners with no tears or rips, no signs of violence.

The thread on her pinky unraveled now that it reached its destination and the nagging preoccupation to complete the quest satisfyingly dissipated. There was still a missing girl to find, a situation that became more morbid in her mind with each passing discovery, but there was personal solace in being freed from the fixation.

“Hello?”

Juniper froze.

“Hello? Someone’s there…” The feminine voice wheezed.

Was this a trap? There was the monster that slid itself through the hall but the solitary defense wasn’t exactly what she’d expected from the expedition. This was the other shoe, precariously hanging on edge.

“Please…” the voice coughed and spat, “Please, I promise I’ll disappear. I won’t ask questions. I won’t come back. Just please let me go!” The person got livelier with each spoken word, punctuating the end of her plea with a thrashing of chains and open sobs.

Juniper winced.

The option of leaving the dungeon crossed her mind for a moment but the guilt of leaving someone behind was not something she wanted her conscious to nag her about.

And could she even look Magnolia in the eye after that?

“Give me a second. I can’t see anything.” Juniper whispered her reply.

“Do you want me to help? I can keep talking if it’d help.” The voice choked back their hope, earnestly offering what little they have for the opportunity to be free.

“Just hold on.” Juniper contemplated using her thread to Magnolia and quickly decided against it.

Her client's card would do. She was willing to handle the risks.

Juniper conjured her golden thread and found it to be heavy with slack. An expected result considering the distance between the two but she just needed the light.

“Was that you?” the voice called out in panic.

“Yeah, shush. Gotta check if the halls are clear before I try to cross over and find you.” Juniper replied. She bundled the missing girl's clothes into a ball and held it tight for her clients' identification.

And possibly closure.

She closed her eyes and listened to the distant sounds of the traveling warden. Finding the hall to be clear, Juniper exited the room.

“You still with me?” Juniper whispered.

“Yeah. I can see that yellow glow nearby.” The voice responded. Their statement was carried in the air further down the hall.

Juniper treaded lightly towards the source and quickly found an open cell, the prison bars corroded by the warden's translucent film. She stepped inside the room and winced.

Hanging on the wall bound by chains was an emaciated woman with vacuous blots across her body. She had to blink a couple of times to make sure her eyes were not playing tricks on her. Indeed, there were sections of this woman's naked body that were dug into, leaving behind the starry endless space Juniper had come to associate with the astral.

“Oh my god, you’re real!” The woman thrashed, kicking aside a worn wooden bowl across the floor. “Please, you have to help me get out of here.”

“I don’t have anything to remove your chains.” Juniper admitted.

The woman lingered on the statement for only a moment.

“If I have to break my fucking wrists to leave this place with you, I will.” The prisoner declared without resignation. “But can you get us out? If I can slip these manacles, can you get us out?”

“It’d be one way and I wouldn’t risk dragging you onto campus with what I’ve seen so our trek through the astral’s gonna be long, but yeah I can pull us through.” Juniper offered.

“Then it’s settled. Do you mind distracting me for a bit?” The woman was breathing heavily as her arms shifted and chains rattled.

“What’s your name and why are you here?”

“I’m Daphne Letore and I meddled in something I shouldn’t have.”

The reflections of her potential end upon discovery given form.

Wonderful.

“What were you meddling with? Who are you relative to the Scarlet Sisters?”

Daphne started to quicken her breath and mumbled something in that southern drawl before violently yanking her arm at the manacle. Juniper looked away as Daphne pulled against her bindings with a manic persistence.

She heard an audible snap and a half sob but they continued with their efforts.

“I… I asked around campus about this student, Claire. And for my efforts, the head of the fucking guides threw me in here. So much for sisterhood.” Daphne’s words were slurred as she spoke, either pain or delirium taking over her mind.

But she continued with her efforts and Juniper could only hear the finger curling results.

And then the realization hit her.

“You’re the guide!” Juniper exclaimed before slapping her mouth shut. Stupid. She wasn’t out of the woods yet and shouldn’t treat a revelation as cause for looser standards.

There was cause for celebration internally at least. If she couldn’t find the missing girl, she had the next best thing in the missing guide.

“Ah, uh, ah,” Daphne took deep breaths, “I can do this.” The woman brought her broken hand to her bonds and coated the interior with her blood. She moved her arm up the manacle as far as it could go before using all of her strength to pull her arm down.

The ‘lubricant’ helped her slide out of the other manacle with a less severe amount of pain. The woman took a gingerly step forward before collapsing on the ground.

Juniper worked on her end of the bargain, hoping upon hope that her ticket to solving whatever was happening behind closed doors on campus didn’t bleed out.

The domain was fixed but this was all part of the astral. Maintained by the owner and held on the other side.

She cleared her mind of distractions and concentrated her attention to the golden thread tying her to the business card with her client. Juniper held onto Daphne’s broken hand and the two of them slipped between the cracks of the world.

It was the first thing she’d learned when finding herself in the astral and the lesson had saved her from the worst that the world had to offer. The domain that enveloped the campus building became a distant blot in the starry space.

The two of them sank purposefully into a quiet corner of the world with only her thread as a tether home. Daphne would leave a piece of herself behind on their travels but there wasn’t a lot left of her to begin with.

There was an ease to sinking into the darkness but Juniper could not find solace in even this, as whatever implications were held by the dungeon and the disappearing girl meant Magnolia and the rest of the students were unsafe.

And it was up to Juniper to solve things.