Feedback at the cantina, along with certain other sources of information, had let me piece together some of the labyrinth’s restrictions. Tests, for instance, came with clues. They were intended to be found and resolved. Just not easily.

Right now, all I could see was the curved segment of wall. Fascina had already checked for obvious physical aberrations.

I started with reflections.

Rippling copies of our faces wavered within the running water. It had been a long time since I’d seen mine properly, and that wasn’t changing today. There were no mirrors in Last Call, and glass provided only muddled distortions.

According to patrons, I was arguably handsome with a divisive sense of fashion. Soddit had gone through a layered era, so I eternally wore a chiton over shirt and trousers with belts, buckles and shawl. At one point they’d been shades other than blue, but I’d long forgotten what. Along with the colour of every part of my body. Now they were pale and my hair never grew, floating around my head in a cloud.

It was all I got from my current efforts. No hoped-for secrets revealed themselves in the water’s hazy duplicates; no shadows that weren’t also real. I looked for irregularities in the pouring flow; none jumped out.

I fancied the walls the likeliest target, since I already knew they were hollow. Their fountains rose through the middle, spilling out at the top before making their way down. Clear and close to the stone, they didn’t leave much behind to the imagination. But the movement might be just enough to conceal something subtle.

Backtracking to the start of the architectural tangent, I floated two Fascina-lengths above said hero’s head and pressed my hands to the wall like a shield. Water showered outwards, making the background patter louder. Checking downwards through the loop of my arms, I found only what I expected.

Uncertain for what I searched, I moved right and kept feeling it out. Perhaps some slightly recessed button or minor, elusive carving. Fascina stared up at my progress along the curve. It seemed a hopeless, lost cause – the labyrinth itself melancholic. That made two of us. But in the midst of it, I felt oddly peaceful. Endings came for everyone, after all, and the labyrinth was the precursor.

Soon.

I’d recently passed Fascina when her voice called out. “Go back.”

I paused, keeping my hands where they were. “Where?”

“To the left, about half a metre.”

I reversed. “Here?”

“Shh.” The lights in her sockets dwindled, almost as if they’d closed. Her chin tilted up and sideways as she held herself still. “Move right again. Now back. Do you hear it?”

Accompanying us, the rushing water murmured. Its chorus had built gradually over hours, blending into the background until our meddlings interrupted it.

But she was right – it had a tone. Moving my hands detuned it. I pulled them out and listened, detecting multiple layers by default. When I moved them back where Fascina had indicated… I heard only one.

Something below me was changing the note. But I couldn’t see it.

I ran my fingers down the length of the wall, exclaiming when they ran out of grip. I moved them up again and shielded the flow, but still only encountered stone. When I moved down, they disappeared into it.

Illusion.

Feeling out the edges, I found the corners of a tunnel. It carried on below the water, terminating at the grassy floor. More grass lay past the threshold.

Fascina glanced over her shoulder as I broke the surface, hands still trapped in the wall. “Well?”

“You were right next to it,” I said. “Two more metres and we’d have saved ourselves the trouble.”

The hero hung her head. “Next time, my hand doesn’t leave the wall.”

“Technically, you’ve met that objective,” I commented with a smirk. “No, you made the right call. I’ve heard stories about touching the wrong things. You solved this how it was meant to be solved.”

For what little that was worth.

Her expression brightened. “We did. See? We make an effective team.”

“You’re not free yet.”

And I had to enter the door. Alone, as the labyrinth wanted. I stared at it, willing it to intuit my thoughts. No funny business.

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

“You’d better complete the test,” Fascina urged me with a nod towards the illusory wall. “I wonder what will be in there.”

“It’s always a death extension.” Though in this case, I did expect something more.

I’d hoped to avoid all this, like the patrons who never left the bar. As far as I was concerned, they had the right of it. Running the labyrinth was for people with desires and hope. It had been ages since I’d possessed either.

It was pitch black inside the wall. I met it by turning up my glow. Behind me rushed the fountain barrier, a thin veneer of resonance magnified and echoing. Another lay just ahead almost within arm’s reach in a cascading hum. It was notably louder in here than outside, but felt detached.

To the sides, I could barely make out the cavity hollow. From this vantage, it seemed much wider. Water pulsed upwards through it, rippling on its way past with eerie shapes moving within. I couldn’t clearly perceive them, and they scattered when I plunged in a hand.

For a second, I felt the wrench of a universal snag descending right on top of me, a violation of the very fabric of the realm.

It tore me out of the labyrinth into somewhere else neither afterlife nor living realm; a complex, layered palimpsest with a manifold of surfaces. Each fold sat atop the others, channelled through with currents. They flowed through the intricate crevices of the structure, connecting its totality via corridors and aisles; water passing through water in contradictory streams.

Far from disappearing, the pattering had only intensified into great, pounding reverberations I recognised as the drums of aeons, those beats extending through all reality. It was the sound of the Gears That Weren’t affixing the shape of the universe. Thundering like pistons, fused with the water, they emerged from everywhere and nowhere, resounding in the void where my heart had been.

And the beat –

My foot came down on the grass underwater, shoulders just above the surface back in the liminal annex. The second liquid barrier pelted just in front of my face.

I stepped deliberately back, but the glitch did not repeat.

Briefly, I’d wandered somewhere impermissible. Hazardous for the dead, anathema to the living. It meant I was on a seam or puncture, with no way of knowing which. The labyrinth would hold together, at least, because the labyrinth was eternal.

But even eternal fixtures could be sick.

In itself, it didn’t change anything. I knew there were flaws, but not how to fix them. The water had been unexpected, but – judging by the intricacy of its flow – probably operating as intended.

I pushed through the echoing wall, drowning myself again.

More pooled water lay on the other side. The submerged grass, just generous enough to walk on, ringed a large cylindrical cistern perhaps fifty metres wide. Beyond the ledge, a central cavity plunged into oblivion, too dark to make out whatever might be hidden.

“Ameri!” Fascina’s distant voice hollered in the kind of tone spectres stuck in a wall applied.

“Found it!” Whatever ‘it’ might be. Hopefully not another test. Two at a time seemed petty.

“Why are my hands still trapped, then?”

“Because I haven’t located the extension yet!”

The cistern walls pulled at me powerfully enough it showed tenuously in the wisps trailing from my body. They trailed towards the culprits: small apertures ringing the cylinder at neat, regular intervals. Placing a hand across the closest exposed a distinct tug inwards. I assumed these pumps were how the water ascended. On the face of it, the system seemed rather pointless. Send something up so it could fall back down. Genius.

Except that the bulk went into the palimpsest between realms. I’d seen it: that huge, tortuous mechanism consuming more than its visible supply. Part of the labyrinth’s underlying workings.

As I circled the cistern’s rim, I could feel the heaviness rising from its depths: continual reinforcement to feed the consuming emptiness. It was only water, yet its existence made me nervous.

No immediate sigils, dread or otherwise, emerged around the ring. I made another circuit to be certain, even reaching my hands into the pumps.

I could block them up if I wanted. Dig down into the grass and pack the openings full of dirt. I might even be able to finish before I shattered.

Part of me was tempted. Conducting revenge correctly meant not being subjected to the consequences, and I had that angle covered. But wrecking the afterlife further was not how I wanted to go about it.

I glanced into the shadowy gloom. I didn’t want to go down there, either.

“Ameri!”

“Working on it!”

My skin was starting to brighten, luminescence filling its fractures. That was always how it went. We’d been running around for about half a day if you measured by fractions on Soddit, and my body would be the next to be divided.

“This is clearly important,” I muttered under my breath. “Why else would you lead me here? But this is where you’ve lost me. Are you asking me to take you with me?”

If nothing else, I couldn’t, even if Project Pumps succeeded.

The pool of water shivered, drawing my focus towards the centre.

“I’m not leaving. Stop trying to save me. It won’t make me any less dead, and I’d rather be dead in here.”

The water shivered more violently.

“So you’d send me off to spend eternity alone?” My voice rose a little in angered volume. “I’m sorry you feel abandoned, but I’m only human. I can’t do this.”

“Ameri!” Fascina called a third time.

“It’s not obvious!”

“Have you listened to the droplets?”

Since the drums had revealed themselves, I hadn’t stopped, intensely aware of their echoes. Eldritch revelations did tend to have that effect, though their critical reception was inflated. All they really did was highlight the relative importance of different factors in relation to each other, but with the prices tithed in attention.

Attention I’d been downplaying, since I somehow hadn’t registered the word they’d been repeating for some time:

LEVER.

Now that they mentioned it, I hadn’t yet tried the conspicuous one in the centre of the cistern. Or indeed noticed it until now.

It floated on a platform in the middle of the cistern, made of serrated dark metal like the gnomon of a sundial twice the length of my figure. Looking at it hurt and threatened to raise things I didn’t prefer to remember.

Oh. Better to get it done quickly. I drifted over to the handle, avoiding the gaze of the water, and threw intent behind my fingers.

The lever moved slowly; far, far heavier than it looked, yet somehow able to be shifted.

The labyrinth separated with it.