Most of the stories making it to Last Call had to be taken on faith. Shatterings I did see plenty of before patrons even exited the door, despite the disgruntled feedback they provoked. My policy was to offer one last haven for anyone who sought it, no matter how discomforting the company. If others had a problem with it, they were welcome to leave.

Besides, it wasn’t as if I could force anyone to go.

Death extension tests occurred offstage for the most part, though occasionally a gauntlet appeared immediately outside my door. Usually when I was out of my mind with boredom and the labyrinth felt sorry for me.

Infrequently, the dead would find a way to make a larger obvious impact. There’d once been a cold pillar of light shooting above the fortifications, and a different instance involving a collapsing stack of towers. Over the years, I’d refined an accurate estimation of distance from the volume of people’s screams. And there had been spectres who’d flown so high out of desperation, the labyrinth had inverted to redirect them. Those were my favourites, especially the ones who came looping out of abysses.

When it was quiet, the labyrinth sometimes took me sightseeing, presenting various points of interest on my doorstep. Bridges spanning glittering voids. Passages lined with narrow, overlapping stairs. Tops of walls. Bottoms of pits. Some of them quite impressive.

But I’d never seen this.

The labyrinth twinned.

Prior to pulling the unexpected lever, the cistern had consisted of one set of walls and a deep, ominous pool. Post- lever, it became two sets superimposed. The duplicate moved at a trajectory relative to my fingers, and at first I believed it an optical trick within the water’s blur.

But the gradient rapidly altered, peeling away from the base at an angle. Paring and passing through it, characteristic of – well, a ghost. Thrown by the sudden double vision, I stopped pushing. The second labyrinth paused with it, frozen at a hanging slope.

“What the odium are you doing?” Fascina yelled from the other side of the double wall.

“I have no idea!” I shouted back. Other than pushing the lever controlling the spirit world. In the distance, I heard rushing water. A subtle current passed me in the direction of the tunnel.

“Noted! Keep doing it!”

I recommenced the manoeuvre, but only because the labyrinth had asked. Colossal fortifications lifted and reared as the landscape split in twain, floor running through walls and vice-versa. Pushing faster, cataclysmic vertigo attacked my brain as whatever had hidden the lever grew to encompass everything else.

Holding fast, I floated in the spectral water of the secondary cistern, also duplicated, its depths rising through me. Apparently I would get to see the bottom. But when it arrived, it was simply a surface of water, a mirror of the one below. It contained its own lever, still in the lowered position, with no attached copy of myself.

I watched it tilt into the sky, accompanied by a labyrinthine underside the reverse of the one we had wandered. The scale was unimaginable: an infinite plane pivoted on a second, infinite angle – where both variants now met in a single, finite edge.

It connected with a decisive tremor and toll that splintered the heavens. Under my fingers, the end of the lever locked in a final clicking mechanism and refused to budge an atom; still as a corpse in stasis while the rest of the afterlife shuddered.

Cold white light flared below my digits, and the handle’s grip came away with it. I found myself holding a flaming metal cylinder newly emblazoned with a sigil.

Relieved and somewhat shaken, I let out a minor chuckle. All that, only for the reward to still be the same.

A frantic series of splashes alerted me to Fascina hastening through the gate. I turned as she burst through the fountain, sending sluices of water flinging. In my fingers, the cylinder’s flames dwindled.

The hero halted at the edge of the grassy ring and glanced at me wordlessly before her head turned up towards the new megalith. Only a fraction was visible from the cistern, but it adequately conveyed the message.

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I tossed her the flaming cylinder. She caught it, barely, before it could sink over the edge. The water level was steadily, but definitely, lowering.

“There you go,” I said.

Her gaze wavered between the item and the pit. “Ameri, I – do you have any idea what this is?”

“Certainly,” I replied. “It’s a death extension. Or curse, if you’re still working that agenda out of your system. I don’t know why the rest of it happened, but it’s now all the way over in that direction –” I pointed at the duplicate, “– so rather less immediate.”

“I don’t mean the sigil. I mean this.” She swept her arms around the cistern.

“Obviously, a big watery hole containing a labyrinth-cloning lever.” The latter posed no trouble to look at anymore, content to lie embedded in its plinth.

For the victim of a realm-shaking incident, the labyrinth didn’t seem bothered, come to think of it. Quiet, but I supposed it needed recovery from the process of being twinned.

“This is a well,” Fascina said.

“It is.”

“A sacred well, like the ones Aggranda poisoned. Although this one is pristine. There must be equivalents in the afterlife, maybe linked –”

“Stop,” I said, crossing back to join her on the ring. The water reached lower on my chest than it had when I’d entered. “Just stop. There’s no connection between Soddit and here beyond the one-way commute of their populations. You’re dead and you’re new, identifying patterns where you expect to see them. But your reality’s rules don’t apply here.”

“You think so?” She shoved the cylinder engraving-up in front of me. “Then why am I holding the dread sigil of Intelligia?”

“Because you aren’t. It’s not even a different –”

I broke off before finalising my error. It was distinct from the version I was accustomed to. The pair were very similar, but the one in Fascina’s hand displayed four squares instead of five, and the line through one of the sides was missing.

“I’ve… actually never seen that before,” I amended.

“Maybe it isn’t a death extension,” Fascina suggested. “But I suppose you don’t care what it is.”

“It’s interesting, I’ll give it. I just don’t think it will make any difference.”

“Let me tell you about sacred wells,” Fascina started, and held up a hand when I opened my mouth. “Humour me. In the living world, wells feed mana to the continents. Without one, magic would dry up in the region. Altering them also impacts the nature of the distributed mana, which is why it’s critically important to keep them hidden. Like this. In fact, it’s how we obtained our attributes.”

“You obtained them from a chaos bubble,” I repeated tiredly.

The hero ignored me. “Back in ancient times, only one ambient source existed. Our ancestors were constantly at war over how to use it. Unable to reach agreement, they eventually divided the land into six, one for each of their leaders, and built a well in each segment. Then they could do whatever they wanted with it. Only then – and thanks to accessible immigration policies – did the world know peace. Of course, it didn’t stop plenty of dark lords mounting attacks against them. My point is, even a single well can shape the world, and I think,” she added, swishing a hand at the water now level with her hips, “you may have just emptied it.”

Emphasising her words, the last of the sluices landed around us in erratically breaking sheets. My eyes drifted towards the pumps now resting mostly above the surface. All of a sudden, the chamber seemed far quieter than the water crashing in the distance, its connection to the drums of aeons severed.

The labyrinth had always been quiet, but there had always been something going on underneath. I could no longer hear it.

Worse, the labyrinth wasn’t communicating.

I glanced at Fascina and half-waded, half-floated past her into the tunnel. The earlier darkness had lifted, and what I’d taken for endless fissure turned out to be nothing more than a very logical gap between two heavily dripping walls.

It didn’t fool me.

Currents pulled my feet towards the exit. They ended in a spout of pressure dumping its contents into a pool barely reaching my shins and rapidly becoming shallower.

The labyrinth had reconfigured. That wasn’t especially noteworthy, but the manner in which it had done so felt wrong. I paused in front of the exit, only moving when Fascina pushed me.

“Mother of innuendo,” she whispered, manoeuvring to my side.

We stared at it in unison as the last of the water washed away to the margins.

“Do your wells do this?” I challenged once I’d managed to reclaim my voice.

“Not this, exactly, no.”

The second labyrinth towered ahead in the distance, infinitely filling the sky. Perfectly perpendicular to the original, its mapping sat clearly exposed from the side. I’d never seen close to a tenth of this much at a time, and the sheer enormity of the sight was such that I worried it might break my mind. Spectres had been driven insane for less. Just to be safe, I kept my focus narrow.

Even accounting for infinity, the view was far better than it should have been for the simple reason there were hardly any walls on our level left. We stood on an open plain on which monoliths reared in bizarre, shorn-off steeples. A few intact walls remained, but distant. Snippets of stairs, rises and falls wove in and out of the grass. I could see where the vegetation ended, and thickened in other patches. To my right, no longer interrupted by architecture, I could make out the tiny form of Fascina’s discarded lantern. And ahead, barely visible beyond a field of ruins, rested the wreckage of Last Call.

The labyrinth in the sky seemed fine.

Ours had been dismantled.