I hadn’t taken the labyrinth for suicidal. In fairness, I hadn’t believed it was actually dead, unlike the scroungers who skittered around inside it.

Now, however, the notion took hold we might be standing on a corpse. A gruesomely butchered one. Afterlife residency had shaped a certain concept of ‘deceased’ in my mind – primarily blue and spectral – and the unexpected appearance of an alternative teased my gut into contortions.

“Are you alright?” Fascina asked, and I realised she’d been watching me.

“I, uh…”

Had it known this would happen? Was it surviving on the other side? The lights in my sockets drifted to its absurdly hovering counterpart, seeking out an indication. The maze of walls looked appropriately normal, but it was all so far away.

I’d had one job. Which I’d failed. At the very least, I should have been able to carry out the backup plan. If I’d done absolutely nothing but waited to shatter, events at least wouldn’t have gotten any worse. Circumstances could have gone any other way than this, and things would have been fine.

I wouldn’t believe the labyrinth had asked me to kill it. It would have warned me. We would have discussed it. The pit in my stomach worsened. What if I’d disrupted a delicate balance bringing Fascina to the cistern? She clearly had some kind of universe-breaking power. The labyrinth had warned me about her, and it knew many things I didn’t. I should have listened.

Or maybe this had all been meant to happen. I didn’t know, and that terrified me.

“Ameri?”

“No, I’m not alright,” I snapped, returning to reality. “We might have just destroyed the afterlife. If you can’t decipher what’s wrong with that picture, then I doubt we have much more to say to each other.”

“I don’t think we did,” the spectre replied.

“Why?” I bulldozed in. “Why would this –” I gestured furiously at the labyrinth’s severed limbs, “– fill you with any amount of confidence?”

Fascina opened her mouth, but held it for several seconds before speaking. “I don’t think,” she repeated cautiously, “that the person who made the labyrinth would employ a self-destruct mechanism easily abusable by an ignorant stranger wandering in.”

“Why not?” I argued facetiously. “Dark lords do it.”

“I thought you weren’t a believer.”

“They aren’t exclusive to your bubble,” I argued. “Mainline Soddit has plenty. So do other bubbles. It’s repetitive and annoying.”

“Kaedhrakthys must really love them.”

“Yes.”

“Well, a dark lord would never leave a kill switch unguarded,” Fascina declared. “A paltry invisible wall doesn’t count. And while we as heroes have the qualifications to successfully abuse it, I can tell you we wouldn’t get close without first fighting through a legion of minions, infiltrating the stronghold by stealth, or being captured and held prisoner in the inner sanctum. When we push that switch, it’s intentional. It’s a –”

“– Rule.” I should have known better than to provoke her madness. At this point I had to consider she might be somehow making it real, or parts of it. The absurd levels of malevolent magic poured into her in life could have combined into some form of death-transcending, reality-warping concoction, for all I knew.

Or she’d been lying. No one forced the dead to tell the truth.

Fascina nodded. “But it’s not only that. Look up.”

I followed the length of her arm to a point on the titanic maze. It took me a while to see it, far above our heads: a tiny ring.

“It’s the other well,” she stated. “The one that split off from here. We have our next destination.”

“And why would we go there, if we even can?”

“For information. We’ve learnt something just now, even if it raises more questions. That’s a good start, and maybe there’s a lever in it that can put the whole thing back. Though I suspect it will open another one. Rule of Six and all that. Something’s going to be behind the last, I guarantee you that, and I’d put money on it being your dark lord’s citadel. Or his doomsday device.”

It wasn’t the device; mainly because we were standing in it. Or had been. The torture wheel of a mad god’s entertainment.

But this answered my earlier question about the tunnel glitch being puncture or seam. It was a puncture – a hole through the breadth of reality. The seam would be along the new lower corner where the two sides connected. By definition, they existed on edges. They just didn’t usually appear in three dimensions.

Either were worth visiting.

As for the citadel, I knew how to find it: Run the labyrinth as intended. Run it well. At the end, if you hadn’t shattered, you’d arrive at a prize no one wanted: more doom, in a flavour less preferable. There was a reason I didn’t share the information.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

There was also a back door, not that it was accessible. If a third route existed, it was one I hadn’t heard of.

“Anyway, look at this,” Fascina said, holding the cylinder out in front of us again. “I always wondered why the ancients chose these markings for the sigils. Now I think I know. It’s a reference to the afterlife. They must have been here.”

“There’s no chance they could have returned,” I said. Not to mention the fact they’d never existed. Extended history on any version of Soddit, even somewhat recent, was pure fabrication.

“But look. You remember the previous emblem, right? And how Intelligia’s has one less square. The others keep going like that, and I always thought it was a reference to the prophesied order. Which it is, by the way. But it’s more than that.” She traced a translucent finger around the inner square. The cracks in the former had expanded; she wasn’t far off starting to break. “It’s an artistic stylisation, but imagine I lifted this central square up and unfolded it along its line.” She mimed the action to illustrate, then gestured in a sweep towards the labyrinth’s looming twin. “Wouldn’t we end up with something like this? The labyrinth isn’t destroyed, I don’t think. It’s unfolding.”

I thought of the overlapping layers of the palimpsest from the tunnel.

She had it the wrong way round; however. It was condensing, not unfolding: layers of fourth-dimensional substance being flattened and abstracted into three-dimensional space. If you cut off the sides of a cube and flattened them onto paper, the resulting geometry would be much larger than a square. This was the same, just enacted one level higher.

But it had taken Fascina’s input to make me realise it. A piece I’d been missing fell into place. Claiming to be from Charismo should have tipped me off – she was a good actress.

“I see. Now who are you, really?”

“Come again?”

“Give up the roleplay. You’re not Fascina. There’s no possibility someone recently arrived from the living could know more about this place than me.”

“Excuse me?” With an incredulous stare, she lifted her palms towards me. “I’m exactly who I claim to be.”

“Please. You’re not convincing,” I scoffed. “First the curse and the magic, then the business with the sigil. Fool me twice, that’s on me. But the third time’s one too many.”

She took a step backwards. “Wow. Okay. I didn’t realise your ego was that fragile. I honestly don’t know what to say; I haven’t lied to you once. I try not to do it in general in order to combat stereotypes about Charismo. But I thought you weren’t familiar with those.” Her tone turned accusatory.

I refused to play defensive. “You’re lying,” I snapped. The labyrinth had warned me. I narrowed my sockets at her sideways. “You want me for something, and thought you could entice me with a pretty story. What’s your real agenda?”

Her mouth dropped slightly open. “Not shattering? Making things better? I’m a hero, Ameri, I’m not that complicated. I’m not even the one with the plans; I just learn the Rules and follow them. And you!” Finally, a crack in the façade. “I mean, the hypocrisy! Do you think I can’t tell you’ve been lying? That in itself I can understand, but not everyone operates under the cynical, dystopian framework you seem to believe is default. That you do only convinces me more that my work is needed.”

“And what is your work, exactly?” I pushed. “You know, that thing ghosts are generally freed of when they arrive here. Do tell, while we’re both still dead to hear it.”

“I’m. Not. Lying.” She rested a hand on her forehead while the other curled into a ball. When her voice came out again, it was measured. “I can’t make you believe me. But for whatever reason the gods have deigned, the heroic method works. It just does. So your options are sinking into the ground and worrying about what terrible secrets I’m hiding for the rest of your sorry existence, or getting over yourself and helping me fix things.” Dropping the hand on her forehead, she extended it towards me. “Your choice.”

“Do you even know what it is we’re fixing, other than a general fixation on Kaedhrakthys?”

“I will if you tell me.”

I didn’t like letting her win, but it was no longer just about me. Though I wasn’t stooping to accepting her hand. Grumbling, I set off in the direction of the second labyrinth fold.

“The labyrinth – was – ailing,” I emphasised when she joined me. “Unlike what they tell you about gods on Soddit, Kaedhrakthys doesn’t care about humanity. Or anything but his own entertainment. The afterlife is bad for anyone who sets foot in it, and shattering is a mercy.”

“Noted. We’ll add it to the obliteration list.”

“No!” I took a second to calm down. “The labyrinth is the only thing that might be capable of changing this. But currently it isn’t operating properly. Kaedhrakthys deliberately sabotaged it when he made it.”

“Why?”

“To make sure he didn’t lose control. I told you he was a pile of excrement.”

For now, I left it there. Spectres had very little trouble believing the labyrinth was self-aware, and equally little trouble hating it. Given the opportunity to destroy it, I had no doubt many would pull the trigger. Explaining it didn’t do much to change opinions, either, since the labyrinth was, admittedly, actively torturing the complainers.

Fascina, or whoever she really was, had been a vortex of actual impact since her arrival. More than anyone else, she might have a chance of pulling off the slaughter.

Crumbs of labyrinth dotted the landscape around us. Even knowing what it was, I still found it painful to look at. Condensing out of a whole dimension couldn’t be good for it.

“Do you know what happens if we lose the afterlife?” I continued grimly.

“People die and that’s it?”

“The souls just sort of collect. Enough of them together eventually form a new elder being. Trust me, we don’t want another Kaedhrakthys. Even if they never reached the afterlife, the same thing would happen on Soddit. So the purpose of the living world is to create souls, and the afterlife’s to dispose of them. Both of which were poorly executed, because what we really need is a dispersal mechanism.”

“Why bother to create them in the first place, then?” She saw my face. “Oh. Boredom.”

“Believe me, I can relate. Now, you may have noticed the labyrinth is infinite. That’s a step in the right direction. Working properly, it could house all the souls and solve the problem. Assuming we haven’t just done more damage than its original saboteur did.”

A wave of uncertainty flickered over her features, gone a moment later. “I firmly believe that isn’t the case. Thank you for the explanation.”

Dodging a monolith, I crossed back into view with Last Call. It hadn’t been far away at all. The labyrinth often did that as a joke, hiding the treasures people were desperate for behind the flimsiest of veneers. Sometimes the hiding spot had been my bar, extensions being deposited on my doorstep the moment seekers had left.

I spared the wreckage a glance as we passed, and stopped short enough that Fascina walked straight through my back.

“What the –”

“Where’s Mothrow?” I asked, tone hard.

Because the other ghost was gone.