Camille reached into a satchel, and retrieved what appeared to be a cube of wood. It was only an inch or two on each side, and as she held it out to him, Lyle noticed that the sides were painted with symbols. There was a yellow teardrop, an orange sun, and a purple city skyline on the side that was turned towards him.

He accepted the gift, taking it from her and turning it over. The other sides held a green pyramid, red mountain tops, and a blue crown. It was light in his hands, and he couldn’t see any magic radiating from it. When he looked up, Camille was already turning to go.

“Wait, what is this?” he asked, and she paused, looking at him over her shoulder.

“Touch the sides,” she said. “Start with green.” She turned to leave again.

“Is it a Token?”

Camille paused again, sighing heavily and facing him once more. “No, it’s not a Token. It’s more like… an instantiation of Tiamat’s power. I don’t know. Ask Tiamat next time you see her. Or, better yet, figure it out yourself.”

With that, she left, not giving him a chance to ask any more questions.

Why is she such a wet blanket? Lyle wondered, closing the door behind him as he went back inside.

He brought the cube up to his room with him, and studied it closely. Except for the colored symbols, nothing jumped out at him. He ran his fingers around the unpainted edges, avoiding the symbols for the moment, but he felt nothing but smooth wood, and the cube itself was completely inert. Gingerly, he pressed a finger to the green pyramid, following Camille’s directions. He felt a small shift in his power, but otherwise nothing happened. After a couple seconds, he took his hand away.

“Hmm,” he hummed in consternation, rolling it back and forth between his hands. “Oh, what if…”

Lyle reached out to the cube with his magic. A spark of golden light drifted towards the pyramid symbol, which sat on the top of the cube where it rested in the palm of his other hand. It brushed the wood.

There was a rush of power that was expelled from the cube, and Lyle would have dropped it, but he found he couldn’t move a millimeter. A sudden panic filled his mind when his commands to his body had no effect. He struggled, but to no avail.

The green side of the cube began to glow dimly, and the air around him began to distort. It looked like the prismatic reflections of light that occurred within the heart of a Tear, but it was all around him. It grew more and more intense, and his skin prickled with discomfort, but he couldn’t even shout out.

With no warning, the world spun and disappeared.

***

Lyle groaned and sat up, shielding his eyes from the blazing sun and glancing around him to take in his surroundings. He was perched on a stone platform, and he could see a hint of the ground beyond the edges, a burnt-orange field of sand that stretched onwards to the horizon. A stone arch rose from the platform, revealing a doorway that swam with shadows.

He stood and walked to the edge. It sloped slowly downwards until it reached the desert hundreds of feet below. He was at the peak of a flat-topped pyramid.

“Well,” Lyle said to himself. “What now?”

He glanced back at the doorway. Sliding down the side of the period was probably suicide. He walked the perimeter, but it was the same all the way around.

Lyle approached the arch. Within, a staircase led into the depths of the pyramid. With no other choice, he carefully stepped inside and began his journey downwards.

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The stairway switched back and forth a dozen times, and as he walked Lyle began to feel like the walls were pressing in on him. There were torches on the walls, so he could at least see where he was going. The flickering flames had him jumping at shadows, but nothing attacked him. At least, not yet.

Then the walls dropped away. The stairway descended from the ceiling of what looked like the hollowed-out innards of the pyramid. Lyle stumbled back as he realized how high up he was and how easy it would be to fall.

Far below, shadows embraced flickering lights, giving a mottled appearance to the floor. Much of it was lit, the torches appearing patterned, but there was the occasional ominous dark spot. Lyle wondered what hid within and committed to avoiding them as much as he could.

The staircase was close to one end of the pyramid, and on the far side there was an open section with a vertical half-circle rising into the air. At its base, there was a glowing light.

“That must be the way out,” he murmured. He braced himself and continued down the stairs. They continued to switch back and forth, and he stayed close to the inside so if he lost his balance, he could at least try to grab onto the flight of stairs above or below him before he fell to his death.

He approached the bottom covered in sweat and shaking with nerves, though not as fatigued as he had expected. Despite the long day of heavy exertion, culminating in being shanghaied into another Tear, his newly-Kindled body was up to the challenge. Now that he was near the bottom, though, he could see that walls would block his view of the entire floor once he reached the ground. Within the labyrinth was, rather obviously, a maze.

A shadow passed overhead and Lyle jerked his head up to try and catch sight of whatever had cast it, but it was already gone. The walls were about fifteen feet high—too high to jump to the top. And that was assuming that there wasn’t also some kind of trap—like spikes, or poison, or both—spread along the upper edge.

Lyle started walking, wishing he had his sword, or really a weapon of any kind. A torch, which he grabbed off the wall, wasn’t as useful as a blade, or even a mace. It just wasn’t heavy or sturdy enough. What’s more, he needed a way to mark the walls of the maze somehow or he would just get lost and wander until he was so exhausted and dehydrated that whatever monsters were present could just walk up to him and cut his throat with no resistance.

He heard a guttural growl from off to the side, and leapt away from it, holding the torch up as high as he could. He backed up down the passage, looking for any other way to go, but there were no other turns. Then he hit a dead end.

What the fuck? he thought in a sudden panic. Didn’t I just come this way?

The creature that was now illuminated shuffled towards him slowly, an evil gleam in its eyes. It was almost fully wrapped in a rough fabric that looked almost like burlap, but what he could see of its body was emaciated and corrupted by sickness. It was undead.

Lyle took a step to the side, and the ghoul mirrored him. It carried a rusted sickle, but despite its worn appearance, the blade looked sharp enough to gut him like a fish.

Suddenly it moved. It leapt towards Lyle, its sickle flashing through the air. He managed to parry it with his torch, but it was sliced in half, leaving him with nothing but a broken stick in hand. The clawed fingers of its other hand reached forward past the useless piece of wood.

“Shit!” Lyle hissed when it scored his forearm. He caught the ghoul’s wrist in one hand and slammed his other into the outside of its shoulder, intending to throw it into the wall, but instead, its arm snapped like a twig. The sound of the crack it made was jarring, and a shudder of disgust ran through him as he dropped it, jumping backwards to avoid another swing of the sickle.

The ghoul barely reacted to its broken arm. The limb flopped uselessly at its side, but it continued inexorably forward, slashing back and forth with its sickle and forcing Lyle to dodge over and over again. He managed to dodge to the side and slip around it, and he drove a fist into its exposed torso as hard as he could.

And then it exploded.

The ghoul’s viscous blood splattered over the floor and walls behind it as a hole appeared in its torso and it fell back with barely a groan. It twitched momentarily then stopped moving.

Lyle looked with shock at his clenched fist. Embers were far stronger than normal humans, but it usually took more than a day to develop that kind of strength. The ghoul must have been barely held together by the burlap that was wrapped around it if it had completely fallen apart with a single strike. He shook his head and straightened up, then grabbed the sickle off the floor. It looked like it would break with a single good hit, but having it was better than not. Even if it was sticky for reasons he tried to put from his mind.

The air above the ghoul wavered, drawing Lyle’s attention. He stepped back, preparing for the unexpected, but the same black mist he’d seen released from the goblins’ wounds earlier in the day drifted through the air. It shimmered in the air and turned white, burning dimly for a moment, then vanishing as if it had been consumed by fire.