Plip, plop, scrape.

Plip, plop, scrape.

Alyss shuffled ungainly along the grim, grey corridor, miserable step by miserable step, her well-dressed Master ever by her side. The dim light emitted by their Entropic lantern cast grisly shadows upon its scarred, pockmarked contours. The soft yet incessant dripping of ice-cold water far in the distance set her teeth on edge.

The Shambling Maze was a terrible place. A terrible, terrible place.

An ugly concrete labyrinth of cramped grey halls that varied in both phenotype and architecture. Alyss had never thought herself particularly claustrophobic, but the Maze took care of that in short order.

Some passages were so small that the both of them had to crawl on hands and knees to get by, inching painfully across leagues and leagues of cracks in the rock scarcely large enough to fit through. Razor-sharp notches in the cement ground scraped her palms and knees until they tore open, and she left bloody handprints in her wake.

Every wall and ceiling wept with freezing moisture, as if the entire thing was submerged beneath some goliath underground lake. The frigid humidity soaked her leathers, making her shiver uncontrollably, and the constant, echoing sound of dripping water drilled into her mind.

But the dark she hated most of all, for the sordid memories it elicited in her.

It was pitch-black, the Maze, and whatsoever runic lighting the two of them produced from their respective spatially-enchanted storage never seemed quite sufficient to provide them safety or surety of their surrounding environment.

She felt returned to a babe, stumbling about blindly, vainly attempting to make some sense of her surroundings. Even amidst their constant change in size and shape, passageways within the maze were near-impossible to tell apart and, as such, it was devilishly easy to lose one’s way.

Or it would have been, if not for Vox.

With just the whisper of a smug, self-satisfied smile ghosting across his lips, the well-dressed Master had yet to demonstrate even a hint of doubt regarding their direction. No matter how many times they reached a fork in the path, Vox was never uncertain. No matter how claustrophobic or inhospitable the passage seemed, Vox did not complain.

Occasionally, he would pause their march, gaze outwards to some unknowable direction, and tilt his head slightly, as if listening to something.

Then his ghoulish shade would blare once, or twice, and he would nod, and they would forge onwards.

But navigating the Maze was only half the battle. Because they weren’t alone, in the dark. They weren’t this place’s only denizens.

No, monsters roamed the Shambling Maze, and the most numerous of them by far were the eponymously-named Shamblers, themselves.

Walking corpses.

Rotted cadavers with beady red eyes, gruesomely re-animated via roughshod cybernetic augmentation. Their make was of even cruder quality than the Cybersimians up above, rusted plating attached haphazardly to a crooked steel-and-bone skeleton, bits and pieces of decaying, barely-human flesh intermingled revoltingly with stripped wires and oily gears.

Their heads were naught but skulls stapled with steel, from which cracked yellow teeth smiled hideously outwards, and their stench rivaled the decaying jungle from whence she’d came.

But something was wrong.

The Maze was thronged with the creatures; they shuffled and stumbled and limped every which way. And though their outward appearance seemed weak, their decrepit frames belied a dizzying mechanical strength and rabid savagery. Rarely, she’d beheld multiple of the foul creatures set upon each other, riled into a frenzy for reasons unknown, tearing themselves apart limb from limb, their blows strong enough to crack concrete and warp steel.

Clearly, they were meant to test delvers. Clearly, they were intended to be a threat. But her, they never touched. Not once.

Vox.

It had to be his doing. She didn’t know how, but it had to be his doing. Perhaps these creatures, like the wasps before, received their directives remotely, and the Master was taking advantage of that fact. Certainly, they seemed rather lacking in intellect; she couldn’t imagine them being difficult to deceive.

A good thing, too, because the Shamblers weren’t the Maze’s sole inhabitants.

Alyss had only seen two Rumblers on their entire trip, so far. They exclusively haunted the large sections of the Maze, whereupon choking corridors opened to reveal sinuous, misshapen caverns stretching hundreds of feet across.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The caverns were rife with bioluminescent foliage, little glowing moss and mushrooms accompanied by much larger ones, tall and skinny, pines of fungus that burned bright in the abyss. Together, they created a gentle, calming atmosphere, providing a welcome break from the thoroughly inhospitable hell that was the place’s norm.

The Shamblers didn’t roam there, either, initially convincing Alyss that said caverns had been sent by the Gods themselves as respite for the worthy. Of course, she’d been wrong. The Shamblers didn’t roam there only because greater monsters called those places home.

Titans patrolled the glowing rock.

Named Rumblers when she observed them, for their mighty feet shook the earth nearby as they moved. Thirty-foot mechanical goliaths wrought of rusted iron and sharpened steel, constructed in the same crude manner as their much-smaller kin. Lacking any biological remnants, the giants retained their grinning steel skulls, perhaps in final mockery of the humans they may once have been.

They moved with the ponderous lethargy of titanic size, spotlight-eyes ever-scanning the endless darkness of the Maze. Thank the Gods that whatever sonic shawl Vox had cast about their forms seemed sufficient to beguile these behemoths as well, for Alyss shuddered to imagine what the creatures might be capable of in combat.

Or, perhaps, thank Vox.

Despite his initial eclectic euphoria and unnerving monologue, the Devoted subsequently lapsed into a far more demure regime, silent and professional. Vox led with a quiet, intense demeanor, never speaking a word more than necessary. Which was, Alyss found, somehow all the more concerning than outright insanity.

Still, it gave her the ample time and proximity necessary to examine her captor in far greater detail. It was an uncomfortable exercise, considering that the Devoted was no doubt far better trained and far more experienced than herself in social manipulation. To be honest, she’d no faith at all in her capability to outwit him.

And even beyond that, she still didn’t understand the nuances of his power nearly well enough, didn’t know to what extent exactly the Blessed could read her mind. She was ever-wary of drawing too much of his attention or ire, or, worse yet, inadvertently revealing the existence of her own Nightmare, likely her best chance of escape.

Perhaps her only chance of escape.

But Alyss didn’t feel that she had much of a choice. She couldn’t just do nothing. She couldn’t. She hated feeling useless, hated the thought that Father was right about her, that she’d never survive on her own.

Well, she was on her own, now.

Father wasn’t here to help her, and neither was Hero. No one was. If Alyss wanted to survive, she’d have to help herself. So, as unobtrusively as she could, she’d begun to examine the man.

The self-proclaimed lieutenant of the Mandibles was thoroughly, thoroughly strange.

Though, Alyss thought, such a thing shouldn’t have surprised her. After all, he was Devoted, was he not? And were any Devoted normal? Were they not fanatics, zealots? Was it not a mistake, in the first place, attempting to assign any trappings of mundane rationality to the mad?

Except…

Except that, for a madman, Vox was remarkably sane.

Now that he was no longer forced to perform for anyone, or affect any manner of faux-personality, Alyss was able to experience for the very first time what was likely as close as possible to the Master’s genuine self.

And whilst never kind to her, of course, rarely either was he truly cruel.

And even his cruelty came off…lackluster, compared to what she knew. Compared to what she’d suffered at the hands of her own blood. Whereas her family took to atrocity with an eager sadism, queerly, Vox didn’t seem particularly interested by it, at all.

His cruelty wasn’t personal, it wasn’t for him. It was for her. To teach her a lesson. To remind her of their respective positions, to demonstrate who held the power, to acclimate her to the prospect of future servitude.

Whenever she’d scraped her knee or otherwise come about damage, he’d compelled her to imbibe a healing draught immediately. When she’d shivered from the cold, he’d provided her with a thick, heavy outer coat. He didn’t seem to revel in his power over her, and he’d never once teased or tormented.

In fact, he’d barely said a word to her at all.

Alyss’s father, or her brother, or any member of her immediate family, really, would have tortured her ceaselessly, should they have taken the Master’s place. Perhaps they might have pitted her against the Shamblers, eager to see how long she’d manage to survive without the use of her Blessing. Perhaps they might have beat her, or ravished her, or forced her to perform even more unspeakable acts.

Such a thing was commonplace within the Aristocracy, in her experience. It was how she’d been brought up. It was the way things were done. Enemies could not be afforded humanity. There was no honor in war. Those who granted virtue a place within their Cell would fall to those that did not.

Vox was…not like that. His cruelty was perfunctory. Almost professional.

Why?

Any attempt to converse with the Master was an exercise in anxiety and danger. Any slip of the tongue or the mind could have easily meant her own end. But, equally, such conservations would likely grant her the best possible chance of gleaning what few weaknesses the man might have possessed.

Vox knew so much, knew so many secrets, and secrets were the most valuable commodity in the world. Her father said so, after all, and when it came to power, he was never wrong.

Who was the Red Queen he spoke of? What role did the Mandibles serve, within the Devoted? She knew Father was hatching some plot with Syn, colluding with Ozymandias to bring about great change to the world. How did the Devoted fit into their plans?

Alyss’s time was running out.

After so many days of exhausting, mangling travel, and sleepless nights spent praying that the Rumblers would not manage to overcome Vox’s subterfuge, they had finally reached the end.

The end of the Shambling Maze.

The wall that represented the termination of the once-endless, winding halls and rooms and corridors, was made evident by its sterile, all-white coloring, a stark contrast to the harsh, grey rock that surrounded it on all sides.

At its center was a single green dot, blinking intermittently.

It was still leagues away, but just visible to the naked eye. Alyss could no longer forestall the inevitable, she had to face her fear. So, gathering her wits and her courage, she asked.

“Why?”