Vox turned towards Alyss and raised an eyebrow, curiously.

“Um, I mean, why heal me?” She stuttered, more timidly than she’d planned.

“Why waste resources to make my passage more comfortable?” she went on, not breaking her stride, trying to speak as calmly as if she were merely discussing the weather. Vox’s eyes narrowed upon her, his shade refocusing from the path ahead to leer at her, as well.

Alyss felt what she now knew to be the grotesque, gangly thing’s gaze rove across her soul, ethereal fingers probing her surface thoughts for the truth that lay beneath. She turned away slightly, still walking, feigning ignorance at its attention.

“Why not let me suffer?” she finished, simply. Vox frowned, pursing his lips.

“You have a peculiar perspective, milady Nycta,” Vox murmured, in that sickly soothing way of his. “You mistake my pragmatism for kindness, perhaps.”

“Wha…what?” She stammered. Vox’s siren-headed shade was still scrutinizing her intently, and it was difficult to focus on the conversation whilst, as always, driving all thought of her ever-present Nightmare from her mind.

“Hm…” A grunt was the Master’s only reply, as both he and his shade refocused on the path ahead, allowing Alyss an internal sigh of relief, the anxiety churning within her gut quieting somewhat.

For a while they walked in silence, the Maze’s ambient noise reduced once more to the grating dripping of unseen liquid and the shuffling of their own footsteps against the rough concrete.

Plip, plop, scrape.

Plip, plop, scrape.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Vox asked, abruptly breaking the peace.

“What?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” He repeated, shaking his head. “Had I neglected to heal your wounds, would they not have festered, allowing rot and disease to take hold? Had I not provided you with a means to stave off the cold, would I not risk the same? And what purpose could your debasement possibly serve? You are a valuable asset, milady. Why should I treat you as anything else?”

“I…” Alyss paused, taken aback for a moment, unsure how to reply. His slimy complement, such as it was, did little to ease her flaring nerves.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted, thinking back to her family. Would they have cared, if she sickened? She couldn’t imagine so.

After all, to her father, death was merely another weakness.

“I–,” she started.

“Cruelty for cruelty’s sake is meaningless,” Vox interrupted her. “Foolish. Childish. Puerile. There is no pleasure in pain, only the satisfaction of a job well done. Sadists cannot be trusted, not with the enormity of our Plan.”

At this, Alyss’s breath hitched slightly in the back of her throat. Yes, she thought, whilst simultaneously doing her utmost to think of nothing at all. Here we go. Tell me what you know.

Vox raised a brow, drawing back as he eyed her once more. Was he suspicious? She’d no way of knowing.

“My people,” he chuckled, “if you could call them that, are hardly a monolith. United in purpose, perhaps, but not means. Proselytists and Physiognomists and Jehenists and, well, us.”

“The first three were Devoted, at his beck and call, but the Mandibles, they cared for nothing at all.” He sang, raising two fingers into the air. “Raphael’s Revelations, page two, verse five. Riveting stuff,” he drawled, rolling his eyes.

“You may think me evil, milady,” he offered mildly, shrugging once more. “And perhaps you are right to do so. I have tortured many, certainly. I have killed. I am no stranger to violence, no stranger at all. I would do anything necessary to accomplish my goals.”

“But,” Vox paused for a moment, licking his lips. “But, I encourage you to entertain the notion that I do not consider myself evil. I do not believe in such a thing, at all.”

Alyss startled, her head whipping towards him, frowning as, for once, confusion overtook fear and the desire to know.

“You–you don’t believe in evil?” She asked, incredulously.

“There is no good,” Vox replied enigmatically. “There is no evil. We who follow Beelzebub…,” he paused, licking his lips.

“We…,”

In a deeply uncharacteristic display of hesitation, the well-dressed master paused again, raising his hand to drum slender fingers upon his chin. Then, he sighed.

“Ah, but how could I try to tell you? How could I possibly explain? The indifference of an unfair reality. The vastness of an infinite universe relative to our own meager existence.” He smiled condescendingly at her, in the way an adult might regard a child.

Vox spread his arms wide, helplessly, palms splayed open.

“Explanation would be pointless. Ultimately, it is impossible to describe to one that has not seen it, themselves.”

Alyss’s mouth worked open and closed, slowly, as she grasped desperately at the meaning behind the Master’s words, bits and pieces of knowledge that rang vaguely familiar from her lessons, but with just enough novelty sprinkled throughout that they were rendered impermeable.

“I…don’t understand,” she admitted. “…it?”

Vox closed his eyes, and stopped walking all at once. Alyss ground to a halt alongside him. In a thoroughly unnerving display, he and his shade moved in unison to face her, rotating robotically to peer into her soul.

Alyss stood firm, refusing to shrink back, even as Vox’s golden eyes began to thrum with blackness, and his shade shivered with glee, and the two spoke in one unholy voice that same word he’d uttered once before.

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“Oblivion.”

When they spoke, all was silent.

The power in his word drowned out the other sounds of the Maze, smothering the dripping of dropping water, choking the shuffling of feet and fabric, even deadening the rushing pulse of beating hearts and flowing blood until all was quiet as the grave.

And yet the silence had noise, too. It had a tone, a rhythm, a song.

A pristine planet that had once harbored great cities, now burnt to ashen rubble. A breathtaking range of sky-scraping mountains, ground flat into dirt and dust. An empty tomb, so long forgotten that even the stone coffins had rotted away.

Its music was death, and that rang true to Alyss, but it was so much more than that, too. It wasn’t just some mundane extinguishing of mortality’s feeble candle, it wasn’t just some poor creature’s terminable sigh.

It was the end of all things, all people, all places. It was the inexorable passage of time. It was what waited at the conclusion of existence, itself.

It was the final pattern, the purity of pure absence, the perfection present in nothing at all.

It tore Alyss’s mind asunder, a secret immeasurably far beyond her current comprehension, and even hearing Vox whisper it ever-so-softly brought her to her knees.

“You see?” the Master asked her as she shuddered violently upon the ground, shaking his head again, regarding her with an unusual pity. “Even were I to tell you, you would not understand. You could not understand. The only way to truly know is to be shown, for yourself. And only my master is capable of that.”

“Your…master,” Alyss groaned, pulling herself doggedly to her feet, thoughts still struggling to organize themselves into coherent sentences. Finally, though, she sensed herself getting somewhere. She didn’t know what exact position Vox’s master occupied in the Devoted, but any information on them was sure to be valuable indeed.

“The…Red Queen?” she hedged, innocently.

Vox said nothing in reply. He cocked his head at her, like a bird of prey might examine a mouse struggle within its claws, his siren-headed shade hovering above and behind his shoulder. The shade drifted further and further towards him, until the two were almost overlapping, and something changed in Vox’s eyes.

For a shocking moment, all semblance of humanity remaining in his gaze drained away, and he looked entirely alien. Alone in the depths of the World Titan, Alyss stood face-to-face with an absolutely inhuman entity, an eldritch predator of incomprehensible motives.

All of a sudden, Alyss found herself more frightened than she had ever been in her life, some deeply-buried genetic instinct activating, screaming at her to flee.

But the compulsion paralyzed her in place.

Her blood froze, and her eyes widened until they were as large as dinner plates, and, incredibly, she found herself praying to her father. It was an indescribable experience. She hated Father with every fiber of her being, she’d never hate anyone more. He was a detestable man, a cruel man, an evil man, but, undeniably, he was a man.

The creature she saw before her, staring emotionlessly at her through alien eyes, was not. Nothing of the sort. It might wear human skin, but it was something else entirely.

Then the man and his shade drifted apart once more, and the moment was over.

“You think my kind mad.”

Vox whispered smoothly, his words whistling across space to meet her ears.

Alyss tried to reply, but found herself unable to speak, still drawing breath shakily, all pretenses abandoned, adrenaline still running hot in her veins.

“And you are right to do so,” he continued, sibilantly, stalking slowly towards her frozen form. “The lower ranks of the Devoted are rife with the sick, the deranged and the mad. The kind that would slit your throat and defile your cooling corpse, even if such a thing meant their own death in the bowels of elaborate Knossos. But not us. Not the Mandibles.”

“I–I understand,” Alyss lied, clenching her jaw tight enough to hurt as he approached she fought against the fear, “I understand. You can’t afford weakness. You can’t allow it to affect your work.”

Vox just smiled at her pitiful attempt to placate him, laughing lightly as he drew even closer.

“Quite right, girl. Well said. We, who serve the very highest echelons of the Devoted, cannot afford to be sloppy. We have, after all, been entrusted with the Plan.” Vox’s face was inches from hers, his grin filling her field of vision as he egged her on to speak.

So she did.

“The Plan?” Alyss asked flatly, staring defiantly up at the Master’s golden eyes as they glittered with mirth.

You’re mad. She wanted to say. You are mad, no matter what you say. No matter what you think. You are mad, your master is mad, and your Gods are mad. Your words are a crude facade to hide a twisted, perverse mind. Your faith is an abomination.

Her fear flared once more as she noticed his smile widen, and the hint of encroaching madness in his eyes, and wondered if she’d pushed him too far, this time.

But Vox drew back from her and took a deep breath, and the creeping insanity infesting his eyes retreated. His shade let out a skin-crawling, disappointed moan as he turned back towards the all-white wall that served as the Maze’s termination, and spoke.

“The Cells are soft,” Vox spat as he approached the blinking green symbol. “Grown fat on opulence and centuries of a meaningless war. Their soldiers are slaves. Their leaders care only for material wealth and power. It will be their doom.”

Vox examined the wall, raised a hand, and wiggled his fingers contemplatively. Once more, he performed that bizarre, animalistic head-quirk, as if listening to something.

Then he looked back at her, grinned, and slapped his palm onto the blinking light.

Alyss gasped as their surroundings disappeared, blurring and dissolving into one million tiny particles that swirled around and around each other, until they reformed into something altogether new.

A great white room.

Its walls were white. Its floors were white. Its ceiling was white. In fact, the room’s contours were such pure, pristine white, and its confines so absolutely empty, that it was difficult to tell just how large exactly it even was. Its edges were practically invisible, the places where wall met floor and ceiling seeming to just…blur together.

Alyss blinked. After days of darkness, the glaring light hurt her eyes.

Vox seemed untroubled, though, and strode purposefully towards the room’s center, where a perfectly-formed, grey, circular dias broke ranks with the room’s otherwise unanimous decor. Alyss trailed behind him grudgingly, strung along by the compulsion.

From the middle of the dias, a bright-green pedestal rose like a fluorescent flower’s stem, and floating a hand’s breadth above it was an orb with six symbols engraved upon it. The orb slowly spun in place, allowing each of the symbols to be seen.

The first two were shaped like a scythe and some kind of loudspeaker, and both were lit up solid green, unblinking. The third was a swirling maelstrom, and it, while equally green, blinked intermittently. The fourth and fifth were a pair of crossed arrows and a half-moon, respectively, and both glowed with solid red light.

The last looked like some kind of sun, and it, too, blinked green.

Vox laughed warmly upon observing them, and turned towards her with a sickly grin. “Two down,” he cackled, “two to go.”

“We camp here,” he commanded, and immediately her limbs snapped into unwilling motion, tens of shadows emerging from the innards of her soul to construct the luxurious runic pavilion Father had granted her for this trip.

“Ah, my little Nycta,” Vox crooned as he watched her work, a deeply satisfied smile spread across his face. “Our escape draws ever nearer, I think.”

He closed his eyes, sighing deeply, and his shade shivered as he spoke.

“You wished to know the Plan, girl. You wished to know my master,” he giggled, a hint of madness dancing amongst his delight. “Well, fear not. The Last Infernal Crusade swift approaches. Rejoice, milady, for even your father will not be spared the flames.”

A shudder ran down Alyss’s spine, but she couldn’t tell if it was joy, hope, or fear.

It made her sick, regardless.

“Soon, little Nycta. Soon, the world will burn. Soon, the world will change.”