Just as Aeshador had promised, two particularly large molemen arrived at the settlement after the second day of their stay. They were in good spirits, and it quickly became evident why when they explained that a direct passage through to the next region of Agartha had opened up for the first time in months.
Satisfied with this making up the rest of his perceived debt, he instructed the scouts to share directions to the passage alongside a partial map that would suffice to get them where they needed to go. He began ranting about how they should watch out for a slew of threats that all sounded straight out of a Dungeon, but stopped himself, adding that there was no point since Jorfr already knew well enough.
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“The Shifting Labyrinth gives way to Ankhezian ruins which stand beneath the Prison of the Unborn, where we will cross the Blackwall. From there, we will continue through a further stretch of Ankhezian ruins, transitioning to natural caves and finally reaching the means of our ascendance to the Arctic Oasis,” Jorfr elaborated as they made their way out of the moleman settlement. He was repeating himself, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
It took a couple hours of trekking before they reached the eponymous Shifting Labyrinth, but it was unmistakable. A passage of natural rock transitioned a rectangular hallway of blackstone, stretching on for some time before reaching a great door. Upon their approach it alighted with a flowing, organic glyph of eye watering complexity, which revealed that the door was split from the middle into three triangular segments. They slid away into the surrounding blackstone a few moments later, barely making a sound or leaving any sign that a door had been here previously. A brief rush of air whipped past them upon the door’s opening, the air fresh, cold, and saturated with Pneuma just as one would expect from a dungeon.
“This place is not a true Dungeon,” Jorfr warned, repeating it for perhaps the third time since they’d left the molemen. “It does not operate by a Dungeon’s rules, nor does it mete out rewards for challenges overcome. The Dungeon Core which wrought this place is corrupt and deranged, a logic automaton devoid of its logic, mindlessly building and lashing out at perceived intruders like an animal. We want to get through here as quickly as we can.”
And so they followed his lead, making their way through the corridor, soon reaching the source of the wind: A vast, monumental bridge over a yawning abyss into nothingness, black cliff-faces stretching infinitely to the left and right, up and down, nothingness as far as the eye could see. Unearthly iridescence pulsed from down below, blasting headache-inducing unlight up around the bridge at seemingly random intervals. Cosmic waves lapping at the shore of reality. Each time it came, it painted the world in stark monochrome using not blacks and whites, but shades which the human mind could not comprehend. Even crossing as quickly as they did, the four of them were left nursing murderous migraines and squinting their eyes to let them recover as they sipped on Liquid Vigor to murder the pain.
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The architecture became no more sensical after this.
Corridor after twisted corridor, up and down senselessly placed stairways. Narrow ledges along bottomless pits, overlooking distorted, hollow cities folding in on themselves. Great halls with alcoves lining the walls, deformed many-eyed horrors standing sentinel in place of the distinctly human designs of Three Kings Era statues. In places it almost looked like there was an infestation inside the blackstone, root-like growths of the material snaking alongside the otherwise smooth surfaces.
On and on they drove through the Shifting Labyrinth’s desolate realm, encountering roaming monstrosities only twice. The first was a skinless, tortured thing, an immense humanoid with gleaming, rune-carved stakes hammered into its joints connected by bladed chains. A crown of iridescent thorns split its skull open from within. It crawled along the ground, weeping blood from empty eye sockets, reaching out as its stakes dislodged themselves and shot through the air, but the creature didn’t even get the opportunity to make its occult powers known. It was rendered down to incoherent flesh by the combined onslaught of Zef’s gunshots and Zel’s arm-cannon. That it survived this and reconstituted itself in less than a minute meant little, as they were long gone by then.
The second monstrosity was markedly more direct; a huge man with a spiked, blackstone club grafted in place of a lower left arm and two blackstone crow’s heads in place of his own. The entirety of his back seemed plated in segments of grafted-on blackstone, but in truth, they merely concealed what was within him; a bizarre mechanism which gave form to stone ravens. A walking swarm, the creature was, emitting a sound not unlike a mis-tuned violin instead of any natural voice.
It took all four of them to deal with it in an expedient fashion; Zefaris to keep its constructs from getting close, Zelsys and Jorfr to engage it directly, and Victor to impede it with clever use of Mud Slick and Bramble Growth, as well as providing supporting fire with his Devil’s Teeth. The crow-man didn’t fall until both its heads were severed, something far easier said than done when his spine was made entirely of blackstone. Zel ended up pulling his heads off along with his spine after Jorfr had shattered the creature’s back, weakening the blackstone enough that the creature’s flesh became the failure point.
The sign that they were on the verge of reaching the promised shortcut came a solid three days of travel through a bizarre nightmare-labyrinth later, when they finally reached a place that would best be described as a blood temple. It was a circular chamber with a pool full of blood in the middle, three concentric spiked rings suspended at the surface with the innermost ring clearly intended to have a human affixed to it by the hands and feet. A walkway led out into its middle.