It was a minute before Erin realized that something was wrong.

She was still so immersed in thoughts of how wonderful it would feel to be able to dig her ballet shoes out of the closet again that she had gone about ten feet up the corridor before she paused, finally coming out of her reverie and seeing what was around her.

This wasn’t the same hallway she had gone through earlier.

Erin blinked and shook her head slightly, wondering if she was imagining things. But no, it definitely wasn’t the same place. The hallway that should have been outside the room she had just left had been lit by large skylights in the ceiling. Here, the light was coming from small lamps set into niches in the wall every five feet or so. The first hallway had also been made of white and green marble. This one had only smooth grey stone.

Erin stood and looked up and down the corridor, feeling completely bewildered. Had the hallway changed somehow? Maybe it looked different but was still really the same place. But then she ought to be close to the door that led into Arturyn’s room.

She turned and scanned the wall behind her. The only door she could see on that side of the corridor was the one she had just come out of. In the other direction, where the end of the hall and Arturyn’s door should have been, there was instead a bend in the hallway. It continued on to the left and out of sight.

Erin turned toward the door she had just come through and started limping back to it. Healer Sil-Gaeryn was still inside the room. She could ask him what was going on and how to get back to Arturyn.

She reached the door and pushed it open. Then she stood in the doorway, staring at what lay on the other side. The room she had just left was gone. Instead, she was looking at another stone corridor, just like the one behind her.

Erin shook her head and then backed out of the doorway, closing the door. After a pause, she opened it again. The other corridor was still there.

“Why do these things keep happening to me...?” she asked the silence around her.

Arturyn had told her it was easy to get lost in the eyathar, but he hadn’t said it was as easy as going through a single door.

She stood there for several minutes, resenting the idiosyncrasies of magic and wondering what she ought to do next. She pulled out Melanie’s letter and reread it to make sure she hadn’t missed any instructions on how to get back to Arturyn’s room. She also searched through the bag Healer Sil-Gaeryn had given her. But all it contained was a jar full of dark blue salve and a box that held a large roll of bandages.

With a sigh, Erin put everything back into the bag and retied it around her waist. She considered just sitting down on the floor and waiting until someone found her. Arturyn would surely notice that she hadn’t returned and would ask the eyathar staff to look for her.

But then...she wasn’t entirely sure that she was even still in the eyathar. And there were no noises or signs of activity anywhere nearby. If this was in the eyathar, she was probably down in the back corner of the basement or someplace equally remote. It might take hours for anyone to think of looking for her here.

Coming to a decision, Erin stepped away from the door, leaving it partly open, and started walking back up the hallway. She could at least look around a little bit before she gave up and sat down to wait. Maybe she would be able to find someone she could ask for help or some sign of the way out of this place.

Rounding the corner, she saw that the hallway continued on for several hundred feet and then turned again. She kept going, passing more doors and many more lamps set into both sides of the wall.

She tried opening some of the doors as she went by them. Most appeared to be locked and wouldn’t budge, but some opened into what were obviously storage rooms, full of shelves and boxes. Others led to other corridors. Which really didn’t make any sense, because that would put the storage rooms in exactly the same space as the other hallways. Erin was also fairly sure that not all the doors in the same wall led to the same hallway.

She made her way to the end of that section of the corridor and turned again, right this time, in a tight U-turn that led her to another corridor that seemed to be directly on the other side of the wall from the last one. But it didn’t look like any of the hallways she had seen through the doors, and it must have been going right through all the rooms she had looked into.

Not only that, but after she had gone a few hundred feet down the new corridor, it made another tight turn into another corridor that seemed to be in the same place that the one before had been in. And to top it all, it looked like this hallway was the same one she had started out in—the first door on the left was still open partway.

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“How can this place even exist?” Erin stared at the hallway in front of her, completely baffled. She felt like she was in the middle of an Escher drawing.

The idea of just sitting still and waiting for someone to rescue her seemed much more appealing now. But she had the uncanny feeling that the building was moving all around her and she wouldn’t be able to stay in one place even if she tried.

Erin sighed and slumped against the wall. The skin on her hands and over her left knee ached from having her scars removed, and the muscles in her legs were starting to get tired and sore from her awkward limping. She wasn’t sure whether she felt more like crying or screaming in frustration. It was only her indecision that kept her from doing either one.

She heaved another sigh and straightened up again. One more corridor, she decided. She would go down this corridor and then, if there were still no signs of life anywhere, she would give up and wait for someone. Or sit down and rest for a while, at the very least.

She limped down the corridor, still checking doors as she went past. There weren’t as many doors in this hallway, and nearly all of them were locked. Aside from the first one on the left, which still opened onto another corridor, there were two others that turned out to be storage rooms.

Erin had just closed the door on the second storage room and was starting towards the last door in the hall when she suddenly stopped, listening hard. She had just heard a faint sound that might have been a door opening up ahead, around a corner to the left.

She started walking forward again, still listening intently. A few seconds later, she heard what sounded like voices. Her hopes rising, she hurried forward. The voices had already stopped, but if she moved fast enough, maybe she would still be able to catch whoever it was and ask them for help.

She was almost running by the time she reached the corner, and in her haste, she collided headlong with a man in a grey cloak who was just coming around the corner from the other direction.

Erin staggered backward, clutching at the wall to keep herself from falling over. She heard the man say something that sounded like an apology, and she looked up, opening her mouth to return the apology and to try to tell him she was lost and needed help.

But when she saw the man’s face, Erin froze completely, her mouth still open. For a few seconds, she couldn’t do anything but stare at him in shock.

She recognized that face. But the man it belonged to certainly shouldn’t have been standing in that corridor.

He couldn’t be standing there….

The man had apparently decided that she was all right, because he turned and continued on down the hall, walking quickly, as though he were in a great hurry.

Erin stood paralyzed for a brief moment longer, staring at his retreating back, before she shook herself back to life and hurried after him. Being nearly a foot shorter and having her leg in a stiff brace, she couldn’t move as fast as he could. He was more than thirty feet ahead of her by the time he turned the corner.

“Hey! Wait a minute!” Erin called, forcing herself into a halting run.

She rounded the corner just in time to see his cloak whipping out of sight down a passageway that intersected the one they were in, going off to the right. She barely had enough time to register that this was definitely not the hallway that it had been the last time she went this way before she, too, reached the intersection. She rushed around the corner….

…and felt the floor underneath her feet disappear.

With a yelp of surprise, Erin lurched forward and tumbled down a flight of stone steps, landing in a heap at the bottom. She felt something wet and warm running into her mouth and tasted blood. Putting a shaking hand up to her face, she found that her nose was bleeding freely. It was also throbbing from hitting against the stone. The rest of her body was aching from thumping down the steps.

“Rather accident-prone little thing, aren’t you?”

Erin looked up, still holding her streaming nose. The man she had been chasing had finally come to a halt and was standing over her, looking concerned but also slightly amused. He knelt down on the floor in front of her.

“Here, let me look at it,” he said, pulling Erin’s hand gently away from her face. He must have heard her calling after him before, because he was speaking English now, rather than Silmarith.

He examined her nose closely for a moment and then touched the bridge of it with his finger. A cold sensation spread through Erin’s nose and face, and she felt the bleeding stop.

“There you go. It’s not broken, luckily. And I don’t think….” The man paused, running his gaze up and down over Erin's body like Kimoja had done, giving her the same sensation that she was being x-rayed. “No, nothing else serious, though you’re going to have some very impressive-looking bruises by tomorrow. Let me just clean you up a bit.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, and the blood vanished from Erin’s face, hand, and shirt.

“Thank you,” she said in a small voice, still feeling a bit shaken from her fall.

“Don’t mention it,” the man replied, standing up. He held out his hands to help Erin to her feet. “Now, would you like to tell me what was so urgent that you had to nearly break your neck trying to catch me?”

“Well, I got lost somehow, and I was hoping you could help me get back to where I’m supposed to be. But first I wanted to ask….” She trailed off.

“Yes?”

Erin hesitated, looking up into his face.

It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. But…his face matched so well…. She just had to ask, to know for sure.

“I wanted to ask…” she began again.

It was crazy. But then, everything in this place seemed to be crazy....

Swallowing her doubts, Erin pressed on, “Is your name…by any chance…Edward Marin?”