Something very, very strange was going on as we neared the heart of the labyrinth. I couldn’t put my finger on what, exactly, it was, but something was different.

It was Kylie who eventually noticed. “There are no spells here,” she said. “Should we be worried about that?”

“No,” Max said. “Or… yes. Perhaps? I have no idea.”

“No idea?”

“Actual written records of anything about this place were extremely hard to find. Most of what I have is conjecture. I’m… not sure, if the centre is supposed to be part of the runic circles or not? I’d imagine not, just from how runic circles are usually constructed. This is… probably to be expected.”

“Well, I feel safe,” I said.

I wasn’t sure what we’d find at the centre of the labyrinth, but honestly, yet another really big cavern should have been my first guess. This one was very faintly lit, not by spells, but by the walls themselves, which were… weird. They weren’t stone. They were smooth and gelatinous, absorbing the fingers I pressed to them until I dragged my hand back, and their luminescence so very faint that I needed the light of my tablet to determine that they were very faintly blue. Water sat in tiny natural pools around the room, and I drew the obvious conclusion about the luminescence – the walls were damp with empowered water.

The room itself was dominated by an enormous, elaborately sculpted stone pillar in the centre, and otherwise filled with junk. The pillar seemed untouched by time, but I couldn’t make out what shape it was supposed to be. It looked like some kind of abstract statue, but I wasn’t sure what it was depicting. It could just as easily have been a woman lying on a couch, or a pair of dolphins. And it was somehow… familiar. Had I seen it before? I definitely would have remembered if I’d ever been here.

We weren’t here as art critics, a fact I was sharply reminded of when, somewhere behind me, Kylie shrieked. She was staring at a pile of junk, her face bloodless. Because in the pile was…

“That,” Max observed, trying and failing to sound unaffected, “appears to be a human arm.”

“No shit!” I started to dig it out of the pile. Really, it was just the bones of a human arm, which turned out to be attached to most of a human skeleton, buried under scrap wood, tarnished jewellery, and ruined paper. Weird stuff for what was obviously a junk pile. Why was this even – ? Hang on. “Max,” I said, “what do you make of this?” I handed him a finger, which had fallen off the skeleton in my hands, and he tried not to look disgusted while he examined it. “Runes,” he said. “I… think? I don’t recognise any of these. Is the whole skeleton like that?”

“Yeah.”

“Are they runes?” Kylie asked. “It looks more like a, a circuit diagram. And yeah, I know a rune circle is basically a magic circuit board or whatever, but you know what I mean.”

I did. The designs etched into the bones were low on ‘letters’ and high on long parallel lines, broken up by the occasional junction or mathematical-looking symbol.

“They have a sort of runic flow, though, don’t you think?” Max asked, which was a question that neither of us had the expertise to answer. He dropped to his knees next to me in the world’s weirdest junk pile and started taking the best photos he could manage on his tablet. “Do you think,” he asked awkwardly, “it would be too… disrespectful… to take the skeleton with us?”

“Yes, Max, it would be disrespectful to take the skeleton with us! Also, it’s most of a human skeleton etched with unfamiliar magical symbols in the very centre of a giant secret spell labyrinth! It’s definitely haunted.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the bloodline mage muttered petulantly to two witches while he handled probably magic bones in a glowing cave. I rolled my eyes and went to find some other weird shit to be disturbed by.

Kylie was staring at the support pillar in the middle of the cavern with intense concentration, I didn’t bother her as I wandered the room, looking at more scattered junk. No more bones, fortunately. Plenty of jewellery and ornaments, for some reason. Occasional actual scrap – a rusty bike wheel, a broken umbrella, even a knife – but not very much. The cave was pretty big, and soon Max and Kylie’s tablet lights were little spots in the distance. I considered turning back.

Then I saw it. The backpack.

It wasn’t much. It had been cheap and not particularly stylish when it wasn’t waterlogged and partly rotten, abandoned lying at the bottom of a cave. I picked it up, and was unsurprised at how heavy it was. Opening revealed, as expected, rotted rope and heavy iron spikes. Old, badly damaged rock climbing gear.

I knew exactly where we were. Because this bag was mine.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

I’d last seen it about six months ago, when I’d been preparing to go rock climbing and had instead followed di Fiore to a clandestine meeting with an artefact forger. We’d fallen into that underground lake with the monster in it, and he’d pulled this bag off my shoulders to stop it from weighing me down. And here it was.

I turned off the light on my tablet, turned my back on my friends, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the incredibly low light of the cave. Then I looked up at the gelatinous ceiling, lit, I realised, not by a little empowered water on its surface, but by the tonnes and tonnes of it on the other side of the semitransparent wall. A whole lake of it, that I’d fallen into twice now. Through the water… were they moving shadows? Tentacles, searching for victims to drown? Or to drag down here?

I shouldered the bag and headed back to the others. They hadn’t moved from the places I’d left them.

“How’s the discovery going?” I asked.

He just shook his head. “I don’t know where we are,” he confessed. “This isn’t what I expected to be here. We’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. This isn’t… there’s nothing here.”

“There’s a creepy skeleton,” I pointed out.

“There’s nothing relevant here! None of my research mentioned anything like this!”

“Well, if this is secret, your research – ”

“No, you don’t understand. I didn’t just pull open access library books off the shelf. What I found was the secret stuff, but…” he looked around and shrugged. “Either my research was in grave error, or I am. I don’t know what this means, and I don’t know how to get us out.”

“I do,” I said. “Well, not what any of this means. I never seem to know what anything means. But I know how to get out.” I explained where we were.

“So your plan for getting out is… to cut our way up and swim?”

“Not unless we absolutely have to, but… yeah.”

“Do you have a plan to avoid drowning?”

“Depends. Did you bring an oxygen tank and a big knife for the tentacles?”

“I did not.”

“Then no.”

“Well, you’ve certainly inspired me to make sure I have another way out that isn’t that. I’ll recheck the maps after I finish photographing… these.” He frowned at the skeleton. I wondered who the person was. If they’d fallen in the lake. If they’d been less lucky than I had, the two times I’d fallen in.

“Were those… designs… etched when they were alive or dead, do you think?”

“I don’t see how they’d be possible to do alive.”

“Well, if they weren’t, then someone threw an engraved skeleton into a lake, which is weirder.”

“Weirder than anything else down here? None of this makes sense, Kayden. I don’t know how I’m supposed to understand any of this.”

“Have you considered just accepting that it’s weird and maybe you won’t understand it?”

He looked at me like I was nuts. The he stared contemplatively at the skeleton for a few seconds and gave a deep, resigned sigh. “Does it bother you that we shouldn’t have gotten this far?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we were stuck. We failed. All three of us. This labyrinth gave each of us a dream, a challenge, and all three of us failed to solve them. Of course we’re not going to understand this place; we’re not… worthy… of being here.”

“Max, what the hell are you talking about? We got through those challenges.”

“No. We didn’t. You broke through mine, I broke through Kylie’s, Kylie broke through yours. We didn’t solve our challenges; we solved each others’.”

“Yeah, I know. What’s your point?”

“It honestly doesn’t bother you? That you couldn’t beat it?”

“I don’t think whether we can beat a challenge is the important question. The question is, who sets the challenges, and where do they get off judging us like that?”

“Um, we do. That’s the poin – ”

“Exactly! I wouldn’t trust Kayden James to set a useful challenge for me; that guy is a fucking idiot! Look, just because the… the physics of this place creates these illusions doesn’t make them deep and meaningful challenges that must be faced, any more than climbing a mountain is a deep and meaningful challenge just because gravity exists. We agreed to this kind of trial for the Initiation, but down here, it’s just an obstacle. And we got past the obstacles.”

“Only by waiting for each other to solve them.”

“And? Why is that a problem? I know this is contrary to your life experience, Mr Magic Genius, but it’s not some great and terrible sin to have blind spots or be bad at stuff. Take it from someone who’s had a lot of practice. Needing to be rescued isn’t a sign of weakness, it means you’re utilising the strength of someone else. Power of friendship and all that. And we’re not exactly going anywhere, are we? So we still have access to those strengths. Not only do you not have to tackle every problem alone, but you absolutely should not tackle every problem alone. It greatly limits the number of problems you can cause.”

“You mean solve.”

“Yes. Yes, of course I mean solve.”

Max rolled his eyes and went back to studying his bones, while I tried very, very hard not to think too deeply about the possibility that we might actually be lost, and have to swim up through the lake. There was no possible way we’d survive swimming through the lake.

And we weren’t lost. We couldn’t be. Max’s map had to be accurate, or we would’ve noticed long before we’d gotten this far. And the lack of spells here meant it wasn’t just another room; it had to be the centre. It had to be.

Anyway. We’d known from the start that Max knew the way out. Kylie had been sure of it, based on the timing of her prophecy, and Kylie knew her prophecy. No, no; we were where we’d intended to be. The room itself was just… unexpected. That was all. Max had been wrong about the contents.

Which was fine.

I sidled up to Kylie, who was inspecting the oddly shaped pillar in the middle of the room.

“How are you doing?” I asked her.

“The stairs are crumbling,” the Evil Eye said.

Huh. The last time the Eye had spoken in anything but vague poetry had been at Duniyasar. “What stairs?” I asked.

“The spine,” it said, which was about as much lucidity as I’d expected. “Are you ready to make your choice? Bones crumble and shackles rust in time. And your time is limited.”

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I was learning to really hate prophecies.

“Time for wha – ?” But I didn’t manage to finish my question before Kylie dropped to the floor, seizing.