The signs of man slipped away and the terrain became almost alien. He’d never been this far into the interior, and the vista was disconcerting. Rolling, rocky ground in for miles and miles in every direction. Until he came to the edge of the low mountain range and the earth shot up before him in a near vertical wall. He’d rode as Yophel and prescribed and sure enough, maybe a mile ahead he saw the milk-pine grove. Towering coniferous trees that must have been hundreds of years old, with light bark and lighter needles. If you weren’t paying attention you might they think were snow covered.

He approached the milk-pines and laid eyes on the opening to the crypts. It would easily go unnoticed if you weren’t looking for it. It was less an entrance and more of a natural looking cave entrance. Lomhen tied his horse to a tree and called into the opening.

“Hello?” He called, and heard it echoed back a few times. He heard panting before a man emerged. His clothes were in tatters and he smelled to the high city.

“A most unexpected visitor. Follow me!” He took off back into the cave and disappeared from sight.

“Varga, Wait!” Lohmen called, but quickly took after him. He caught up to him shortly after.

“They said this place is called the maze?” Lohmen asked, trying to start his questioning.

“Who’s they?” He asked but didn’t wait for a response. “Who’s you?”

Lohmen told him his name, how his wife had given him directions to the maze and finally the reason for his dropping by. The man stopped.

“Tell me everything that happened. Leave out no detail.” His jovial demeanour turned dead serious in an instant.

Lohmen told him of what happened with Thesdon. How he had yelled, then chased after and how there was no trace of him in the forest.

“They took him too…just like my boy. Yes they did.”

“Who’s they?” Lohmen fired back. Varga’s eyes turned wide with delight and he pointed at Lohmen. “That is a very good question. I don’t know who they are, but I think I know how they did it. Come.” He clearly didn’t know who they were either. Lohmen started to regret this detour, but having sunk a good part of the day already, he made toward Varga and the cave.

“Are you ready to enter Lohmen? Keep up.” And he darted off.

What light came from the opening had soon vanished, and Lohmen found himself in complete blackness. He could feel his pupils dilating, trying to suck in any ambient light that might be available, but there was none. He could feel the blackness, like it had an additional, tangible quality to it. The weight of it muffled the sound of Varga’s footsteps until they engulfed it completely. A slight panic crept up Lohmen’s spine. The pragmatic cartographer hadn’t charted his course into the maze and he was lost already.

He gasped when he heard a whisper and forced himself to calm. He remembered a trick from when he was younger playing in the corn mazes in Kinney. He stuck out his right hand and touched the wall. If he followed the right wall and what ever turns he made, he’d find the exit. If he didn’t happen to find it’s centre first, and whatever may lay in wait for him there.

“Lohmen, you sure do take a lot of time. Hurry up!”

A wave of relief washed over Lohmen and he followed the sound and his arm, and eventually Varga appeared, in a dimly lit room at what Lohmen guess was the centre of the maze. It was a fairly large, cavernous room with a stone pedestal at the middle. On it were the remnants of some sort of structure. The lower parts were in tact, but the rest had crumbled away either by time, or intent.

As Lohmen’s adjusted to the cavern light, he looked around. In one corner he saw a bedroom, with pages from a notebook strewn about. In another, a fire place with a makeshift cook stove installed, and in the third corner a simple, wide mouth pot. Lohmen judged from that the lack of smell, that Varga had recently emptied it.

“Look. What do you see?” Varga gestured with outstretched hands toward a set of crumbling columns, with a half intact bridge of stone across the top.

“Um. A pedestal? An altar maybe?”

“No, Lohmen, there’s no middle.”

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“An archway…or a door maybe?”

“Now you are starting to see. Look at the stone. This is twilight quartz. There is none of that for a thousand leagues.”

Varga was right. The stone was not of this place, and the confounding maze to get to it made it even more strange.

“Watch this.” He said, as he picked up a stone and tossed it at the gateway. It continued through it and landed exactly where it looked like it might.

“Shit. Hold on,” Varga picked up another stone. “Watch this.” He did the same thing again, to the same result. He threw half a pail of stones before he got his desired reaction. The stone disappeared when it breached the gateway and hit Lohmen in the back.

“Haha! That’s the spot.”

“What the…?.” Lohmen said in disbelief.

“That’s right Lohmen. A portal. Mind you, its in quite the state of disrepair. But this might be how our boys were taken. No traces.”

Lohmen wasn’t entirely convinced. He’d lived a fairly un-magical life, but then again recent events had convinced him of the existence of arcane forces.

Lohmen sat tossing rocks at the stone structure and thought about how it might be used, and whom might use it.

“The existence of this alone, says there are other arcane things we do not understand. Come, put your hand here.” Varga walked up to the pile and pointed to specific place in the imaginary door. Lohmen agreed and put his hand up. “Push it through, just there.”

Though feeling a bit silly, Lohmen stuck out his index finger and pushed it toward the spot Varga had asked. He let out a gasp when his finger disappeared into the invisible threshold.

“Where did my finger go?” He asked Varga, who nodded behind him in the direction the pebble that hit Lohmen had come from. There, floating in mid-air was the tip of Lohmen’s finger, wiggling as he intended.

“Varga, this is incredible!”

“I’ve been trying to repair it, but these blocks are all messed up. Some are broken. Some seem to be missing, but If I can reassemble it, I think I can go through it.”

Lohmen, pulled his finger from across the room and back through the portal. The two of them sat there tossing rocks, discussing theories, and occasionally hitting the invisible spot where it would displace the pebble behind them and it would continue it’s trajectory. Lohmen inquired about the types of experiments he’d done which included fingers, sticks, weapons but the active part was only a few inches wide.

“Have you asked a mage about it?”

The man threw another pebble through the spot and listened as it fell to the floor behind them.

“I have yes, but I’m a poor, simple man. Even the mages that take me seriously have little interest in a side project. Others get quite tight-lipped when I talk about portals.

“What about Yophel, Varga. Do you…live out here?” Lohmen asked. Varga lowered his head, and ran his hand over the shiny bald spot at the top of it.

“I can’t stop, Lohmen. My boy is gone. You know what that’s like.” Lohmen nodded in agreement, and let the matter lie. From what little he know of her, she’d not want the two of them pitying her. Lohmen steered the conversation back to the structure before them.

"Where do you think it goes?”

“I’m not sure of that either. But my best guess is that it would work with another gateway, allowing you walk through one and out the other.”

Lohmen pondered that and recalled what Yerik had told him about the mage he saw with Tomeera. He had mentioned it earlier, as it wasn’t relevant until just then, but Varga was dumbstruck.

“Of course,” he said, staring at the pile of portal rocks.

“Maybe it isn’t two gateways working in concert, maybe there’s a device…or a magic or something, that would allow you to travel to a gateway. From anywhere.”