Grey, grey, and more goddam grey is all there is in this godforsaken, vine covered imitation of a digestive tract.

Following my psychedelic awakening, these are the bleak shades of my reality.

My spiritual awakening, induced by the talented Gharava, leaves me feeling whole. Like the missing part of me is found. What part? My soul expands within me like a physical thing. Ashe is there. As she reaches me from wherever she is, she can touch me again. I’m left feeling her.

But more importantly…

I’m left feeling lost.

For a fraction of an eternity, I got to spend time with her, the goddess of beauty and death. Life like it is, can never compare to what I experienced. The divide is too wide.

The love I feel is so immense it spills over me. It’s eternal. It makes me want to die because I know I’ll find her then.

The love I feel is new. I didn’t love her yesterday. It is not important to me.

But it is.

It is groundbreaking.

It is revelation.

It is not forever.

It is eternal.

The greys flow by me like by magic. My head hurts, my heart hurts. The walls are like water. In the distance I can see the dark end of a tunnel that never ends. A dark spot on the horizon that never changes, no matter how close I walk, the greys flow by me seeping into my soul. I don’t know how long I can stand it. This is not a life I can lead. My life is over if I don’t kill myself. There isn’t anything in it for me, is it?

I want to turn to Ashe.

Everything turns to Ashe.

The tunnels seem to be spinning around me, and it seems the dark end turns darker with each spin. My heart sinks after it leaps, and I run for it. I need to be there now. I can’t be here anymore. The dark grows wider and wider until it disappears in a moment when I stumble into a well-lit room.

Large clusters of blue, fluorescent stones hit my face, harder that the light illuminating the tunnels and I take in the odd space I found. Three separate tunnels seem to coalesce from one side, running down to two tunnels on the other.

In a dizzy fit I fall on my ass and let the world spin for a moment, taking a moment for it to settle. A shape appears beside me and shoves something in my face.

‘Crazy rat, make drink now.’ Gharava’s crackly voice sounds in my head. I open my mouth and feel something wet. I drink. I’m parched. ‘Want die? Crazy rat!’ I take the sack of water out of his hands and gulp it down.

‘This is too much for me to handle Gharava, I don’t know what’s going on anymore. I’m really confused.’

‘Feel like that always.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Life do what life do.’

The sitting and the water clear my blurred vision. How long have I been walking? The room around me clears up and I calm my spirit to look around to see something isn’t right. People were here. I smell blood.

Suddenly I feel alert.

I stand up and see the room again. I see the wrongness. It should all look the same, interchangeable, but there’s a patch on the wall where all the vines are missing. Gharava nearly falls over with fright as I jump up and run for it.

The vines really are gone.

They’ve been cut off, methodically.

In between is a symbol. A series of stripes made with stone on the wall into an abstract figure. Tears well up in me because I know if I walk down the right tunnel, I will find a similar symbol carved in the wall. One way or another, they will lead me back, to my family.

Laughing manically, I run around the room looking in all the tunnels and am ecstatic to find a strong putrid stench coming from a giant rat corpse down one of the tunnels. On closer inspection I can tell how it was killed, an arrow jammed straight through its skull all the way to the jaw, too stuck into the massive behemoth to be pulled out and reused.

Brynn’s arrow.

Crying and shouting, I jump around the tunnel and start into a slow jog. Behind me my crazy friend is panting and huffing.

‘Why crazy, friend?’ He asks with great effort as he doesn’t run so fast. My grin splits my face in two and fills me with new life.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

‘My friends are close!!’

---

‘Keep up shitstain! We’re catching his trail! We can’t lose it!’

In a frenzy, running through the tunnels, the rats may somehow have Anite’s scent. It eludes most of them, however, as they gasp and wheeze, trying to keep up with the experienced stalker. Obscured by the magical shadows which drip from her stone plate armor the warrior runs from tunnel to tunnel in search of her lost comrade. She can smell his boring stink. This, however, preoccupies her too much to notice her companions struggling to keep her trail.

Tripping and stumbling, they run and run, until they find the stalker standing tentatively still within a large open area. They look around, seeing only more greys and vines and ways connecting. A room in and of itself quite ordinary. They can tell why the stalker is confused though. It is because one wall shows signs of struggle. This one large area on the left side of the room, where the wall is not covered by vines, betrays black scorch marks and contrasts to the dark grey shapes of cracks and fissures.

Or so Brynn points out while the tiny rats struggle to catch their breath.

‘See? There’s a subtlety, a nuance within these lines hinting at violence. There is a burning sensation in my nose mixed with the smell of stupid. It’s all a bit stronger here, and it’s mixed with other strange scents. Stop crying like a little girl rat Bart and get your bony ass to walk. If the track fades, we’re back at tunnel one.’

‘I agree with you Brynn, we have to be selfless to find our friend.’ Amethyst manages to mutter in between spitting bile while laying stretched out on the floor. Laying there, Magical smoke rising up from her enchanted armor, she looks like a burning rat shaped poop.

‘Wuwuwuwuuuu.’ Says Bart. Brynn couldn’t be more disappointed.

For two days now, he’s getting into shape, receiving Brynn her training and guidance. This is a euphemism. In fact, she is giving him royal beatings as her first official pupil. From memory she knows this to be the proper way of educating in the martial arts.

Bart did not ask for this. He got it anyway.

With great difficulty he gets off his knees and dries his face, stone armor shifting uncomfortably and weighing heavy on his shoulders. His knees shake a little from the running, almost imperceivable through the magical shadows swirling around him in an obscuring mist. He has just discovered what his liver feels like.

Hearing it cry out with every step he jogs along with Brynn’s agitated figure. After some time, they slow down at the sight of shadows in the distance. Brynn takes out her new bow from her pocket. The weapon appears to be magical and changing in size. So much so that she keeps it in her pocket for most time.

She takes an arow from the satchel around her shoulders as she lets the weapon grow in her arms. Nocking and loosing at the unexpected lizardman that seems to be waiting about. The poor thing collapses to the ground and his two friends start hissing. They run at Brynn, getting shot down one by one. Clinical.

‘Definitely on the right track.’ She says, ‘I can smell him through the blood. He was here.’

The pressure on the little rats their chests resonates to their thumping hearts. We’re finally going home. Then Brynn stops.

‘I smell something.’

‘No, pffff… huff huff huff, shit.’

‘No, I mean it. This is serious. There is a lot of… smell.’

‘Maybe we check it out?’ Amethyst asks.

‘Well of course, but I want you to know at least. It might be dangerous. This type of smell only comes from crowds. Who knows what is there.’

‘Maybe we rest a minute first?’ Bart asks in between wheezes.

‘We have to keep moving, Anite is close, I can smell it.’

‘You’ve been smelling it for hours!’

‘Someone has to! It’s not like you’re being very helpful with your leisurely strolling along. We would have found him ages ago!’ She took a deep breath and looked a bit kinder. ‘We have to go. I’m only warning you because I might not have the spare hands to protect you both. That means you’re on your own Bart.’ She says as she pats him on the face comfortingly. ‘This is what we’ve been training for. Honestly, I don’t believe you can do it. Good luck.’

She stands up and walks away, Amethyst on her heels, and Bart crawling a few paces behind, blood draining from his face.

Above them the blue stones start to flicker bright blue through the ever-stretching tunnels, announcing a new part of the day in the labyrinth. Just as they walk out. When their feet hit the ground, it’s as if they step into a new world. Something they can only describe as a street, stretches on and on in their vision into the distance until it splits itself on a stone wall in the distance. Small houses fill their peripheral vision. Real houses with walls, doorways, and roofs, leaving a grand space between their top and the infinitely stretching canopy.

They hold their steps as they take in the sight, at the same time familiar and strange. There should not be something like this in a place like here. And yet, within these endless, indistinguishable webs of paths, there lies a city.

‘No fucking way in hell...’

‘Where are we Brynn? This feels impossible, these are houses. People live here. It’s so strongly obvious that even I can smell it. This is civilization. How can there be something like this?’

‘What? You smell people? Please tell me you didn’t say that. Who could be here?’

---

Xass steeled his nerves.

The bags under his eyes weighed heavy on his sleepless nights. He felt sick, and his arms were molting in random places. His muscles ached with an excited tension as he straightened his black tunic, undistracted by the golden motives moving along the fabric in impatient agitation. He took his sword and scabbard to steadily plant it on the stone floor in front of him.

Bronq and Phath put their hulking shapes in formation next to him. Taking a solemn stance, leaning on their massive clubs in front of them with both hands wrapped around the bottom of the handle. The inlayed rubies on the ends of the clubs sparked slightly as they touched the stone ground.

Tens of impatient tails swept the floor of the camp as they waited.

It was time. All the soldiers faced the chief who faced them right back, exposing rows of his sharp teeth to a hungry grimace. Only moments left.

‘We’ve waited long enough!’ He said with a deep bellow. ‘Day after day we’ve stalked them, the tunnels hinting at their elusive trails. Day after day we’ve seen our brothers return bruised, beaten, dying. Patiently, we waited for our comrades to arrive. Waiting to drench our spear red. I say we’ve waited enough!’

Nearly two dozen lizards roared, and unconsciously, Xass roared with them. The chief was crying out to them, raising his arms.

‘Take out our spears, men! Take out our knifes! Take out our arrows! We will cut through their eye sockets. We will rip off their tails! Our archers will strike the beasts down, weakening them for us to crush their necks. You know what we will do right now?’

‘YES!!’

‘YES!!’

‘YES!!’

‘Slaughter every single disgusting rat in this fucking labyrinth!’