After several minutes of feeling every inch of the wall around the secret door, Josh eventually came across an odd wrinkle in the stone. He fumbled around a bit before realised that it was an indent in the shape of a handprint. He fit his hand into it, but nothing happened. It didn’t seem to have any moving parts. When he tried pressing it, he just felt solid stone beneath his palm.

Maybe it was a verbal command?

“Open,” he said. “Appear. Move. Shift.” What other words could he try? He could be here all day going through different combinations. “Obey! Open sesame!”

The door stayed invisible. Eventually, it occurred to him to try feeding it a tiny bit of magic, the way you would if you were going to cast a spell scroll.

He immediately felt a clunk and a vibration deep in the rock. Whatever magic had been hiding the door vanished, leaving a clear rectangular outline in the cavern wall, along with a lip he could get his fingers into. In films, ancient door mechanisms in abandoned temples always worked perfectly, whether or not they had been maintained. Josh hadn’t had a lot of luck with the doors the druids had left behind, and this was no exception.

It opened about six inches—revealing a tantalising glimpse of a narrow, artificial tunnel—and then appeared to stick fast. It wasn’t until he’d been pulling and tugging on it for several minutes to no avail that he stepped back, and realised what a flaming idiot he was. Some chips of stone had somehow got lodged in the hinge side, preventing the door swinging open all the way. That dealt with, he managed to drag it open wide enough to admit him.

Here Josh paused.

In a few hours it would be dark, and the book moth haunt might come back. He should go upstairs and get all the rest of his things, find a safe place to camp that was well away from here. But once the moth haunt came back, he would need to defeat it again to access the foundation stone chamber. If he wanted to follow the secret passage, he had to do so now.

He could feel a breeze on his face. There was air coming from somewhere, so it must lead to a way out.

He gathered all his possessions from his campsite, filled his pack with as many of the remaining vegetables as he could find, and a few minutes later was standing in front of the secret passage again.

He suddenly had a lot of sympathy for cats. Was this what all closed doors were like to them?

If you die because of this, he told himself, it’s your own fault.

The floor of the cave was dry and gritty, but smoothed flat enough to make walking easy. Josh could only shuffle down it very slowly, because if he tried walking at a normal pace the candle would blow out. This, he realised, was why people used lanterns and torches. He had some idea that you could make a torch with tree sap or something, but he had no idea how you went about extracting it from actual trees. Next time he decided to go exploring, he would invest in a proper lantern.

The passageway sloped down, and several times descended abruptly into crudely cut steps. Other than that, however, it headed in what was pretty much a straight line, getting deeper and deeper into the earth. Moving so slowly and carefully was excruciating, but the very last thing he wanted to do was let the candle blow out. He didn’t want to be here in the dark, desperately trying to light it with the flint and the tinder.

The darkness was already making him feel jumpy. There was no sound except his own breathing and the slide of grit under his shoes as he took his next step. He began to be worried that there was no end to the tunnel, that it just went on forever and ever, sloping down into fathomless oceans of stone.

What if he met a monster? What if there was something down here that was worse than the book moth haunt. He kept nervously checking over his shoulder, and made his eyes water by continuously trying to stare beyond fading edge of the candlelight.

Why had he come down here? What had he been thinking? He was an idiot. The next time he had an idea like this he should just slap himself across the face.

He had been shuffling along the corridor for more than an hour when he suddenly realised he could hear water dripping, and the tunnel ahead of him was lightening. He came out into a little grotto that was open to the sky, full of boulders covered in thick green moss, with a narrow path snaking between them and plunging into another cavern at the other side.

Water sluiced down into the grotto, a tiny trickle that was the birth of a stream. It plunged into the cavern on the other side, burbling merrily into the darkness.

The candle blew out as soon as Josh stepped into the light. He cursed, and knelt to light it, but there was too much dampness and mist in the grotto, and the spark wouldn’t catch. He was stuck here, because the rock walls around him curved inwards as they rose up, and the vertical parts of them were slick with algae.

Unless Josh wanted to return to the chamber of the moth haunt—no, thank you very much—he had to go on.

He put the candle away. Maybe he would be able to light it a littler further on. He took a few steps into next cavern, put his hands on the rock wall to guide him, and felt his way into the darkness. After a few steps, he turned corner, and saw light. He blinked, his eyes adjusting, and moved further on. The artificial rock-cut passage he had been walking through before was gone. He was now in a natural cavern, the kind that formed over millions of years from dripping water. There were giant sponge-like boulders, the ringed teeth of stalactites and stalagmites thrusting up from the floor, and the banded colours of the earth’s innards exposed for him to see.

And all around him it was glowing.

The cavern walls were covered in bioluminescent algae. It was sprinkled across the rock like a galaxy of alien stars, a hundred fairy constellations looking down from above, glowing blue and green and every shade in between.

Beautiful as it was, Josh didn’t think bioluminescent algae would keep the moth haunt away, so he kept going. The algae gave off just enough light for him to be able to see his footing. That was good, because the path was much more treacherous now, with sharply angled rocks and large, uneven steps. It plunged downwards at a much steeper rate, and the stream running beside him swelled with water.

There were no monsters, for which Josh was relieved. Maybe they had already been killed by all the other heroes, which was inevitable if you invited thousands of heroes to your world, who could kill monsters faster they could breed. And then you got heroes running around desperate for experience and levels, because they had core things inside them that conditioned them to want it.

What a stupid system it was. Not that Josh was advocating endlessly reappearing monsters as a solution, but there had to be a better way of doing things. He occupied his mind with that while he passed through cavern after cavern of mystical, underground grottos, each as visually spectacular as the last, until he came to the mouth of a cave, beyond which he could see the path led into a forest.

The cave he was in was roughly circular, too regular to be natural. It was clear that the druids had used it, because there was a chest sitting up against one wall, where it would be hidden from outside view. It was a classic wooden one with a domed lid and sturdy iron bands.

Josh stared at it, torn. It was probably empty. But it might not be. He should at least try to open it and see if there was anything in it. Shouldn’t he?

He knelt down beside it, feeling intensely grateful that there were no mimics in Spiralia mythology, although this would not be a great time to find out that he was wrong. The chest didn’t have a lock, just an iron plate with a magical sigil scribed on the front. It would be stupid to feed magic into it, because if he wasn’t authorised to open it then it might just shoot out a jet of flame, or melt his hand off with acid or something.

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If he copied the sigil onto a piece of paper, and then put the tiniest bit of magic into it, he would be able to see what the effect was, but, he hoped, aimed away from him.

That meant lighting the stupid candle again, because there wasn’t enough daylight for him to be able to see the fine detail on the sigil. However, it wasn’t long before he had transcribed it onto a sheet of paper. He set the copy facing the mouth of the cave, on top of a tiny box he’d made out of four flattish pebbles and a chip of bark, all balanced together to make a miniature chest. He cautiously set off the spell.

The paper disintegrated, and the little chip of bark pinged off the box. The four pebbles collapsed.

It was a spell for Open! Unless it was a spell for Explode Chest, but Josh didn’t think druids would go to that extreme to protect their treasures.

Josh could do good things with a spell like Open. It was probably more worthwhile to him than whatever item was in the chest. Grinning broadly, he forced himself to copy out two fair copies of the sigil so he would have a reference in future, and stored them carefully in his pack.

Then he put his hand on the metal plate with the original sigil, and cautiously pushed magic into it.

There was a clunk as the locking mechanism disengaged, and Josh let out a breath of relief. He used a twig to push open the lid, which screeched horribly as its rusted hinges protested the abuse.

Inside was some fur. After failing to lift it out with the twig, he gave up, put his hand in the chest, ready to snatch it back at the slightest sign of movement, and lifted the fur out. No steel jaws snapped shut on his fingers, and no poisonous needles lanced his hand. The fur was an animal skin, made into the shape of a cloak. It felt silky smooth against his fingers, and smelled of musk and lavender.

There was something else underneath the fur, but it didn’t look as special. It was a pair of snow shoes, a rickety arrangement of thin strips of cane bent into circles, with straps to hold them onto the bottom of your shoes. Josh had no idea why such a thing would be necessary. Maybe the winters here were severe?

Both items were magical. He could feel an ever so slight tingle on the pads of his fingers as the fur slid over them.

The next step would be to try putting the cloak and the shoes on. But when he slipped the skin over his shoulders he doubled over with a gasp, shucking it from him as hastily as he could, and shivering with shock.

It was like the cloak had a don’t wear me notice embedded in it. It didn’t want to be worn by him. It wanted nothing more than to go back into the chest and be locked away.

No wonder no-one else had ever come along and stolen it. The shoes, now that Josh, concentrated on them, had the same effect. Regretfully he put them back into the chest, exactly as he had found them, then closed it. When he put his hand on the sigil and fed it magic again, he felt the clunk as it locked itself.

It was a shame that the only magic items he had come across so far—which he hadn’t made himself, that is—simply didn’t want to belong to him. But there was nothing he could do about that. At least he now had another, very useful, sigil.

Josh stood and went to the edge of the cave.

He had no idea if this forest was still the Whortleberry Woods, but he could see that the path continued, winding down the hill beside the stream, which was bracketed by steep, grassy banks and tumbled boulders. There were old wooden posts stuck into the ground to mark the way, their wood bleached and weathered. On top of them, were placed animal skulls, stripped of all flesh, porous and greying. It was an ominous sight, and Josh seriously considered abandoning the path, and turning north again.

The problem was, he could no longer tell which way was north. The sky was full of clouds, which hid the direction of the sun, and the undergrowth threw only undifferentiated shadows onto the ground.

He had come this far. He might as well go on.

Another ten minutes or so of following the path brought him to the edge of the woods, where the ground flattened out, and became a mirror stretching as far as the eye could see.

Josh was on the edge of marshland.

The steam rippled into thick stands of reeds, where it became flat, calm pools broken only by sedge grass. It was so still that it was like there were two worlds, one above, and a reflected version below, as if the land had been sliced in half horizontally, and inverted.

At the horizon, if this world did indeed have a horizon, was a misty haze.

A wooden walkway had been constructed leading directly into marsh, marked by the same wooden poles that had marched through the wood, each one with an animal skull set atop it. Josh hesitated. He wanted to see what was at the end of the walkway, but the skulls were not a reassuring sight. They made him think of death and decay.

He had come this far. He should, at the very least, see what was at the end of the path.

The marsh was very silent. There weren’t even ravens cawing, or frogs croaking. Josh jumped when he heard a tiny splash of some hidden creature, but all he could see of it were spreading ripples in one of the deep, peaty pools that lay beneath the walkway.

At the end, the walkway it split into a ring running around a central pool, with a massive post at the junction where the walkway diverged. The post reached up at least ten feet, and as Josh came up to it, he realised there was a cross bar sticking out from it over the pool.

From the cross bar dangled the remains of a noose.

Josh stopped, his heart thumping uncomfortable. Whatever he had been expecting, it hadn’t been a site of execution. Something ritual, yes, something magical, maybe, but not a gallows.

He took a few steps to the side, staring at it in uneasy fascination. The gallows post had been carved with knotwork that looked vaguely Celtic to him—not that he was an expert. But it had the kind of loops that went under and over to create a continuous pattern. There were things had been tied to the post as well, bits of feathers, shells, and stones with holes in them. Fetishes?

Abruptly, Josh realised what he was looking at. This wasn’t a gallows for executing criminals. It was place for sacrificing people. Immediately he took a step back, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.

The Six Spires version of the druids weren’t the happy, tree-hugging, nature-loving hippies he remembered from Spiralia. These ones practiced human sacrifice.

Despite himself, Josh couldn’t help peering over the edge of the walkway and looking down into the pool in the centre of the ring. Was that where they dropped the bodies when they were done with them? Was he looking at the resting place of multiple victims of human sacrifice?

He saw his face staring back at him, and thought, that’s funny, why do I look like I’m wearing a wolfskin cloak?

He nearly screamed when he realised he was looking into someone else’s face. It was a woman, in her forties or fifties, with a square jaw and broad cheekbones. The wolfskin had retained the snarling head of the wolf, and it framed her face. She had braided hair, and there were blue tattoos on her chin and forehead.

He was looking at a reflection. The woman stood on the walkway, roughly where Josh was, and she was looking down into the water, just as he was. Her expression was thoughtful and interested.

And then the woman and the pool and gallows were behind him, and Josh was running as fast as he could along boards back to dry land without consciously having decided to do so. Every step of the way he expected some ghastly drowned woman to launch herself out of the water, and clutch at his ankles with pale blue hands, cold and wet and clammy, trying to pull him into the mire where he would be smothered in thick, dark mud, to become of one of the restless dead.

He made it onto path and into the forest without being accosted by ghosts or undead bodies rising out of the murk. As soon as he felt he had gained enough distance, he collapsed onto the grass and wheezed until he got breath back.

That hadn’t been a drowned sacrificial victim, he thought, as his mind replayed the horror of the moment. That had been a priestess. Or the spirit of a priestess. Or something. He’d looked into the site of a ritual of human sacrifice and something had looked back.

He wanted nothing to do with druids ever again. He had what he came for, in the form of the sigils. He should go straight to Brackstone, where presumably there were nice, ordinary human people of flesh and blood, and nice, ordinary human things, and never come here again.

Once he felt able to travel on, he decided, in the absence of any other direction, to make his way uphill through the forest. That would send him in the opposite direction to the marshland, and allow him to put as much distance between him and that thing as he could before nightfall.

The sky was getting dark again as he finally made his way to a ridge overlooking the next valley of woodland. Hang on, he thought, as he looked around him. This is familiar.

He clutched his head to his hands, aghast at his own idiocy, as he realised back in the same area as the druid grove and the resurrection shrine. Now the moth haunt might be able to find him. Exploring the passageway had been the Stupidest Idea Ever. This wasn’t a fantasy game, where any detour held the promise of a wonderful magical adventure. This world was full of ghosts and monsters and other horrors.

There was no option but to find his way as far downhill as he could before night fell. He scrambled down the bank, found the shrine, and started following the path left by the other outlanders.

He was concentrating so hard on finding his way in the gathering darkness that he had walked into the middle of the camp before he realised it. Someone was crouched over a ring of stones in the centre, presumably lighting campfire, and there were various packs distributed all around.

There was a sword being held to his neck.

Josh looked up into Varian’s smiling eyes and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

“Hello, Josh Armstrong,” Varian said pleasantly. “Fancy meeting you here.”