<~> CHAPTER 61

The rest of the mountainous floor wasn't too difficult. The hardest part was keeping proper footing on the tenuous hiking trail the entire time. We mostly fought the coyotes the entire way, but we did eventually come across some of those acid blood lizards I had been warned about. Luckily for me, my umber wolf instincts seemed horrified by the idea of eating one of those, my worries that they would force me to eat something that would hurt me was unfounded. It was a bit curious that my instincts seemed to know about them though. The innate instincts I gained when I became a partial umber hound seemed weirdly specific sometimes, like a trove of gathered knowledge. The instincts sometimes felt like they were operating on rules that weren't obvious to me. Regardless, I didn't end up eating the heart of one of the poison lizards.

Eventually our group found ourselves at the bottom of the stairs to the floor I had been warned about all this time. After the long flight of stairs that separated the floors, we found ourselves in the first room of the sixth floor. The walls of this floor were bright grey-white and were made of a smooth matte stone. There were imperfections in the stone but none that would stand out enough to register as a landmark. To my blindfolded magic sight, the walls all glowed much more brightly than the other maze floors. The walls themselves were probably part of the trick. The ceiling glowed with a bright light that reminded me of harsh fluorescent bulbs, making the entire place feel reminiscent of a hospital.

"If the monsters don't attack you until you're alone, how do people get separated?" I asked.

Maxwell shook his head. "I'm not sure. People just disappear. They look away from each other for only a moment and then they vanish." Maxwell was already unpacking the same rope we had used as a lifeline over the pit in the clockwork room. All five of us attached the rope line to our belts and prepared for the trip ahead.

"Do you feel any air currents on this floor Helena?" Piper asked.

"I can't feel them in my human form." I shifted to my werewolf form and focused on the sensation that was flowing against my whiskers. The air was mostly stagnant in this room but I could feel the prickle of airflow coming from the open archway ahead of us. "I think I feel it. It'll be easier to tell once we're in the actual maze."

Maxwell took a second rope and using a practiced knot, looped it around my waist and attached it to the lifeline so that I could be in my wolf form for this trip. "We'll follow the airflow for a while and see where it leads us. If we don't seem to be going the right direction or making any progress I'll activate a guiding rod. We need to .... them if we can, in case we get separated. Helena, you're in front. Keep a hold of this rope so you can keep it taught. If the line falls, you'll have been separated from us. Everyone else, always keep your eyes on the person in front of you, don't let them out of your sight," Maxwell said.

This time our order was Me, Maxwell, Aria, Luna, Piper. I took a deep breath and began to lead our group forward, into the painfully bright white hallways. The group was tense. I got the feeling that while everyone here but I had experienced this floor, it wasn't a happy experience. The structure of this floor felt different from the mazes on the other floors. They tended to have winding paths that usually ended in T-intersections. This maze nearly always ended in four-way intersections and the hallways only occasionally turned. Sometimes we would reach an intersection where one or two of the paths visibly ended in a dead end, completely visible from the intersection, something the other floors had never done. For some reason, the structure of the maze itself was somewhat disconcerting compared to the previous floors.

While I was walking someone behind me suddenly stopped and I turned to look behind me. Piper was missing.

("Piper's rope just went slack,") Luna said with more calm than I felt.

Maxwell sighed. "Piper is gone. We should keep moving, it's possible for Piper to make it through before us. There's nothing we can do now, we'll try to make it all the way through and wait for everyone that gets separated at the end."

"Do you think I'm taking us in the right direction?" I asked.

"I would guess that we are going the right way. The kind of path you're taking feels similar to the path that we would take using a guiding rod," he reassured me. "It seemed accurate before so I think it's worth following to conserve the guiding rods until we need one."

We continued on like this but the anxiety of the situation was starting to get to me. The only solace I felt was that the people disappearing weren't actually dead. They were just being transported to a different part of the maze. I was told that everyone on this floor was strong enough to handle the monsters on their own and everyone had gone through this before but me. Out of all of us, I was in the most danger if I found myself separated and while that idea might have frightened me in the past, I now felt confident I could figure out how to deal with whatever would come my way.

We kept walking for another thirty minutes or so before I stumbled when the rope pulled against me suddenly.

"Aria's gone!" Maxwell said in shock. He glanced at Luna and frowned. "How did she go missing from between us?"

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Luna's ears went back and her eyes met mine. ("I accidentally looked at the back of your head for a moment and she disappeared.")

"Luna looked at me for a moment," I told Maxwell.

Maxwell's face hardened but he shook his head. "She's plenty well equipped to make it through. It's good that we gave her some weapons." He didn't cast any blame on Luna but I could tell that she felt guilty for the mistake she made. Maxwell readjusted the rope for the three of us and we continued on. Only two intersections later I turned to look down a hallway and felt the rope fall slack behind me. My eyes snapped around but the place where my rope had been connected to Maxwell hung limply in my hand.

The change to the walls was dramatic. The obnoxiously bright light of the hallways faded to pitch darkness and it was only because of my brightly shining eyes that I could see the walls moving and rearranging themselves. With a lurch all of the walls suddenly changed, a different configuration of hallways surrounded me than the ones I had been looking at a moment before. These walls too moved, opening and closing new passages until they finally settled. Large glass paned windows opened up in the walls ahead of me, the orange and white streetlamps of my home city illuminated the hallways I was in, revealing rows of huge doors and school lockers along the walls. The ceilings looked taller as well, giving me the impression I had shrunk.

I stared out the window. I could see the city from where I was standing. The occasional car drove by, bright headlights streamed through the windows and cast long shadows on the walls of the school building I appeared to be in. I rested my claws against the glass before letting them sink in. The texture of the glass felt real but once I got an inch deep I could tell that it wasn't glass at all but just an illusion on the thick stone of the dungeon. I carved a long deep line in the stone and looked at the odd sight of the deep gash surrounded by a view that didn't reflect it. It reminded me of a scratch on a television screen.

I turned away from the fake illusion on the wall of the dungeon and bristled a little. This felt cruel. I shouldn't be surprised, this was what I was warned of, but the sight stoked the nostalgia and longing I had for my home. Feelings that I had pushed away since I had become stuck here in this world. A world that I only knew of from my friends' stories and the walls of the hostile place I found myself in.

Before I continued on I untied the rope from myself and wrapped it up after shifting to my human form. As I put the rope away in my bag I stared at the walls through the blindfold. Through it, all I could see was the flat walls of the maze, the familiar illusion of my home hidden from me. I considered going through the maze-like this but decided against it. I was always more effective in my wolf form and if the dungeon wanted to flaunt my trauma at me, then I would just deal with it. Besides, I could only use my whiskers to navigate in my wolf form.

Shifting back, I took a breath and glanced over at the deep gash in the wall that was already repairing itself. In a minute or two the gash would be completely healed as if it had never been there. The maze floors always healed more quickly than the cave floor I had originally woken up in, but the damage to the walls here healed even faster. Everything about this maze seemed intended to disorient you and distract you from escaping, and the maze wasn't going to let you progress by marking the walls.

My whiskers felt the flow of the air and if the movement could still be trusted, the maze had dumped me out facing the wrong direction. Another trick to make someone lose their way. I sighed and gripped the handle of my axe and started walking in the direction of the airflow. I paused in surprise when I came across a door that had a name plaque next to it.

Aliandra Pierce - Assistant Principal

I tilted my head in confusion, the plaque was written and English but I didn't recognize the name. Deciding to satisfy my curiosity I cautiously opened the door that led to a slightly messy office. It was as huge in scale as everything else was, a giant desk and towering bookcases that held giant books. I looked around the room carefully but I didn't see any monsters or illusions other than the ones on the walls. I climbed my way up onto one of the giant chairs like I was a short child and pulled myself up to the towering desk to look over the papers and books piled there.

The papers were gibberish. They looked to be forms of some kind but the boxes were filled with nonsense that didn't mean anything. It was odd that the paper looked so convincingly like a typical form someone would fill out, yet the actual words on the page were meaningless. I pulled open one of the giant books and flipped through the pages. Again, everything about the book looked like it was real but the actual content made no sense. This particular book had both a table of contents and an index but nothing listed there contained meaningful sentences. Just random English words spilled out on the page in ways that didn't make sense. The index wasn't even alphabetized despite having sections broken up by letter.

I closed the book and looked around. This place was strange. This place looked like a weird mixture of my elementary school and my high school. I had only visited an office like this a few times that I could remember but it looked convincingly like what you might expect from an office like this. This entire place was unnerving sure, but not as... scary or traumatic as I had expected. I climbed back down off of the desk and took a peek through the drawers. More papers and files but amusingly I found a giant bottle of what I assumed to be alcohol in one of the drawers. The label was just as garbled as the rest of the papers were. I considered taking it with me but I didn't even know if it was real and if the books had been that garbled I didn't trust this liquid to actually be alcohol. It could just as easily be poison.

Walking back through the door of the office and into the hallway, I gently closed the door behind me. I hadn't run into any monsters yet but this place did give me the creeps. I looked out of one of the windows and stared at the fake city off in the distance. There were no landmarks I could recognize or signs I could read, it was just a vision of a city that vaguely looked like my home. I opened the next door on the same wall as the office and peered through it. There was a large classroom that looked like a science lab or something similar. There were various beakers and papers around but nothing that looked valuable enough to bother with. Notably the classroom was long enough that it and the office would have taken up the same area, meaning that the space on this floor was warped. I closed the door and shook my head. What a strange... and lonely place. I missed my friends.

I sighed and walked through the halls, following the flow of air with my heavy axe on my shoulder. It was going to be a long day. I could feel it.