Impressive pipes for someone who probably hasn’t used his voice in years.

I tilt my head at the incubus. “Okay, how is this causing you stress? It’s just a fucking healing potion. Do you guys seriously have something against healing potions?”

Bashekehi drops his cloak and shouts at me, “They! Do not! EXIST!”

What? Why? Why is this setting!?

“Healing potions–true healing potions–are a myth! Panacea, the fabled dream of every healer. It’s not how healing magic works.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard today. Health pots are a copper a dozen in RPGs.” Okay, that math is definitely wrong, but I’m exaggerating for comedic effect.

Bashe looks at me with despair in his eyes. “Malice, I had really, really hoped I wouldn’t need to tell you this, but: real life is not a video game.”

“Wait, hold on, you guys have video games?”

“THAT IS NOT THE POINT RIGHT NOW!”

I wince. Ouch, okay, this has him really worked up. “Okay, okay.” I hold up my hands in an appeasing gesture. “Clearly things do not work how I expect them to. I’m just not really clear on why healing potions would be impossible for magic to pull off.”

“Because–” He pauses and gets a shrewd look in his eyes. “That should be one of the three. If you want more magic knowledge, pay up.”

“I’m actually totally okay not knowing,” I lie. “I’m perfectly happy to remain blissfully ignorant of why healing potions are impossible, and will simply continue to bother you about how silly you’re being.”

Bashe narrows his eyes at me. “You’re lying.”

“I am! But which one of us will crack first?” I ask with a grin. “‘Cause it seems to me like there’s really no reason for you to be so fussy about this. Maybe you just don’t understand how healing magic works? Healing potions are super easy, so easy you don’t even have to be a mage to make one! Are you sure you know how healing works? I could educate you, if you’d like.”

“Fine!” the incubus hisses. “If it will get you to shut up, fine. Look, there are basically four kinds of healing, and the only kind that you can bottle is preservative healing: magic that is fast-acting and keeps you alive but doesn’t fix anything wrong with you. The kinds of healing magic that heal you quickly and completely… they’re dangerous, and rare, and definitely not something you can put in a bottle.”

“Gotcha. Noted.” So this system has harsh limits on healing magic. Why would it be designed that way? It’s obviously an artificial limitation since I was handed an exception to the rule. “Thanks for the intel. I did absolutely drink a healing potion, though.”

Bashe sighs and walks to one of the side doors. “Just one more impossible thing, I guess. Let’s see if we can find any other prisoners to free.”

We didn’t.

In one room we found a dead woman, chained to the wall, who had bitten off her own tongue to avoid slowly starving to death once the Contrite stopped bringing food. Her body had liquefied in some areas and ruptured in others, which was fascinating to look at but disgusting to smell. In another room we found scattered salt and scorch marks in the shape of a circle, but the door bar was intact with no signs of being forced open.

The final side room is barren, and I take the opportunity to ask Bashe, “So, tell me more about magic. When I mentioned narrative tropes, you reacted like those have actual power here, just only for some people. Wyldfae and spiritbound, right? What’s the story there? Why them and not imps?”

Bashe crosses his arms and chews his lip. “Give me a second to figure out how to answer that.”

“Sure.”

We head back into the main room and Bashe leans over to grab one of the scourges dropped by the sin eater–for whatever reason, they didn’t disappear when the monster did. He gives it a few experimental swings and I resist the urge to make a joke about him knowing his way around a whip, because I am an adult and have restraint (and definitely not just because I don’t want to interrupt storytime).

Bashe seems satisfied with the scourge, lets it dangle, and leans back against the far wall. “So there’s this phrase you’re going to hear a lot: ‘the essence of magic is the manipulation of meaning.’ That’s really all a spell is: you’re unleashing a packet of meaning-rich data into Pandaemonium and enacting a specific effect. That meaning can be personal, if you’re a scion, but for most of us it comes from on high.”

I eagerly take notes in my head and wish that I could sit down and start scribbling in one of my regrettably-bloodstained notebooks.

“I said there were five scions, and there’s a reason it’s specifically five: there are five Thrones that rule all magic. Each Throne is like a different lens, a different way that events and actions are framed and given meaning. Imps like me belong to the Throne of Shadow, and Shadow is all about will and want. Choice, free will, and individuality are enshrined at the very heart of Shadow magic… at least in theory,” he adds with a mutter.

Hmm. For an incubus, he really doesn’t seem that happy with his own ‘Throne.’ Interesting. Can we use that?

Bashe continues, “The Throne of Spirit, on the other hand, is all about the beliefs and values of the many. When people tell stories, those stories all have something to say about the world, about how things are, about how things should be. When you take that magic into yourself, when you bind yourself to that lens, it can affect you and the world around in ways you didn’t intend, because your intent isn’t what’s most important; the meaning isn’t coming from you, it’s coming from the collective that made you and empowered you to act, for better or worse.”

I frown. Fascinating. Narrative laws enshrined into the fabric of reality, but only when specific entities are involved, because the very nature of the meaning driving their magic is different between categories. “What about fae?”

The incubus grimaced. “Fae are thieving fucking vultures, that’s what. They murdered their own world and made off with its treasures like tomb robbers. One half of the fae, the Winter half, took the technology of the old world with them and made it part of their necromancy. The other half, the Summer half, took the stories with them and used those stories to expand their magic far beyond what it should have been. So the wyldfae are a mess of all sorts of spells and abilities because they have the benefit of drawing on a dead world’s stories, but it can also bind them and trap them into performing certain actions or abiding by certain rules.”

That is a whole bunch of really useful and cool information that I am itching to dig into and analyze but hold the fuck up did he just say that one half of the fae in this setting are techno-necromancers? Damn it that is almost worth wasting a question on. “Very interesting, thank you. You should be a teacher.” I wink.

Bashe ignores my wink. “My turn. How did you get the dagger and the potion?”

The Dreamweaver’s hands–or tentacles, they could be tentacles–wrap around my throat, and I answer him, “Oh, I’m pretty sure Azathoth gave me the potion when I asked for healing. I–”

“Nope! Nope, that’s not a thing,” Bashe interrupts me. “Wrong, incorrect, you are mistaken.”

I pout at the incubus. “C’mon, at least let me finish!”

“You’re just wrong here. Azathoth never, never, never intervenes directly. It’s one of the Dreaming Edicts.” Ooo those sound interesting. Maybe not worth burning a question for, but definitely something to pry out of him later. Bashe hesitates, then adds, “Nyarlathotep might send the Intercessor to act on her behalf, but not over something as trivial and petty as that.”

What? “What? What? What the fuck? Why the fuck did you just say ‘Nyarlathotep’ and when you said ‘her’ did you mean Azathoth or did you mean Nyarlathotep and what the fuck?”

Bashe looks surprised at my sudden questioning but I don’t care just answer the damn question! “Uh, okay, why are you freaking out all of a sudden?”

“Because,” I hiss, “I recognize that name! Nyarlathotep is another character from fiction back on Earth–the Zero Sphere, I mean. In the Mythos, Nyarlathotep is the most human of the Outer Gods, the most lucid of them, and the most malevolent of them.”

Bashekehi frowns. “For the record, I still don’t believe you, but that’s not an inaccurate description. The Demiurge is all of those things.” The imp actually looks uneasy now, not dismissive or irritated. “Just… keep telling your story.

I grit my teeth, desperate to know more, but the pressure around my throat tightens. “Fine. I fought a thing that wasn’t a ghost in an abandoned school and it stabbed me twice. While climbing some stairs I complained loudly at whatever entity was responsible for me being sent to this weird world. I demanded that it give me some kind of cheat ability or one-of-a-kind magic item, and godDAMN IT I’m just now realizing that bitch gave me exactly what I asked for. Fuck! Shit, fuck, shit, bastard, genie bastard bullshit. I’m gonna be pissed about that one for a while, ugh. Whatever. I asked for healing and the potion just appeared in my backpack. I drank some of it, it healed me, and I moved on.”

Bashe frowns, but he doesn’t challenge me on anything. “And the dagger?”

“Got a knife from the not-a-ghost, stabbed a spider-dog with it, the asshole faerie guy burned all the spider-dogs to death, and after he left I grabbed the now-crispy knife, gave it a name, and it burst into flames. Magic dagger!” This time, when the pressure eases off, it vanishes completely, and I breathe a sigh of relief as Azathoth’s attention leaves me…for the moment.

“That’s not–I mean that’s not how–what the fuck, Malice?” Bashe looks pained again, but he takes a deep breath and forces his expression back to neutrality. “Okay, that’s not really how artifacts are made in most systems, but maybe it’s some weird fae thing I don’t know about. Plausible.”

Definitely interrogating that later, but I have bigger fish to fry right now. Speaking of which… I rub my hands together. “Alright, final question.” Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep–

Bashe holds up a hand. “Wait. Before you ask your last question, there’s something I can show you that might change what you want to ask. Would you rather waste the question now or wait a few minutes and ask a better question?”

I shrug. “Yeah, sure. What are we looking at?”

Bashe opens the far door, the only one we haven’t gone through yet, and we enter a room with only one defining feature: an ornate mirror wide enough to fit three of me side-by-side, and tall enough to fit maybe one-and-a-half Malices.

It’s the first time I’ve seen my reflection in the new world and I immediately avert my gaze, catching only a flash of pale skin, chestnut hair, and a whole lot of dried blood. The incubus cuts a much more striking figure, somehow managing to look handsome and confident even starved, which I attribute to cheating. I examine the pretty gold filigree bordering smooth glass and find no scenes of torment or sinister designs, just artistic swoops and embellishments.

I glance at Bashe. “So…”

Bashe walks up to the mirror and puts his hand through it. His arm sinks into glass like a pool of water, and ripples flow outward from the point of entry. He smirks back at me. “First quirk of the Labyrinth: every mirror is a doorway. Step inside and get your first glimpse of the mirror-paths.” Then he steps through and vanishes, disappearing both from the room and from the mirror’s surface.

Right, well, that’s fucking awesome. Through the looking glass! I stroll over to the mirror and stick my leg through. I meet resistance, but only the kind you get when you try to move through water. I take a deep breath and plunge through.

I step out into an infinity of swirling color. A thousand overlapping kaleidoscopes shimmer and swirl, rainbows within rainbows twisting across a sky that stretches in all directions. Behind me I see the mirror that I stepped out of, which shows not my reflection but that of the room I was just in. Beneath me is a pane of glass that reflects the oscillating bands of color, red then green then blue, cyan to magenta to yellow. It’s a dizzying effect, and though I can tell the glass pathway goes forward I quickly lose track of it in the endless parade of dazzling light.

Two deviations break the chaos: straight ahead of me I see another mirror, twin to the mirror behind, but showing the reflection of a room with strange discolored walls and a floor of graying lichen. To my right, looming over everything, I see the tower of black glass.

The tower draws in light like a black hole, the rainbow colors blending together and warping as they swirl around the tower and are drawn in. The tower is jagged, sharp, less a work of careful engineering and more an angry shard of glass stuck in the skin of the world like a bad splinter. I blink my eyes to clear the disorientation and my perspective shifts, my interpretation of what I’m seeing changes; the tower isn’t drawing in light, all that color and light is bleeding from every shattered edge where the tower pierces the sky.

The tower looks close enough to touch, close enough to breathe on it. I take a half-step toward the tower and reach out a hand to try and feel its surface. Before my fingers can brush against black glass I am pulled back, Bashekehi grabbing me by the wrist. I glare at him, about to say something biting, but the look of panic on his face stops me. “What? It looked weird, so I wanted to touch it.”

A strangled noise escapes Bashe’s throat. “‘It looked weird?’ That is the worst motivation–” Bashe cuts himself off, clenches a fist, and forces a calmer expression onto his face. “Listen to me, Malice: I understand that you’re very curious and that being reckless comes very naturally to you, but this is not something you can afford to take risks with. Stick your hand in an open flame, shove your foot into a bear trap, but do not touch the Nightmare’s Heart. The monster keeping us all trapped here, the Nightmare Queen, she lives in that tower. Nothing good has ever come of drawing her attention.”

I must look unconvinced, because he keeps talking before I can get a word in. “Look, you may not place much value on your life or your sanity, but the consequences for messing with the Lady of Shards are dire. Whatever you do value–your identity, your drives, the things you think you know–can vanish in an instant if the Nightmare Queen whims it. Stay away from the Heart, and stay away from her.” His voice is full of gravity, so much so that I almost feel bad about what I’m about to say next. Almost.

“Ah. I think I’m here to kill her, actually.”

Bashe’s face goes blank in that way when it feels like your whole brain is restarting. Blue screen.

“See,” I continue, “I’m here for a reason. I obviously don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but back on the Zero Sphere we have lots of stories about plucky young girls–mostly boys, actually, but ignore that–getting whisked away to strange new lands where they acquire fantastical powers and steadfast allies. And, almost invariably in these otherworld stories, the protagonist falls into one of two roles: the Hero destined to save everyone from the local Dark Lord, or the Dark Lord destined to conquer the world.” I grin and spread my hands. “Now, who’s to say which one I am, but it doesn’t really affect the outcome much. If Azathoth–or Nyarlathotep, since you seem to think that’s more likely–brought me here as a Hero, killing the Nightmare seems like a sure bet to save everyone she’s imprisoned. And if Nyarlathotep brought me here to be the Dark Lord, well… dethroning the current dimensional ruler is an important step in conquering said dimension.”

“You’re insane,” he mumbles. “You’re actually, totally, completely insane.”

I make a so-so gesture. “Insanity’s kind of a buzzword: it doesn’t have a real medical meaning. Well, not where I’m from, I have no idea what psychiatry is like on your world. I do have a personality disorder, but it only includes, like, the teensiest bit of psychosis, arguably none.”

“Malice.”

“My point is: it may seem ridiculous to you, but do you have a better explanation? A girl from the Zero Sphere, gifted a miracle in a bottle by powers unknown, wielding a dagger that defies your understanding of artifacts. Who else could have arranged that but the Dreamweaver or the Demiurge? And if the Demiurge really did bring me here, then why? Why bring me to the Labyrinth? Why set me on such a path that within a single day of arriving here I’ve bargained magic from a faerie and freed an imp from his years-long imprisonment? It’s because Nyarlathotep has a story for me to play out. This Labyrinth is a stage, a theater, and she’s brought me here to be the lead actor in the Labyrinth’s final play.”

“Or you’re delusional,” he counters, “and lucky. The only evidence that you came from the Zero Sphere is that you remember that you came from the Zero Sphere, and memories can be tampered with. Even if you were from the Zero Sphere–and to be very clear, you are not–that wouldn’t make you special enough to kill something as old and powerful as the Lady of Shards. She predates physics, Malice.”

I shrug, then blink as I realize what he just said. “Okay, well, we’re absolutely unpacking that later because–and I can’t believe I keep saying this–what the actual fuck, HOWEVER: I don’t intend on killing her right away. First I need to figure out the magic system and use it to amass power. And on that note…I’m ready to ask my final question.”

My dialogue starts light, but by the end of it I’m fully serious. This is important. The most important question of the three, the one that I knew I had to ask from the moment I heard the word. There are so many tantalizing secrets that I want to tease out of the incubus, but in the end only one is important enough to spend my final question on.

“Bashekehi…can a mortal become a god, or something like unto a god? In this world, can a human reach apotheosis?”

Something new creeps into Bashe’s gaze as he looks at me more closely than ever before, peering at something only he can see. Softly, he murmurs, “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen your soul clearly, Malice. The first moment I’ve seen the chaos harmonize. There was a hint of it, when I told you I could make you live longer, but that was nothing compared to this.”

I tense, not happy that he can read me, but I persist with my questioning. “Can a mortal human become a god?” Unspoken is the true question, the question that Bashe has just seen in my soul: Can I become a god?

The incubus keeps me pinned with his judging gaze, and when he speaks his voice is still so very soft. “That is, in fact, the only way that gods are made.”