A flash of rainbow maelstrom and the ever-present dark tower is all I see before I’m stumbling, slipping, falling through a chaos of color and then just as quickly gone from the space between worlds, through another mirror and out the other side into a brand-new area.

I hit the ground and my side flares with pain where Mahiri kicked me. My lungs protest as they struggle for air in a state of breathlessness that is becoming reprehensibly commonplace. I clutch at my injured side and slip a hand beneath my shirt to feel for broken ribs, but though waves of pain follow every finger-press I don’t actually think the bone is cracked. So just bruised, then. Phew.

…Wow. That’s an actual genuine relief. A bruised rib is a relief now. I hate what my life has become.

I take a deep breath–ow, ow, ow–and push off the ground into at least a sitting position. The ground is… weird, here. I blink away my disorientation and look at what I’m actually pressing on: it’s fabric. Huh. I guess that explains why the fall was just painful and not bone-shattering.

I’m on what looks like a bunch of ribbons of fabric stretched over each other thick enough to create firm ground that’s no more yielding than topsoil. Beyond me is an absolute eyesore: bridges of interwoven ribbons in a dozen colors criss-crossing over a bottomless pit like spider’s thread, lit by sourceless roaming spotlights. Overhead is a big top tent in signature white-and-red, like the kind you’d see at a circus.

In every direction it all stretches into infinity, and I can see that same curvature trick that gave the Mourner’s realm a sense of dimension despite the lack of any real border to the worldspace. I suspect that if I walk for a while, I’ll start getting more of those scene transitions that became scarce in the city proper.

I slowly clamber to my feet–or at least I try to move slowly, but I lift up too fast and nearly pull a muscle. The atmosphere in the Mourner’s bubble was oppressive and choking, like swimming through tar, and it took extra effort just to move. But here, inside the Reveler’s maze, there’s an odd buoyancy underlying every movement that makes every motion too easy. I feel like there’s static electricity crackling over my limbs.

I stretch my body carefully and try to get acclimated to the new atmosphere. “Well, that was unpleasant,” I groan to Cheshire, who flickers into view next to me.

She winces sympathetically. “Yeah, that did not look fun.”

I glance up, looking for the mirror that I fell through, but I can’t find it. I frown, but before I can ask Cheshire about it I hear echoing hyena-like laughter coming from multiple directions. A quick sweep of the area shows me the source: four humanoid creatures–more than humanoid, human, but animalistic in movement–loping on all-fours, sprinting at me from separate ribbon-bridges.

From a distance, I can tell that they’re wearing even less than the last pack of monsters were: strips of gauzy cloth in many colors wrapped around only the most necessary areas to maintain their decency. Cheshire hisses, “Celebrants!” and I have a name for these new creatures. “Don’t let them touch you!”

“Yeah, remember that from the Lost,” I mutter. “Gods I hate this place. I literally just got here!”

Okay, running time. Those fuckers are moving fast, so there’s no time to get fancy or clever. I call [Swarmheart] to one hand and point at the Celebrants with my other hand. “[Carrion Swarm]: bury them in centipedes!” I unleash the spell and watch a mass of horrid, wriggly, creepy-crawly centipedes appear at the intersection where the ribbon-bridges my opponents are on meet mine. I don’t stick around to see how that pans out.

I race away from the Celebrants, picking the direction that seems furthest in opposition. I start running. I am still not in shape–we really need to get a spell that’ll fix that–and my bruised ribs hurt with every step, but I ignore my body’s protests and move as fast as I can.

While I run, I swap the bug stone for the knife I infused with a tracking spell. Running aimlessly might get me away from the Celebrants, but it definitely won’t help me escape the maze and evade Averrich’s hunters. But though I’m clutching [Hunter’s Marker] in my hand, I don’t sense my quarry anywhere.

I hiss at the knife and try to reach for its spell effect in my mind. I can feel, in that strange intangible way, the knife trying to point me toward Averrich, but it comes up blank like a 404 error. “Cheshire, what the fuck?” I ask between gasping breaths. “Why isn’t it working?”

Cheshire, who is gliding alongside me because the cheating bastard doesn’t have a corporeal form right now, looks at the knife and winces again. “Ah, that’s because we’re in a dream bubble. The spell you copied can’t track targets while they’re in another world.”

That nearly gets me to stop in my tracks, though luckily I restrain that impulse. “What?” I need my lungs for running, so I have to hope she gets my meaning from that alone.

Cheshire seems to pick up on the unspoken part, as she winces for a third time since arriving in this wretched space. “Right, Dara was your guide. His explanation was technically correct but misleading if you lack context.”

I spare a glance back at the Celebrants and find that they’ve collided with the centipedes and begun eating the bugs. They’re all laughing, but two of them are fighting over the same insect–actually, wait, centipedes are a different class of arthropod–and clawing at each other with overgrown fingernails. One of them is ignoring the centipedes clinging to them and still charging at me full-force, but it stumbles and nearly falls into the pit, only barely scrabbling back onto the bridge.

“Dream bubbles are just nested, subordinate throne worlds. This whole place is the Reveler’s soul, which can manifest a stable worldspace indefinitely because the Labyrinth isn’t trying to reassert its own reality–why would it, when the Reveler is just a piece of a piece of the Maze-Maker?”

I am a piece of a piece of me. The phrase from the school, scrawled on the walls in the room with the doll. This new revelation is maddening, but I don’t have time to analyze it because the Celebrants are gaining on me.

The pack of four is loping toward me, one in the lead, all the centipedes swept aside or eaten. None of them seem to be bleeding from the centipede bites, damn it, but the two that were scratching at each other are bleeding. I can work with that, but first I need to take out the front-runner.

I whirl to face the monsters, trade [Hunter’s Marker] for [Swarmheart], and call out, “[Carrion Swarm]: stag beetles! [Swarmheart]: Madame Hornsby! CHARGE!”

In rapid succession I see a swarm of stag beetles burrow out of the ribbon-bridge, melt into buggy goo, and reform into a much larger stag beetle. Madame Hornsby, iridescent and majestic, immediately charges the leading runner at full speed.

The crazed, half-naked, ghoul-like Celebrant merely laughs and pounces on the charging stag beetle as it gets close. The mad monster keeps laughing as Madame Hornsby keeps charging, momentum and mindless obedience sending both of them soaring off the side of the ribbon-bridge and down toward the infinite pit below.

You were the best of us, Madame Hornsby. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten. The remaining three are gaining fast, but two of them have given me an opening. I reach a hand in the direction of a bleeder and cry, “[Exsanguinate]!” I clench my fist to punctuate the cry, because that seems like the kind of thing this magic system would appreciate.

A dozen shallow cuts rupture and widen into brutal lacerations, and the wounded Celebrant immediately stumbles and collapses, bleeding profusely but still laughing. Its fellows halt their running, turn sharply to look upon their fallen peer, and pounce. The Celebrants tear into their comrade with jagged nails and filthy teeth, grasping and biting in ways that seem disturbingly close to sexual, and through the whole process they’re all still laughing.

I watch the carnage in undisguised horror. I let out a deep, nervous breath, and I realize that the pain in my side is gone. I poke at where the wound used to be and feel nothing out of the ordinary. Parasitic transfusion at work. Absolutely worth the cost.

“We shouldn’t stick around,” Cheshire reminds me, and I nod.

“Yes, right. Back to running. Somewhere.” I set off at a more comfortable jog, still just aiming to get away from the Celebrants. It feels wrong to jog, though, like my body could go faster and thus should go faster. That static feeling, the buoyancy, it’s pushing me to push my body to its limits. “Ugh, how is this maze worse than the last one? The atmosphere, the horrid circus aesthetic, and the bastardfuck fast zombies. That’s the worst kind of zombie! Legitimately, why are these so much more violent than the Lost?”

Cheshire, who is still gliding alongside me like a cheater–and now that I think about, there are practical reasons as well as petty that I should manifest her first chance I get–responds, “Well, think about it: are you usually more destructive when you’re manic or depressed?”

I roll my eyes. “Bah, I can ruin my life in any mood. Wait.” Click. “Oh, you’re kidding me. Oh, fuckshit dammit. That’s what the ‘Beast of Lamentation and Euphoria’ is, isn’t it? Of course it is, because all this throne world shit comes back to psychology and belief and mindset. Magic and meaning, ‘cause magic is meaning. So the Mourner makes depression zombies, and the Reveler makes mania zombies, because those are the two halves of the Beast behind them both. Motherfucker.”

I’m still swearing when I cross the arbitrary threshold into a new zone of the dream bubble. Gone are the ribbon-bridges and big top tent, replaced by giant wooden blocks that are colored and engraved like children’s toys. The toy blocks are stacked in infinitely-recurring piles and some of them are stuck frozen in the air to form pathways from pile to pile. Some are frozen in the act of tumbling down toward the pit or tumbling up toward the ceiling. The background of this room–I suspect it would be accurate to think of it as the skybox of a video game level–is the inside of a toy chest.

I come to a stop at the edge of one block and take a seat, already feeling the strain of all this physical exertion. “Okay. Quick pause to figure out what the fuck we’re going to do, and also to get you a body.” I summon the charm bracelet and manifest Cheshire, who luxuriates in the act of stretching her limbs. “Ideas?” I ask the catgirl.

“I mean, there’s the obvious: your artifact may not help, but you still have a spell that’s perfect for the occasion. You’ve used it for this exact scenario before.”

I hiss at her and clutch the brand on my right hand. “I’ve already used it twice! This is the last one, and I can’t just waste it. I sold my name for this spell. At some point I’m going to have to kill a fae because of this spell, and that’s entirely separate from the other fae that I have to kill. It’s such a waste to burn two out of three uses on navigating a maze.”

“Okay, then get caught by the hunters or the Reveler and die here. Those are your options.” Cheshire’s voice is firm, and her expression is serious. “You can’t deal with Averrich or Eirdryd if you never escape the maze.”

“Argh, I know that… but it’s just so inefficient. If I could–wait, idea. If I ask it to lead me to something outside the maze, rather than just leading me to the exit, I’ll get a path to freedom and still extract value. There’s just the question of what I ask for.”

“Something to help you beat Averrich,” Cheshire suggests, “since that seems like your immediate goal. A weapon uniquely suited to killing him, or an ally that’ll be good in a fight with him.”

“Good idea. Hmm.” I hold up my branded hand and burn my last spell charge. “[Find the Path]: lead me to that beyond the maze which would be most helpful in defeating Averrich.”

The wheel of flame spins to life, spokes forming into an arrow, and then the brand vanishes from my hand, leaving my porcelain skin smooth and unblemished. I have my path, and I have a goal. And maybe, just maybe, I have a shot at killing that bastard fae who threw me in this maze.

Cheshire stiffens and points at something off in the distance. I glance in that direction and catch sight of the reaver with a crossbow and dog. He’s just finished clambering over a tricky block and has definitely seen me, because he’s loading his crossbow.

“Fuck. [Carrion Swarm]: crows for the eyes!”

My summoned crows fly at the reaver and peck at his eyes, but he gets a shot off first and it nails me in the shoulder, piercing right through my cape and blouse. I scream and pain floods my nervous system, that arm immediately going dead. I clutch at the bolt, hesitate for only a moment, and then do the one thing you’re never supposed to do: I pull it out.

The bolt hurts even worse leaving than it did entering, and I nearly double over with pain. Blood flows freely, staining my blouse, and my knuckles go even whiter from clutching the crossbow bolt.

At the same time, I see Cheshire shapeshift into a hawk and begin flying straight for the goblin dog. The hideous monster dog takes off at a run, horrible human eyes locked on me, but Cheshire flies up to it as a hawk and transforms into a lion at the last moment. The lion slams into the dog and both careen perilously close to the edge. They scrap, trading bites and scratches.

I try to split my attention between their fight and the reaver’s struggle with the crows, an attempt made more difficult by the awful, awful pain that is now partly self-inflicted. “[Carrion Swarm]: another round of crows,” I croak out. The reaver draws his sidearm and slashes at the crows, but with the arrival of the second batch he cries out in pain and one of the corvids swallows something. I see blood, and I immediately exploit that opportunity with a shouted “[Exsanguinate]!”

Blood ruptures from the reaver’s face, and I feel the wound in my shoulder begin to knit close. It’s not instant like the bruised ribs, but this is definitely a far worse wound. The healing starts to slow before it’s finished, and I see another pair of crows die by the sword, so I cast another “[Exsanguinate]!” and hope it’ll be enough. Blood flows and flesh knits.

In her scrap with the goblin dog, I see Cheshire finally grapple the mutt and put all her leonine weight into rolling off the side of the giant toy block. Both lion and dog fall toward the pit below, but only one of them vanishes into the dark. Cheshire flies out of the pit as a crow and joins my summons, transforming into a wolf as she arrives.

She’s bleeding from a few wounds, but still looking strong, and she easily pins the reaver to the ground. He’s in bad shape, far worse than Mahiri was after my spell, and I race to get the kill before he becomes ineligible for my coup de grace.

Cheshire knows what I’m after and injures without killing, focusing her efforts on crippling his limbs. I reach the still-shouting reaver, crouch down, and cast “[Prey Upon]: all mana.”

The Abyssal darkness takes hold, and the reaver breathes his last.

And just like that, with almost callous ease, I have taken another life.