Rita and Alice crept through the open doorway, wariness in every step. The hallway did not look especially dangerous or eerie, it was just… impossible. The doorway was in the middle of open ground and a quick peek behind it revealed only a smooth slab of concrete at its back. By all rights, all they should have been able to see through it was a flat, concrete wall, but the passage disappeared around a corner in the distance.

“This isn’t just me, right?” Rita asked, carefully poking one of the stacks of wooden pallets leaning against the wall. They seemed oddly fused together. “This should be impossible, right?”

“I think we’ve established that magic is a thing. I don’t think ‘impossible’ is much of an obstacle,” Alice replied, poking the wall with her makeshift spear. It made the flat ‘chink’ sound of tapping on a very thick wall. Not even the slightest hint of hollowness.

“This is still fucking impossible. Makes my head hurt,” Rita muttered.

Lacking any other real direction to go but along the featureless hallway, they set off to follow the path. There were not even any doors in the walls. Rita had never realized how weird and artificial a corridor could look without any doors in it.

As soon as they turned the corner, they heard the door behind them slam shut. A quick peek confirmed that yes, they were indeed stuck inside now.

“Well, not that it matters,” Alice commented. “It’s not like we want to go back to the circus, right?”

“I’m more worried about what exactly closed the door,” Rita replied.

Ahead of them, the corridor turned again, this time into a long, cramped staircase upwards. It was narrow enough that it would have been a bit claustrophobic for them to climb had they still been human. With eight legs it was downright uncomfortable, forcing them to stretch their legs out in front and behind and walk only with their knees. It looked very much like a maintenance access built for gnomes.

Alice went in front, holding her spear out ahead of her and forcing anything coming from that side to have to navigate its pointy tip. It was a tense minute as they climbed, unable to move too quickly or easily turn around, hemmed in by the walls on either side. Eventually they reached the door at the top, a simple wooden one with a blank brass sheet where a handle would be.

Luckily, it was already opened a crack and with but a gentle nudge from the tip of Alice’s spear, it creaked open all the way.

“Hmm,” Alice commented as she peered through the open doorway, before stepping through.

Shortly thereafter, Rita also collapsed through the door with a sense of relief and out onto a metal walkway, her legs finally able to extend to the sides again.

The floor, the walls and even the ceiling was made of the same what appeared to be iron latticework that was curved and twisted into strange, eye-catching shapes that disappeared if you looked directly at them. It made the whole thing seem like an elongated, squirmy metal prison, suspended in the sky. Outside was nothing but an endless ocean of blue mist in all directions.

Set into each side of the walkway were three handle-less wooden doors, identical to the door that they had just arrived through, except closed with no way to open. At the far end, it ended in a passage through a vast, craggy, brown wall that curved away to the sides as far as the eye could see. Which, admittedly, was not very far. The blue fog surrounding them was quite thick.

“What do you think?” Alice asked, inspecting the doors.

“I’m not sure what to think,” Rita admitted. “Wait, shh, do you hear that?”

Faintly, barely audible, was the sound of a woman screaming in terror.

“Is that… Ava?” Alice asked. It seemed to be coming from one of the walls.

They both scrambled towards the wall next to one of the doors, peering through the metal bars in the direction they heard the screaming from. Suddenly, the mist in that direction cleared and they could see what appeared to be a large round garden from above, filled with large patches of dead growth, as if the life in them had been sucked out.

In the middle, cocooned and barely visible inside a mass of vines and roots, was an exhausted and panicked looking Ava slowly being dragged towards a giant toothy potato in one corner of the garden.

“We have to help her!” Rita exclaimed.

“Rita, there’s nothing we can do for her from here,” Alice replied.

“The door! We have to get the door open…” Rita scrabbled at the door, but there was nothing for her fingers to get a hold of. It had no handle, and she had nothing to pull it open by, even if it had not been locked.

“Well, it’s too late now,” Alice said, still staring out through the mist. “Ava just got eaten.”

Rita stared at her, a look of horror on her face, then rushed back to look through the mist again. Sure enough, Ava was gone, and the overgrown potato appeared to be chewing. Blood was leaking out of its mouth.

Rita jerked away, covering her mouth. That was… that was horrible! Ava had been the closest thing she had had to a friend in this horrid place, apart from Alice who did not count due to technically being her. And she was just… gone. Tears began forming in her eyes.

“Wow. That sucks. If only she had stayed focused in contact, whatever that means,” Alice said.

“What?”

Alice pointed at some of the shapes in the patterns of the metal bars. “That’s what it says here. ‘Stay focused in contact’.”

Sure enough, there was writing worked into the pattern of the latticework in the area where they had been peering through at Ava.

“Oh hey, here’s more,” Alice said from the opposite side. “’Pain is turned against you’. How cryptic.”

“How can you be so calm!” Rita shouted. “Ava just died!”

Alice held up her hands defensively. “Look, I didn’t really know her, okay? I was frothing at the mouth while you guys pow-wowed. I mean, I can remember her, and it sucks that she died, but it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you and at the end of the day that’s what matters to me.”

“How can you be so cold?” Rita asked, tears streaking down her face.

Alice sighed. “We can mourn her properly later, okay? For now, unless you want to lose Samual as well, we need to figure out what ‘Pain is turned against you’ means.” She pointed through the wall next to her and Rita ran over to peer through.

Just like on the opposite side, the mist parted as they looked, and revealed a primitive fighting pit. A muddy basin surrounded by wooden poles planted into the ground to make walls formed an extremely barbaric looking arena. Blood, both dried and new, was spattered over every visible surface.

Standing on the slippery mud, clinging to his mace and shield, was a very tired looking Samual. His armor was caked in mud and dried blood and he was panting for breath.

Across from him was a big, lumpy, meaty blob of flesh and metal. It looked like someone had melted a lump of lard before wrapping it in sharp, jagged metal chains that bit into the flesh, leaving open, weeping sores. Two stubby arms were similarly wrapped in chain but left long lengths of chain hanging free past its large, meaty hands. Metal spikes appear to have been hammered through various parts of its anatomy like grotesque piercings.

None of that appeared to slow it down, though. As she watched, Rita saw the Lump wind up and swing with a length of chain. Samual clearly braced himself for the blow but was smashed off his feet and sent flying anyway. He landed in the mud and lay still.

“Oh no, Samual!” Rita exclaimed. “Samual! Get up! Don’t you dare die on me too!”

To both of their surprise, Samual looked up at them as he slowly climbed to his feet. Then he shouted something incomprehensible back at them before shaking himself off and turning back to his adversary. The Lump seemed strangely happy to sit there and wait for him to get back on his feet.

“We can’t understand him without your thingy,” Alice said.

“Right… okay…” Rita fished out her circuit board from her sock. Then she took out the bottle of essence that Ava had given her and nearly started crying again, thinking of Ava. There was only a tiny little bit left after she had been liberally applying it all day whenever she had to talk. Still, this was no time to break down or be stingy. She swallowed her sorrow and tipped the last bit of essence out and onto her translator.

Then she took a deep breath and shouted.

Samual was irritated. The disgusting lump of flesh and chain had been sitting there, stymying his attempts to kill it for what felt like hours. Every time he tried to get close, it smacked him back with those damn chains!

And it hit like a freaking runaway cart. Even channelling his patron to shore up his guard as he had done in the battle with the worm had not prevented him from being sent flying when struck. Most of his time had been spent catching his breath and recovering after each failed attempt.

He cracked his neck as he waited for his broken arm to finish setting, the steady pain of the bone knitting itself back together a reminder of his patron’s blessing. Thank goodness he had that, otherwise recovering between hits would have been impossible. Even if it did hurt like crazy.

He eyed the Lump. It was still sitting in place, glaring at him with beady red eyes sank into its grotesque flesh, and making no move to approach, just as it had done since it had fallen down from above, shortly after he had found himself in this place. It had a few scratches and cuts where he had managed to strike it, but no serious wounds.

It did not seem to be healing, but he had not managed to cause anything that could be considered serious damage, despite managing to connect with a solid hit with almost as much power behind it as he could channel from his patron. This thing was seriously tough.

Flexing his hand, he tested his grip. Good enough. The Lump’s blows broke bones anyway, no point in wasting time waiting for them to fully heal. He had a schedule to keep, and he had to get moving if he wanted to wear it down anytime soon.

His mace gripped tightly in one hand and his shield in the other, he stepped forward. He grit his teeth and winced as he drew deep from the seemingly bottomless well of his patron’s power. As deep as he could stand.

Time slowed down, his muscles surged with strength and a sensation not unlike bathing in white hot metal seared his every nerve ending.

The Lump swung one of its chains in a lazy arc, easy enough to duck under, before following up with another, faster blow from the other side. This one he parried successfully with his shield, even though it rattled his teeth as it struck and glanced off to the side.

Darting forward in a gap in the thing’s defence, his mace struck a clean hit on its arm, sending ripples of force through the creature’s flesh. It tanked the blow that would have shattered a normal man like a champ, the only signs of injury the grunt of pain it gave.

An unexpected retaliatory backhand strike knocked him several steps backwards and almost off his feet, and he barely managed to get his shield up in time before a chain slammed into him with a brutal crunch and sent him sprawling again, out of range.

He lay in the mud, letting out a sigh as he felt his bones realign themselves. Shit. Again it wasn’t enough. He just needed a little bit more. More power, more speed…

From somewhere above, Rita’s voice shouted at him in her usual gibberish.

Samual slowly climbed to his feet, his bones mostly back in place and healed up, and peered up at the sky to where he had heard her from. Sure enough, he could see movement up above through thinner parts of the omnipresent blue mists.

“I can’t understand you! Go away!” he shouted back. Damn monster. She had complicated things when the group had decided to take her along, and now she was bothering him while he was trying to defeat his Guardian and get his question answered. She had no direct impact on his plans either way, so he did not care if Ava wanted to adopt her like a pet, but she was still irritating. If they had let him kill her back in the camp, things would have been so much simpler.

“Samual! It says, ‘Pain is turned against you’!” she shouted again. She must have fixed or repowered or whatever her tronic, as he could understand her. The words, at least. She made about as much sense as usual.

“What?” he shouted back, frustrated at the constant interruption.

“The note for you! It’s sort of like a clue or a goal or something! It says, ‘Pain is turned against you’! Does that help? Do you know what it means?”

Samual rolled his eyes. What was she going on about? And what did that have to do with fighting…

He stopped. Then he counted the places where he had landed after the monster had bashed him with those chains.

Could that be it? Could it be that simple?

“Samual? Are you okay? You’re just standing there…” Rita shouted again.

“Yes,” Samual replied. Then after an awkward pause, he added, “thank you.”

He rolled his shoulders, easing the last of the kinks out as the healing finished. Then he stepped forward towards the Lump once more.

It swung one of its chains in a sweeping motion. Was it moving slower? It was hard to tell. If he was wrong, he was going to be crushed possibly beyond even the ability of his patron to heal him, but all the evidence supported his conclusion. It was the right call, even if he ended up being wrong.

He raised his shield…

“Be careful!” Rita shouted.

The chain struck him with all the force of a gentle summer breeze, clanging harmlessly off his shield. He barely even felt it.

Samual nearly laughed. So, he was right. What an ingenious challenge. So simple too.

When the other chain swung from the opposite side, he did not even bother blocking it. It struck his armour with about the same impact as the first. The Lump struck out with one of its huge, meaty fists and Samual had to suppress the instinct to tap into his patron’s power at the sight of the huge fist coming right at him.

Sure enough, when it struck it was like being flailed at by a toddler. The blow had no force behind it and Samual took the opportunity to smash it with his mace, breaking one of its big, sausage-like fingers.

It was so obvious once he actually looked at the marks in the mud and linked them up to the various times he had tried to attack. The distance he had been tossed back by its blows had grown further and further the harder he had leaned into his patron. Each time he had tapped into his patron’s power, and the pain surged through his body, it had empowered the monster as much as it did him. No wonder he had felt like he had been getting nowehere!

Without leaning into his patron, however, he was still a human, with muscles, while the monster in front of him was, apparently, just a lump.

The once powerful Lump flailed pathetically at him as he worked it over with his mace, bones cracking and flesh rupturing beneath his blows. Eventually, it stopped moving completely.

“Well?” Samual shouted up at the sky once he had caught his breath and wiped off the sweat. He could tap into his patron’s blessing to recover faster but did not want to risk waking the Lump up again.

“T̶H̸E̴ ̶G̴U̴A̴R̶D̸I̷A̷N̷ ̷F̵A̵L̵L̸S̴. S̷T̴A̸T̴E̸ ̷Y̸O̷U̸R̵ ̶D̴E̵S̴I̸R̶E̵.”

The sudden voice surprised him, but Samual did not hesitate. This moment was the culmination of years of planning and preparation and he had thought about what he was going say for a long time, ever since he had discovered what the Tree could do. He knew exactly what he had to ask.

“How do I escape my fate?”

There was a pause. Then the eerie voice spoke again.

Three words that caught him completely off guard.

He blinked in surprise at the voice’s response, then looked up at the patch of clouds that Rita had spoken to him from. There was no sign of her now.

“Huh. Interesting,” he finally said.