38.

Into dark, boundless halls

The atmosphere when they woke up and began preparing the next morning was apprehensive. Dominic had confidence that they could make it out unhurt, but the place they were headed was still completely uncharted territory. There were bound to be surprises lurking, and he doubted they were going to be nice. Marion, the Marshal enthusiast, had put it similarly to how the king had said it: “The truly devout could be…eccentric. Because one facet of creation was, after all, chaos.”

The three of them stood in front of the rock face—the panther having left to patrol its territory—anxiously taking in its grandeur. Marion was the only one who didn’t seem worried in the slightest, an excited smile on her face and notebook at the ready.

Dominic stepped forward and slipped his hand under the vines. The rock was freezing cold to the touch, shielded all day from the Sun because of its sheer height. He injected his mana into it. Gold lines spread outwards, lining the huge insignia that had been engraved on the stone long ago. He forced his mana inside, flowing through the circuits and greasing the gears. A tiny seam, jagged like the lines between bricks, appeared in the rock. It quickly turned into a thin crack, then a widening rift. The doors drew themselves aside, stopping with a loud, low boom once they opened entirely.

A gaping, black hole stood before them now, leading straight into the rock. Marion activated her lamp, letting it float by her side, and lit it.

Taking one last breath of the clear jungle air, Dominic wordlessly walked inside. When all three had stepped in, the doors once again groaned, the huge slabs of stone moving on their own, and cranked shut behind them. Aster held onto the back of his robes tightly, eyes wide. Dominic touched his fingers to the doors again, and calmly turned away.

“It’s fine,” he said. “The mechanism is still the same. It’ll open once we return.”

He glanced over at Aster, who was already mildly terrified.

“I could open it now, if you want to go back,” he suggested.

Aster clenched his hand, then shook his head. He popped into crow form, nestling into Dominic’s shoulder.

“I’ll stay,” he said, decision unwavering.

Dominic just nodded.

“Okay.”

They continued deeper into the hall. A small breeze was floating through the cavernous structure, and as he oriented himself with the scents that were coming to him, his brow furrowed a bit.

“This is a maze,” he said. He could tell from the way the mana twisted and turned that the Marshal ‘monastery’ was really structured like a giant, confusing network of corridors, rooms, and side paths that led nowhere.

“That makes sense,” Marion replied, jotting something down. “Marshals were infamous for their labyrinths. Many adventurers would challenge them just for the sheer thrill of it, much to the annoyance of the nuns and monks that actually lived there.”

She chuckled to herself.

“Though I’m sure they found it at least a bit entertaining, seeing the laymen struggle.”

“Did any of the adventurers lose their lives in the mazes?” Dominic asked.

“No, not if it was inhabited,” Marion answered, shaking her head. “Despite their eccentricity, these places were very well managed.”

That made their exploration feel a little less risky, though the labyrinth they were in was definitely uninhabited. There was no safety net of Marshal monks running over to help them.

“Oh, how beautiful,” Marion murmured, inspecting the engravings on the hallway walls.

Dominic glanced up, following her gaze. They were simple drawings—carved into the stone as if they had been done with only a chisel and hammer—depicting trees with thick trunks and hanging branches, imitating the forest outside. When he looked closely, there were also tiny monkeys perched on the branches, and the etched vines spiraled and swirled as if in motion, just like the annoying ones they had met so many times.

She sketched them down in her notebook in a few fluid, practiced strokes.

“Do you see these kinds of designs a lot?” Dominic asked.

“Well, there are variations,” she replied. “It’s fairly common for them to depict the surrounding environment. It’s like symbolically recreating the outside world, the way Mars created the world itself.”

Marion jotted down a few last notes under the sketch, then glanced over at Dominic.

“I’m done now. Shall we continue?”

His eyes lingered a moment longer on the etching before turning away.

“Sure.”

The hall quickly forked into three possible roads—left, forward, and right.

“…Should we mark the wall or something?” Aster asked, nervous about the decision.

“No need,” Dominic replied.

“Why?”

He just tapped his nose.

“Right is…full of rats,” he said. “Left continues for a while, and forward is…a big room?”

In the midst of the dusty, stale air of the abandoned monastery, a wisp of something that smelled slightly fresher came from the hallway directly ahead. It either meant there was a leak in the roof, or that a larger chamber had opened up.

“Big room,” Marion said, eyes twinkling.“Let’s go there.”

Dominic had no complaints. They moved forward. The engravings of jungle trees continued on the walls, and Marion somehow sketched them down onto paper while moving, her hand a blur.

“It looks like you’re quite experienced,” Dominic remarked, watching her work.

“Does it?” she replied, not looking up. “Well, I guess I am. After working on a few, you kind of get used to the patterns and style they use. It’s easy to repeat.”

She smiled softly.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the lines. Simple enough that anyone could become a craftsman, if they had faith.”

There was a hint of wistfulness in her voice, a warmth that floated in her mana and reflected on her face in the dim glow of the lantern light.

“The Marshals took anyone who came to them,” she said, “The poor, the hurt, the lost—I mean, they even tolerated the annoying adventurers that trespassed every now and then. Because the god of all things is the god of all things. No one in the world can be condemned under Mars.”

“Not even the evil and twisted?” Dominic asked.

“Not even them. Though, in practice, I’m sure very few Marshals were willing to let a real son of a bitch inside.”

“Even the most accepting people can’t always reform evil.”

“It wasn’t about reforming anything.”

The sound of sketching echoed through the corridor.

“The basis of the Marshal faith was that the world is perfect as it is,” she said. “You don’t need to change anything about it. Therefore, even the evil don’t need to be made good. Their existence is in line with the doctrine.”

“Then the Marshal faith preaches that everything should remain the same?” Dominic replied.

“That is a very crude way of putting it.”

For the first time, Marion seemed a bit angry.

“The Marshal faith,” she said, looking up at Dominic, “preaches that everything is allowed to exist as it is. You, the drawings on these walls, the vines that hunt for meat outside, the panther that followed you here, the trees in the jungle and the grasses on the plains and the king in the capital—”

She reached out and tapped the end of her pencil on Dominic’s nose.

“—all of it is perfect the way it is. You are enough, just as you are. You don’t need to change for anyone, and least of all for Mars.”

She returned to sketching again, and the hint of anger that had been there slowly melted away.

“And if you do change,” she continued, “then you are still perfect as you are. Because you continue to exist, and Mars is the god of existence.”

She smiled.

“No matter what happens, the world still loves you.”

“Even if the world is cruel?”

“The world isn’t cruel, Dominic.”

He watched as she jotted down a monkey on her sketch, the tiny animal mid leap between tree branches.

“People are cruel. Circumstances are cruel. But the world is the world. If somebody threw a stone at you, could you blame the rock?”

“If the world cannot be cruel, then how can the world love anyone?”

She laughed at that, her voice echoing sharply through the hall.

“Because Mars is a god, Dominic!” she replied. “The earth underneath your feet might not have feelings, but divinity is more than just soil. A god can love, and Mars has chosen to. It’s that easy.”

Dominic pursed his lips. The things Marion talked about felt strange to him. There was no such thing as a Marshal Church left in Vaine anymore—hardly a mention of their god remained in the history books at all. The Ashans held a monopoly over religion, and their doctrine was nothing like what he was hearing now. Heavy-handed. Exclusive. Orderly. That was what religion was supposed to be: a structured, tiered organization. And yet the Marshals, long dead and gone from these halls, were saying that it wasn’t.

“…I thought you said you weren’t a Marshal,” he remarked.

Marion laughed.

“Well, it’s not like I go around building labyrinths. I just…”

She hesitated, then shook her head softly.

“You’ll understand it someday, Dominic,” she said. “Just like this old lady.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but in the end didn't reply. He didn’t feel like pretending he understood, not in these dark halls.

Their footsteps, though the same, began to echo louder and louder. It was easy to tell that they were nearing a large space.

At the end of the hall, a huge, rectangular room opened up, the floor dropping several stories downwards into the ground. Unlike the dark hallway, the rim of the ceiling was lit with glowing stones at intervals, just barely emitting enough light for them to be able to see the floor below.

There were no ladders, no steps, not even a chute leading down—just a sheer drop. He turned to Marion, only to find her fiddling with a couple of bricks at the edge of the wall. She felt them with her fingers, then expertly pressed them in a specific order, eventually forming a figure-eight.

There was silence for a moment, and then the loud, mechanical grinding of stone and gears. Marion clapped her hands together softly.

“Oh, how wonderful,” she said. “It still works.”

A rectangular doorway opened up in the wall, leading downwards into what Dominic guessed was a staircase. She headed into it and waved back at the two of them.

“I’ll see you all at the bottom.”

He paused, then nodded and turned away.

“You’re just going to jump, brother?” Aster asked.

“Yeah.”

Dominic leapt off the edge, the crow taking flight. He fell down at least a few stories, clothes fluttering, before landing hard on the stone ground. A layer of dust and sand swirled up in his wake as Aster slowly glided down and settled back onto his shoulder.

He glanced around. The huge chamber was empty, not a single decoration in it, but as his eyes adjusted to the low light, he realized that every inch of the walls and floors were covered in engravings. These were far more intricate than the ones he’d seen outside, and for a moment Dominic was reminded of Duchess Alobast’s gallery—the mural of the entire world. The carvings stretched up every wall and over the ceiling, depicting an endless cycle, so interconnected that they almost appeared to have been drawn from a single line. As Marion appeared from a doorway beside them, her lantern bobbing along, the light cast new shadows across the engravings, and for a moment it looked like they had begun to leap and move.

She put a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

“Wow…”

Dominic slowly made his way across, glancing over the drawings as he heard the sound of Marion’s pencil resume behind him. He stepped into a circular design in the center of the room, then realized it wasn’t a circle, but an animal. The beast was curled up, tail to nose, sleeping. It had a sleek, semi-serpentine shape with four thick, bird-like feet, the front pair tucked under its chin like a cat. Around its head was a frill of horns, pointed straight outwards in symmetrical lines. And on its back were two huge wings.

“A dragon?” Dominic murmured.

“Ack—”

Aster made a sound of surprise as he suddenly returned to demon form on top of his shoulder. He tumbled down, Dominic dodging his flailing limbs, and landed on his butt on the floor.

“What the hell?” he said, rubbing the back of his head. “I didn’t do that.”

Dominic frowned. He was saying his crow transformation had been forcefully undone. If that was true, then that meant that some magic more powerful than Aster’s had quietly overtaken him, then canceled it out.

He reached his hand out to help the boy up from the ground.

“Stay close to me.”

Just as Aster was about to take it, the drawing below them lit up. Grey, almost black mana flooded from the dragon into every other line in the room, and Dominic knew immediately that something was very wrong.

The ground began to rumble. There were cogs grinding under and around them, a mechanical system so vast and complex that even he couldn’t sense the end of it. He reached out desperately to catch Aster’s hand, but the floor beneath them had already begun to move.

“Brother!” the boy shouted, the ground shifting him away in an instant, bricks growing upwards from the floor building new walls, deconstructing old ones—starting from this spot, reorganizing the entire structure of the maze.

“Aster!”

Dominic tried to catch his fingers, but it was no use. He was being dragged back too, an intangible force almost like hands on his shoulders, forcing him to go with the bricks and the gears underneath his feet.

The labyrinth built a wall in front of his eyes, sealed it shut, and he could no longer see Aster, nor Marion, nor even the room they had just been in. The maze continued to move and reconstruct itself around him, and he knew he was only getting further and further from everyone.

After some time, the rumbling finally died down, leaving only silence echoing through the empty corridor he was now in, along with the occasional ping of a loose rock falling. Dominic stared at the solid wall in front of him. He had had confidence they would all make it out fine. He could heal anything and could navigate easily with his sense of smell. All they had to do was stay together. It wouldn’t be hard.

He stood, turning away from the blank, unmoving wall. The hallway beyond stretched far into the darkness, his only light—Marion’s lantern—now gone too. There would be no seeing anything down here. And he didn’t need to see to understand what predicament he was in.

A light breeze picked up, the dust around his feet swirling in little eddies.

Dominic was alone.