[participant in the Royal Road Writathon challenge]

“Steady! Slow inhale through your nose. Hold to the count of four. Exhale just as slowly. Listen to your heartbeat if you can’t focus on anything else. I can hear it pounding in your ears from here. Poor kid; you must be ready to collapse.”

I close my eyes, warding my sanity against the swirling vortex of not-reality around us, and follow Tem’s breathing exercises again. It helps me feel more grounded, centered on myself in the middle of a sea of madness. By the time I open my eyes, I find that I can walk in a straight line again, no longer looping and tripping as the world shifts around us. The Rift’s been getting worse since we entered . . . however long ago that was.

“It’s breathing!” I say, snapping my fingers as I suddenly put the pieces together. “The way the ground and walls shift and pulse, it’s like the inside of an absolutely enormous creature. Are we . . . are we inside a void monster?”

Tem shrugs. “No idea. Some have postulated that may be the case. It’s far above my pay grade. But the void does funny things.”

“Like your strange storage methods?” I push, hoping for an answer, but Tem doesn’t react to my prodding.

“C’mon, Tem, I’m not a dummy-- ”

“Could have fooled me,” Tem says blandly.

I resist the urge to stick my tongue out, and instead keep talking, laying out my case for why I’m certain he’s making use of void energies. “I’ve never heard of anyone storing an object that massive in an interdimensional storage device. It’s orders of magnitude better than any bag or chest I’ve ever heard of before. And remember, I’ve read your biography.”

“Traps and tripwire,” Tem mutters. “I always thought that book was clever until I met you. Now I wish I’d never published that stupid thing.”

“I thought you said it was all misdirection?

“Of course it is,” Tem says. “But the best lies are always built on truth.”

I nod smugly. “So no one has a dimensional storage space like you do via normal Skills. I’m right. Just admit it!”

“You want a prize?” Tem snaps irritably. “Because I already gave you a beast core worth more than a year’s salary in Silaraon.”

“You can’t put a price on truth,” I say airily.

“Sure I can. Blood. Haven’t you ever heard dead men tell no tales?”

I yawn and pat my mouth with my hand in an exaggerated fashion. “If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it a long time ago. Why not teach me what you know?”

“Can’t,” Tem grunts, turning away and busying himself with setting up camp. I silently fall in beside him, assisting with the quick preparations. He ignores me as we work, but I’m satisfied with his tacit admission that he’s doing something unusual.

After the tent is up, along with an obscuration array that Tem swears will keep us safe from monsters while we finally catch up on sleep, Tem passes out some hardtack so we can keep up our strength. Neither of us have any idea how many hours or days have passed inside the Rift, but we’re both running ragged from exhaustion and hunger.

“One sequence with your heat-resistant orbs before bed,” Tem mutters, already starting to nod off.

“So, is it a magically-binding oath?” I begin. “Is that why you can’t tell me more about the void powers you so clearly have?” I yelp and duck too late to avoid his boot, which he throws with unerring aim at my face.

Still chuckling to myself, I activate both [Lesser Manasight] and [Heat Manipulation], and get to work grinding my Skill rankings. If I keep pushing, I should be able to upgrade to the full version of [Lesser Manasight] soon. Dropping the “Lesser” prefix is my number one goal right now, after surviving the Rift, of course.

“You’ve outgrown your tools,” Tem notes, rolling over in his bedroll and nodding toward the glass globes. “They’re too easy for you now. You’ll have to find something harder, or craft new objects when you’re back at the studio.”

“That doesn’t help much right now, does it?” I grumble, but I know he’s right. We haven’t been on our expedition for long, but the intensity of the practice—combined with the incredible precision boost provided by [Lesser Manasight]—means I’m making vast and rapid improvements, and the challenge is waning. Manipulating the energy flows is almost trivial, now, unless I’m adding in another task for complexity. Even before the Rift, I could handle the first several levels of the iron lunk’s offensive and defensive routines while controlling the heat.

“Nope. Doesn’t help much,” Tem agrees. He rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “It’s not a big problem. Just come up with ways to distract yourself. You could try juggling knives.”

“Or I could listen to you snoring.”

Tem’s other boot smacks me in the face, but the flash of mild outrage in his eyes is worth the indignity. “Too bad you only have two boots. This is good practice,” I quip.

To my shock, his boots pelt me again. And then again. I throw my hands up in front of my face—after beginning the [Heat Manipulation] sequence; I’m not so stupid that I’ll waste a good training opportunity—and duck for cover behind the pile of our packs and carryalls. Tem’s laughter echoes through the tent, a kind of pure glee that’s utterly infectious, and soon I join him in his amusement.

Tem sits up and puts his hand out, palm up. His boot disappears from the ground next to me and materializes in his hand, ready for throwing. He winks at me. “Don’t ever antagonize a [Scout], Nuri. We’re full of tricks.”

“And still no mana use,” I mutter, but he simply rolls over and goes to sleep, leaving me to figure out a way to challenge myself. My eyes catch the knives laid out by our dinner plates, and I sigh. Am I really going to juggle knives just to challenge myself? What if I slice off my finger?

Instead, I try to review the magical theories Ezio gave me. I thread a touch of heat into the first orb, activate my [Lesser Manasight], and rely on instincts and mana memory to let the process go while I get in touch with my scholarly side. “Let’s see,” I mutter to myself, casting my mind back to the dusty tomes. “Two competing schools of thought go into improving Capacity.

The first orb reaches equilibrium, and I stop talking to myself under my breath to focus on reversing the energy flows, but it’s harder than I anticipated. My attention wavers from theory as I try to keep the even energy flows required for the heat transfer; it's one or the other if I want to do it properly, and simultaneously reciting dense paragraphs from the textbooks Ezio loaned me proves too much. The two activities get crossed in my mind, and in my frustration I yank on the wrong mana structure in my soul.

The dense, layered orb shatters, spraying shards of sharp glass across my face. I scream and flinch away, my eyes squeezing shut just in time to prevent the razor glass from blinding me. Stinging pain peppers my cheeks, and I cry out as thick, hot blood trickles down into my mouth.

Tem leaps up from his bedroll. With a flick of his wrist, he expresses his sword. His eyes scan the tent, and for once a pulse of mana extends to our surroundings. A moment later, I watch a ripple of mana wash back over us, faint but complex in my [Lesser Manasight].

“Not an emergency, then?” Tem says flatly.

I shake my head weakly. “No, I just broke my, uhh, globes.”

Tem smirks, his full lips pressed flat for once as he shakes with silent laughter. “Most of the time other people tease you, but here you are bustin' your own balls.”

I wipe the blood off my face with the back of my sleeve. “What are you, thirteen? Just call them orbs. Or globes.”

“No. I don’t think I will,” Tem says, still amused at his juvenile joke.

“You’re going to get along great with Mikko,” I say, resigned ahead of time to the teasing that I’ll have to endure between the two of them.

A deep, bone-rattling rumble shakes the ground, drowning out Tem’s attempt at a reply. He scrambles to his feet, stashes his things, and pushes me out of the tent ahead of him. With a swirl of his wrists, he pulls the tent and everything inside it within his mysterious storage ability, and he ducks behind the rock outcropping that shelters our position.

Overhead, the cavern ceiling disintegrates.

Dark tendrils of grey nothingness rip apart the rust-red and charred grey-black rock that predominates in the Rift, and in rushes the Void. I don’t have any other words to describe what I’m seeing, and Tem has all but confirmed that the void really exists as more than an amorphous and sinister concept in children’s stories. For once, I wish I’d paid better attention in school in my early years, before I earned my Class and upgraded to the working world.

“Stick close!” Tem screams, latching on to my arm with an iron grip. His eyes go wide, shining with the telltale gleam of mana. It’s a strange, swirling silver color in my [Lesser Manasight] that I can’t quite place, but the complexity of the working instantly sets me on edge.

Cracks spread in a spider web pattern across the burnt ground. The tremors intensify, and I crash down to my knees as the world splits apart all around us. A crevasse opens right beneath me, and I plunge into the depths. Tem’s hands tighten on me, pulling me back over the edge of the gaping canyon that suddenly snakes across the landscape where our tent stood not two moments earlier.

Clinging to Tem, I hobble alongside him across the crumbling terrain as formerly solid rocks dissolve into dust. My feet keep slipping and sliding, and if not for Tem’s steady gait—he somehow draws on his mysterious abilities invisible to my [Lesser Manasight] to stride across a plane of existence that I can’t perceive.

Stormwinds kick up the dust into a howling funnel that buffets us from every direction, tugging at my clothes and slinging shards of splintered stone that sting my eyes. Up and down, left and right, forward and back—direction loses its meaning as I tumble through a grayscale abyss, clutching at Tem like a drowning cat digging its claws into its owner.

“This is our stop,” Tem declares, although the bizarre, indecipherable world of the Rift is impossible for me to parse. How he knows what’s happening is beyond me.

We ricochet sideways, slamming into a wall that I swear wasn’t there a second before. The horrific shriek of the world devouring itself cuts off so abruptly and completely that for a moment I wonder if I’ve died. My ears are ringing and my lungs are burning as they pump like bellows, so I conclude that I must be alive if my body can still feel pain.

Darkness closes in all around us. The stillness is so absolute after the horror of the void that I find myself struggling to keep from bolting. I don’t know where I’d run, but standing still in the middle of the dark triggers an ancient instinct of prey stalked by a predator. I never thought that I’d miss the queasy unreality of the Rift, but I’d trade the oppressive darkness for the void that lit up the sky with the lurid promise of oblivion.

Tem’s fingers dig deeper into my arms. “Breathe, Nuri. Breathe! We’re not safe yet, not by a long shot. I need you at your best for what comes next.”

“We’re going to die,” I whimper.

“Remember your training. In. Hold. Out!”

The simplicity of the demand gives me something to latch onto in the middle of the terror, and force away all the distractions so that I can listen to Tem’s advice. I breathe in a slow, quiet rhythm, matching the encouraging murmurs from the [Expert Scout]. As my racing heart calms down, Tem releases my arm with a reassuring pat.

“Better, lad. Now, let’s see where we’ve ended up. I haven’t stumbled into a labyrinth in a long, long time.”

A spark lights up the dark. Tem holds his finger aloft like a torch, turning back and forth to illuminate our surroundings. Wrapped in gold-and-red-flecked mana, his fingertip glows with a joyful, inviting warmth that seems out of place in the horrors of the Rift.

“This will get harder before it gets easier,” Tem says.

I grimace. “Have I ever told you that you’re the worst at pep talks?”

“Stop interrupting me after my opening statement, then. It’s not my fault you suffer from the worst sort of impatience.”

I wave my hand grandly. “All right, all right. Go on.”

Tem clears his throat. “As I was saying, falling into this labyrinth is a stroke of good luck. It won’t be easy, but we make it to the end, we’re guaranteed a way out—or at least as close to a guarantee as you’ll find in a forsaken place like this.”

A way out? That catches my attention. “So, it’s like a giant corn maze? You know, I’m something of a maze expert myself.”

Tem snorts and says, “One, you’re not an expert on anything, except maybe at finding stupid, surefire ways to kill yourself. Two—yeah, all right, a Rift labyrinth is like a corn maze, if the maze is actively trying to kill you.”

“That’s a lot of killing,” I point out nervously. My back goes clammy with cold sweat.

“Glad you got the details right,” Tem says, turning back and forth as he examines the walls with his finger torch. He leans over to the stone and sniffs it. “We head right.”

I give him a flat stare. “What, are you a bloodhound now? We just . . . follow your nose?”

“Who’s the expert here?” Tem asks. He strikes off in the direction indicated, not waiting for me to answer. We both know I’ll scurry along behind him, regardless of the reason he gives for the path. A hunch, a favorite color, a nursery rhyme—no matter how nonsensical they might seem, they’re still all better than what I’d come up with.

Tem is muttering to himself, too quietly for me to make out, and as we reach a yawning, dark gulf where a side tunnel joins up with our corridor, his face lights up. “Ah! Perfect. We’re in the outer reaches. Less danger here, although you need to keep your guard up, Nuri. You’re as sensitive as a silkspun spider web in a Southeastern storm.”

I reach out a hand and tentatively touch the stone wall. Unlike the burning, savage heat of the Rift proper, this feels cool, solid, and entirely too uniform to be natural. I eye the length of the cut stone, each piece as square and smooth as the last, and start counting out paces as we walk past the passageway. At fifty paces, another tunnel crosses our path. Tem walks right by it without a care, but I restart my count, squinting at the tunnel mouth suspiciously.

Sure enough, after another fifty paces, the next tunnel arrives, right on cue. There’s no way this is as wild as the rest of the Rift.

“This can’t be a naturally-occurring phenomenon,” I finally say, watching Tem’s face to gauge his reaction.

“Nope!” he confirms, striding confidently forward.

I trot to keep up with his strange, space-bending stride, and try to engage him in further conversation. “Which begs the question of where it comes from, don’t you think?”

“Nope,” he says.

“Oh, c’mon!” I splutter. “Someone built this. Aren’t you curious?”

“Nope.”

“Fine time for you to turn into a worse conversationalist than Mikko,” I mutter. “Look, this is something I’ve never heard about before when people talk about the mysteries of Rifts. I’ve always thought they were fairy tales for kids; fall into a weird, colorful vortex, escape monsters, come home with a pot of gold. That sort of thing. This could be revolutionary! Don’t you want to bring new scholarship to people? We could be the first men in the realm to publish works about the . . . the architects of the labyrinths!”

Tem snickers, shaking his head at me as he ticks off another tunnel on his hands. He stops here, tilts his head sideways, and double-checks the count. “One more.”

“How do you know?” I challenge him. “There could have been more tunnels behind us that you’re not accounting for.”

“Nah, you either end up at the start, middle, or end of the labyrinth,” Tem declares with far more confidence than he should have any right to possess.

I take a deep breath, and speak up again. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

Tem’s next words dash my hopes of becoming famous. “There are piles of books on this subject in the Capital. You’re just not privy to them because you’re not at your second Threshold and you don’t serve the crown directly. Now pipe down. We’re turning left up ahead, and we’re likely to meet our first monsters.”

“You’re certain?” I push. “You already know the layout, and who made this maze?”

“Of course,” Tem scoffs. “Why do you think I’m not curious? I’ve had these details drilled into me since I joined the brigade.”

I keep my voice at a quiet whisper as I follow Tem to the left, my [Lesser Manasight] flaring so I’ll have an early warning if any of the beasts of the labyrinth attack. “So, who is it? Can’t you tell me now that I’ve seen it? I’m not ever going to forget this encounter, so don’t try to prevaricate.”

“Why, I thought you’d never ask!” Tem says dramatically. He pauses, looking around us with an exaggerated expression of caution on his face. He rubs his palms together, and leans in theatrically to make the big reveal. “The Masters of the void.”

I shrug. “Never heard of them.”

Tem scratches the back of his head, then snaps his fingers in my face, making me jump. “Oh! Right, right, I forgot they go by a different name in popular stories.”

“No you didn’t,” I say as I roll my eyes. “You’re just building it up so that I’ll get all excited or have a big reaction.”

“Guilty as charged,” Tem says. “Now, do you want to know, or what?”

“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

Tem grins and nods.

I throw my hands up in the air. “Fine! I want to know. Happy now?”

“Yep. You’re more likely to know them as the Abyssal Monarchs, the high overlords of the wraiths and sovereigns of all void-related realms.”

“Oh, smack me with a battledore,” I groan. “Are you serious?”

“Quite,” Tem replies, a twinkle in his dark brown eyes.

“Then why are you so excited? This is—this is insane! They’re the ones responsible for that wraith incursion that almost killed us. And instead of running back to Silaraon, I decided we should keep going. Mikko is right; I’m an enormous idiot. We’re going to die down here!” I wail, glancing around for boogeymen hiding in the shadows.

Tem purses his lips together and blows a raspberry in my direction. “Stop worrying, Nuri. You’re worse than my great-aunt. We’d have gotten out eventually, but labyrinths are the fastest way—and the most dangerous, as you’ve surmised.”

“Why would we ever willingly wander into their domain?” I demand.

Tem shushes me and jerks his head toward the tunnel. “Company soon. Keep quiet and stay in the shadows if you want to sit this one out. Fight first, talk later.”

A trio of smokey purple signatures light up in my [Lesser Manasight], moving toward us quickly. I shut up, taking Tem’s advice, and crouch down several paces behind him. My hands clutch the handles of my knives, not that I’m likely to do much against the kind of power radiating off the incoming monsters.

Tem casually draws his blade, flickers out of view, and pops back a moment later. With a contemptuous snort, he flicks the blood off his narrow blade. “They’re weaker than I anticipated, Nuri. They must not be guarding the core. You get the next ones, and I’ll provide pointers if you start to struggle.

“Can’t you just kill things while I watch the energy fluctuations? My [Manasight is getting great practice down here.”

Tem shoots me a disgusted look. “This ain’t a vacation, kid. You want to get stronger, or not? Look, I’ll tell you plainly if we run into something you can’t handle. In the meantime, we’re still on your expedition. I’ll keep training you if you’re willing to keep learning.”

“It’s just pain,” I mutter to myself, already visualizing the savage scrapes and brutal bites I’ll have all over my body by the time we emerge. “Fine, but you gotta tell me everything. I want to know more about why you think entering a labyrinth is a good idea. Aren’t we intruding?”

“Sure, but the monarchs don’t care about visitors unless you threaten the labyrinth core. Mess with one of those, and you risk destabilizing the void and tearing a hole right through the realms.”

I gulp. “Got it. No cores.”

“Raiding their outposts is always lucrative, though. Fight through a few guard dogs, lift a little loot—I used to bring my gal out to a labyrinth for dates. Good times.”

I stare at Tem in shock. “You’re crazy. I mean, absolutely shattered-glass insane.”

“To answer your earlier question about why I’d ever want to go into a labyrinth,” Tem says, ignoring my outburst, “well, you can think of them as islands of stability in the sea of chaos that is the void. Stability requires dimensional anchors, which means a ready-made pathway back to our own plane.”

“Bridges between reality,” I breathe, catching his excitement. “Now that’s an adventure!”

“Precisely. Now, let’s pick up the pace. If memory serves, we’ll hit an armory soon. You can probably pick up an upgrade to those little toothpicks you carry around. Who knows? You might even find some fancy glass ornaments. I won’t judge another man’s taste.”

“I think you just did,” I reply blandly, falling in beside Tem as we set off down the tunnel again. As we go, he condenses a series of little strands of visible mana, placing them side by side in neat, geometric rows. Some he turns at right angles. A single path snakes through the rest, its color shifting into a soft blue.

I watch with curiosity as he builds out a tiny model of the parts of the labyrinth we’ve already traversed, impressed at his mana control for a non-mage. Do [Scouts] gain extra affinities with energy manipulation? Maybe it helps them blend in as they sneak behind enemy lines.

Tem glances up ahead every so often, and his jaw tightens if he senses anything that he doesn’t like. I can’t see or hear anything, and my [Lesser Manasight] is coming up empty, but the tight lines around his eyes and his sudden lack of conversation tell me that we’ve got ourselves in a real rough spot.

His eyes widen, and he comes to an abrupt halt. Tem holds up a fist, signaling me to stop moving. The miniature model of the labyrinth winks out of existence. Tem leans against the wall, slides down, and rests his feet. I join him, sitting cross-legged on the ground, and he draws in the air with his little mana torch. It’s a slow way to communicate, but he spells out the words: “Wait. Captain ahead.”

I have no idea what he means by a “captain,” but I give him a curt nod, and he releases the mana pen and his glowing finger torch, plunging us into darkness.

As the minutes stretch on, I sink inward, visiting my inner world with only the rhythm of my heartbeat to keep me company. If we’re up against an enemy as dangerous as Tem makes this Captain sound, then I won’t do any good, anyway. Tem will watch my back; I’m going to take a long-overdue look at the crystalline structure of my [Lesser Manasight] compared with the full fledged version of [Heat Manipulation]. It’s only been a few days since I’ve received the Skill, but it feels longer since I’ve been straining to see mana for months now.

The silver shape of [Lesser Manasight] is simple and straightforward, only showing off several switchbacks and swirls. Impossibly small, incomprehensible runes cover the surface of the Skill, but they’re far too tiny for me to make out with any clarity. The overall form of my [Lesser Manasight] is sturdy, however, and it’s not a weak Skill despite the lack of intricacy.

By contrast, the grand fractals of [Heat Manipulation] expand outward in magnificent trills and patterns, pulsing with frigid blue and scalding red. The sheer complexity boggles my mind; I haven’t looked at the Skill since it finally healed to my satisfaction. Not a crack shows on its now pristine surface. It gleams like perfectly-crafted glass, or perhaps polished chrome.

I recall the months of careful mana-soaking to mend all the microfractures in the original [Lesser Heat Manipulation,] and part of me wonders if I could directly control the Skill shapes through mana. On a whim, I try to add complexity to [Lesser Manasight] manually, but a quick experiment soon shows that it’s a fool’s errand—at least with my current, rather limited mana pool. While adding mana to the mix leaves the Skill looking fresh, it does nothing to change the shape. I’m pursuing power, not beautification, so I let go of my fanciful dreams of shortcuts and mentally heave the equivalent of a heavy sigh.

“Nuri. It’s safe,” Tem says, shaking my shoulder to wake me up from my stupor. He’s holding up a little torch of golden mana again to light the path forward. “The Captain has moved onward. They rarely patrol the same place twice, and they don’t let intruders go, so I’m confident I kept us cloaked since it’s gone. Let’s go hit that armory. They never keep the doors locked, so we won’t even have to break and enter.”

“Cloaked? Another one of your endless Skills?” I croak. For some reason, my mouth and throat are as parched as a desert. I blink away crusts from my eyes, and stretch out a crick in my neck. “How long was I out? I feel terrible.”

“Maybe twenty minutes,” Tem says, squinting as he looks at my face. “Feeling all right? You lit up like a bonfire for a moment. Thought you were gonna get us killed even through my cloaking Skill, but then it all imploded. Never seen anyone use up all their mana that fast without spraying it into the air or using it for a finishing blow. Here, take some of my water.”

I gratefully accept the water skin that materializes out of nowhere, pop the stopper, and slake my thirst. I cough and double over, spluttering as fire races down my throat. My mouth is a raging inferno.

“Ah. Sorry, Nuri,” Tem mumbles. “That was supposed to be water, not my moonshine.”

I gag, but the worst has passed. An aftertaste like paint thinner coats my tongue, thicker than a flavor has any right to be, but I’m already standing back up and trotting after Tem. There’s no room for self-pity here. We’ve got a long way to go before we escape the Rift, and my body is already shaking off the punch to the face that is Tem’s rotgut.

The spring is back in Tem’s step. He’s acting more confident now that the danger has passed. With a flick of his wrists that’s not technically necessary, Tem summons his makeshift mana map once more. He taps on a section up ahead of us. “This room is usually an outpost. I’ve only been in the rectilinear labyrinth type once before, but they always follow strict rules. We should be able to make safe assumptions about what we’ll find.”

I pause, a hitch in my stride. “What do you mean by ‘rules’ in the labyrinth? The Rift sure doesn’t follow any. And should I be concerned that we’re making assumptions?”

Ten gives me a flat look. “With someone else, yes. Proverbial red flags and whatnot if you allow assumptions to guide your delve. With me? Listen to everything I say! Revere it as the golden standard, and follow my instructions. We’ll be fine. Now, let’s go rob them blind.”

“What if the Rift falls apart completely out there while we’re stuffing our pockets with trinkets. Shouldn’t we hurry up and get home?” I ask, twisting my fingers into my cloak as the terrifying memory of the world disintegrating quite literally right under our feet crashes over me again.

“Remember, the labyrinths function as dimensional anchors,” Tem reminds me. “Time and distance work as expected again. The original entry—and exit—for this Rift may have collapsed, but it doesn’t matter anymore. We’ll get out once we reach the gate room.”

The knowledge that the portal has distorted and likely been destroyed does little to calm my frayed nerves, but we soon reach a solid grey door riveted to the wall, and Tem’s eyes light up with greed. He flourishes his hands at the doorway. “I present to you the Outpost armory of the void! Go on, get your first master tier item. You’ve earned it.”

Excitement welling up within me, I grasp the intricately etched metal handle and pull. Nothing happens.

“Well, huh,” Tem says, scratching his jaw. “Guess we have to break in after all.”