Thornton held the decapitated and half-splattered head of Handsome Gentry. He’d been staring at the face for so long now that the eyelashes and mustache had become white from snow, almost as though the dead bard had aged fifty years right before his eyes. But the truth of what had happened to Gentry was worse than merely aging, of course. He couldn’t find any words for a long while. This was his own doing. He had been the one who butchered the bard, who by Penny Amberwine’s account had still been alive when the cutting began, if even just barely.

  Finally, it was the shockingly muscular salesman—Seymour Little, who a few moments earlier had somehow been wearing the body of Thornton Gring’s very own Nana—whose inappropriately-timed question broke the silence:

  “How do we want to split up this loot?” he asked, still busy digging through the gooey remains, hoping to find another card.

  The Surrogate Nursery had been designated as some sort of mini-boss monster. That sort of thing—the designation of special enemies and the subsequent distribution of sigil catalysts—was only supposed to happen within Vol’kara’s dungeon, as far as Thornton knew, which was only possible because at its core the dungeon possessed a degree of intelligence. Did that mean that the hedge maze within which he now found himself trapped was also acting with a will of its own?

  “Thornton?” Little wondered, “you still with us? Maybe you should put down Gentry’s head, Bud. Even just for a little while, you know – so we can plan our next moves and whatnot.”

  He did not put down Handsome Gentry’s head, which had a chunk of flesh missing from the left cheek, obliterated down to the skull when Seymour had struck it with a club made from what was evidently some sort of bizarre, sapient, shapeshifting cactus familiar.

  “What about the Ressurectory?” He held the head up so that Little could look in its dead eyes. The blood which had come out of the facial wound was tainted brown and hung in gooey strands that had a distinctly sour smell. “Can’t it put the dead back together so long as we have something to start from? Such as the head, here?”

  “I’m sorry, Thornton.” Seymour came over and put a hand on his shoulder, attempting to offer some reassurance. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for him now. The Ressurectory can reconstruct a body from nothing if the requisite life insurance sigil has been applied prior to death, but Gentry wasn’t wearing one. And yeah, even lacking the sigil, we could still bring him back using the head alone – but I’m not sure it’ll work on him since he’s undead now and whatnot. I don’t have a ton of experience down in the corpse bakery, but my gut says that if we slap that head on the slab right now he’ll regrow as the monster we just defeated, rather than the Handsome Gentry we knew him as before.”

  Thornton frowned down at the decapitated head in his hands. In recent weeks he had taken his first steps as an adventurer. He had killed – but only ever monsters and beasts. Never a man. And he had done worse than murder to Handsome Gentry. He had cursed the bard to undeath by leaving his corpse alone in this evil place. They should have taken the time to bury his body. It might have prevented his subsequent corruption.

  “So, anyway, Thorn.” Little looped his bulky arm around Thornton’s shoulders. “About the loot: there were only two cards on him, not sure why. Seems like three would make a lot more sense since there are three of us. I guess it could be that the maze wants us to fight over them or something.”

  “It’s probably because you showed up after we had already engaged the creature,” Thornton said without ever taking his eyes off the severed head.

  “Oh. Damn. I guess that does make some sense. Like the loot gets locked in at the start of the fight, and I wasn’t technically part of your team at that moment. Well shit, ain’t that a kick in the nuts?”

  Ignoring his rambling, Thornton demanded to know, “how were you impersonating my nana? You and your minion both seem to be able to alter your forms at a whim, not unlike the mimic creature who murdered Handsome Gentry. Can you explain that?”

  Was it possible that Little had known? Had he known about the mimics; known how dangerous this place was before allowing them all to enter? As the salesman stammered, no doubt searching his mind for a lie to dissemble which might justify his impersonation of Nana Gring, the urge to strike him was becoming almost too much to bear. Thornton began to wonder if perhaps he was still clutching the decapitated head in his hands simply to keep them occupied so he couldn’t choke Seymour Little.

  He closed his eyes. He finally let go and the head thudded onto the snowy ground at his feet. Then he turned back in the direction Little had arrived from; turned his back on both Seymour Little and Penny Amberwine, whom he now suspected might also be in on the deception, and he started off on his way. He felt confident that he knew the way out and wouldn’t need Seymour’s map. Over the past month he had crawled Vol’kara once and had explored a few crypts hidden in the woods near his home. Now, his mind mapped locations like this almost automatically, drawn out of pure self-preservative instinct.

  “Thornton?” He heard Penny ask as he left them both behind, never once looking back.

  “He forfeited his share of the loot,” Seymour explained. “Which is his right. I don’t think he was comfortable taking cards from Gentry’s corpse, even if that wasn’t really Gentry anymore.”

  “Seymour. Shut up. His heart and soul were deeply injured by his misguided attempt to save the bard. To save Handsome Gentry. He was in shock then and still is, I believe. We should not have let him go off alone.”

  “What were we supposed to do? Restrain the dude against his will?” Flexing an enormous bicep he added, “I could now, you know. Easily.”

  Sat upon his broad right shoulder, the bizarre, cactus-man squeaked out two quick kissies.

  “Nice,” Seymour said, giving the cactus man an approving nod. “Good lookin’ out, blood bro.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Despite her curiosity regarding the cactus’s transformation, Penny wasn’t inclined to indulge their childish antics with any more attention.

  “I don’t know what should have been done to make Thornton stay, but I regret our inaction.” She looked to the pile of weird, milky viscera that had been the pod monster. Steam rose off the corpse-puddle and she shivered. “We didn’t even try to stop him. He’s all alone now.”

  “He’ll be alright. Probably. Honestly, we’re the ones in danger here. Thornton has tools to deal with the topiary circus, which seem to be like ninety-nine percent of the baddies in this maze, right?”

  Penny continued to stare at the body of the Surrogate Nursery. It was left as little more than a puddle after Seymour rummaged through its remains looking for more catalysts, rupturing pod after pod. The various magical effects previously unleashed by each pod were rendered inert upon the death of their owner. Not that Seymour found a single thing inside any of them. After the body fell, the loot had simply appeared with a flash, lying unceremoniously on the corpse’s breast inside a small box. The way in which Thornton—the only experienced adventurer in their party—had reacted without surprise to its appearance made her think this was the normal means by which intelligent dungeons distributed sigil catalysts.

  And this hedge maze was clearly intelligent, in her opinion. She had previously believed that Vol’kara was unique in that regard. This discovery, if true, presented the greatest mystery yet about this place.

  Of the two cards they’d found within the small, wooden box, there was one which she wanted to apply right then. The card showed an image of a rune circle, drawn on a brick surface she somehow knew without any other context was the floor of a temple. A shadow fell across the circle of runes, as if someone was standing just outside the frame. At the bottom of the card, below the mysterious imagery, were the words The Ritualist. She felt certain this card belonged in her power set; drawn to it in a way she couldn’t begin to explain. Yet she didn’t feel right saying so in the moment, which still seemed like it belonged to Thornton Gring and Handsome Gentry – the human victims of she and Seymour’s expedition.

  “Look, I know this feels wrong.” Seymour took her hands in his, which were so much larger and stronger than normal. “But it’s just how it is. We can’t leave these cards here just because we feel bad about how everything went down.”

  “I know.” She nodded, still fixated on Seymour’s unfamiliar hands. “I’ll take the card of the ritualist.”

  He laughed. She felt her cheeks redden. He’d caught her coming to the decision too quickly despite feigning protest.

  “Alright then.” He passed the card to her, just like that, without any further deliberation. “I’ll take the weird one that is obviously evil.”

  The other card held an image of a man hung on meat hooks. His skin and muscles and organs had been flayed away over the entire right side of his body, revealing a clean skeleton. The left side of his body was nude but intact. His face bore an unnervingly ecstatic grin. The card was labeled across the bottom in plain black lettering as The Skin Thief.

  “What do you say?” she asked, closely studying the Card of the Ritualist. “Do you think I should use it right away?”

  “Yeah, I think there’s no sense in waiting. It can only help us get out of here, and you can overwrite it later if you find it’s the wrong—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” she interrupted. She held the card up and admired it by the moonlight as snow continued to flitter down all around her. “I can tell.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “I just know.”

  There was still the decision to be made of which sigil she would apply it to. Her Charity sigil still had all three of its slots untapped, while each of her Diligence sigils had one remaining. Logically, she thought she should save her last two diligence slots for weapon skills. And furthermore, in addition to logic dictating she apply this card to Charity, her intuition confirmed as much, too.

  “Will you do the honors?” She held the card back out to Seymour. It wasn’t at all lost on her that there was something special about the way he applied catalysts. It was her intention to have him apply all of hers in the future, in order that she might obtain the most unique power set possible.

  “You bet, it’d be my pleasure.” He accepted the card and she pulled at the collar of her blouse to reveal the Charity Sigil drawn across her right collarbone. In the usual white lines, it depicted a hand holding a bunch of grapes by the stem, offering it in a way that Seymour had said reminded him of a servant feeding a decadent Roman emperor. Card in hand, he asked, “Are you ready?”

  She drew in a deep breath and nodded. Seymour placed the card flat against her sigil and it melded into her flesh. The previously white lines of the sigil shifted to charcoal black and the hand depicted there suddenly released the grapes, which seemed to fall away, disappearing at the edge of an unseen frame. The hand then rotated so that the palm was now facing out. The center of the palm began to fill in with inky blackness to match the outline, until the sigil had changed so that it almost looked like someone had dipped their hand in tar before gripping Penny by the collarbone. Then the sigil wavered like a mirage. Seymour blinked and the black palmprint was suddenly filled with a starfield, the blackness revealed to be made from a night sky that possessed impossible depth. Looking at it, Seymour felt as though he was peering deep into space through a telescope.

  Penny staggered and fell against Seymour. He caught her and held her gently while the rush of new power caused her to tremble and lightly moan. Her breath puffed out in short bursts of steam.

  When she finally recovered she stepped back and displayed the new ability for him to see:

  The air around them was suddenly electric. The snowflakes flitting down were repelled in a sphere above their heads, as if an invisible balloon was floating there and the snow itself was allergic. Then came a deep hum and a small hole formed in the fabric of reality. Seymour waited for the new minion to emerge, when suddenly the void-hole itself simply fluttered down, taking the shape of a butterfly made from shadow-stuff as it did so, and came to land on Penny’s left shoulder. The Teacher’s Pet was hovering above her right, and turned as if to examine its new sibling. It ruffled its pages approvingly, and the shadowy butterfly mirrored it, leaving little wisps of shadow where its wings flapped.

  “Okay now that is pretty damn sick.”