Serenti Invitational Finals: Amen Vs Relt Peltfelter Vs Christina Bredith

[Silence Sei]

Finals begin November 4th at 10 PM, Central Time. May the best warrior win!

[Relt PeltFelter]

There is a very specific melange of emotions that a person experiences when the world around them spirals violently out of control over a very brief period, but these emotions are almost always accompanied by a very specific physical sensation. It manifests differently for everyone, of course; a sickness in the floor of the stomach, a splitting migraine, an ache in the joints.

For Relt Peltfelter, it manifested as the sensation of being hit in the back of the head with a brick and stuffed into a sack.

She had been in the offices of the Serenti Invitational, in the middle of the first fight she was sure she had under control. She was reeling, hurt, but actually fighting, when her opponent just...disappeared. No flash of light, no fanfare; a candle snuffed out on a silent night. Relt had responded to this by entering a blind fury, racing through the offices in search of the vanished man. She had flung open an office door, seen an employee (all of whom were supposed to have evacuated) shoving papers into a big leather satchel, and then...the brick, the sack.

There had been snatches of conversation overheard, in brief windows of consciousness. Two men seemed to be arguing, a weasel-worded dipshit with a voice like cream corn being boiled, and someone who rasped in a desiccated, inhuman hiss. It was a heated conversation, but Relt's brick-abused brain could only grab bits and pieces of the argument.

"...fool and coward!" the dry voice seemed to say, "You brought her here!"

"I had no..." the other, clearly subordinate voice said, "...was spotted...escape..."

"Worthless hound...ruination..."

"What now...can't..."

"Take...arena...you've selected...third finalist," At which point Relt faded out again.

- - -

Relt woke up. She wished she hadn't.

She rubbed her head muzzily, only to draw back from a bruise in danger of surpassing its Chandrasekhar limit. She couldn't see anything. This turned out to be because she was still in a bag, and was therefore easily remedied by sitting up and allowing the burlap cocoon to molt away, though for Relt the feeling of sitting up was like swallowing a ship's anchor.

Removing the sack did not help that much, actually. Wherever Relt found herself, it was nearly as dark as the unconscious world she had so recently vacated. Only a faintly luminous blue mist, hovering at about ankle depth, provided any light or definition of space.

Trying desperately to take the mind off of the agony of her bruise (now the approximate shape and size of a hippopotamus testicle, a comparison which Relt really wished the first round of this tournament had not provided her the raw material for), Relt began searching the space more carefully. She had been dumped into some kind of tiny alcove off of a much longer hallway, all built to geometric perfection of peculiarly seamless black, non-reflective stone. An architect would have weeped in shame at how their work had so cheaply mocked the Platonic ideal of these right angles. The walls seemed to continue indefinitely upward, disappearing into absolute stygian nothingness so far above as to be meaningless.

Relt staggered out into the longer corridor, trundling down in an arbitrary direction. She had no idea where she was, but she had an idea of how she'd gotten here, and that fucking cubicle-humping clerk and his dehydrated pal were going to pay. Maybe she'd stuff them into a sack, that'd be funny. Sack-stuffing was hilarious when it wasn't happening to her. Maybe chuck 'em out a window. Be a fucking defenestration celebration up in there.

The girl stopped in her rumination for a moment, clutching her damaged duffel bag. She realized that she had taken several turns, and walked for a good while, and had evidently made no progress. With an irritated grunt, Relt turned and began stalking back towards where she had started, to try again and pay more attention this time. In doing so, she began to realize that the paths she now walked were not the same ones she had walked earlier. Something had changed, the corridors had rearranged themselves.

"Fuuuuuuck," Relt groaned, "Great. Magic labyrinth. Probably a minotaur in here, or that really old singer with the package and the Muppets. Maybe he'll give me some magic-"

A sound interrupted Relt's pithy rejoinder, from somewhere far away in the maze. It was not a good sound. Calling it a roar would not be totally inaccurate, but it would lack so many extra layers of meaning that the sound contained. There was a clear directional component, but the sound was largely deep and powerful bass, the sort that seems as if it would shake the ground and shatter your eardrums if it were closer, and sounded as if several throats were howling it out in tandem. It was definitely, terrifyingly, the sound of a living agency. And it was angry.

Angry doesn't actually begin to describe it. This was a Bacchanalian bellow distorted with unimaginable rage, an aural torrent of inhuman fury, the anger of an entity which has known, knows, and will always know nothing but pure, primal hate. It rang through the endless twisting corridors of the black maze, echoing like a foghorn over a still lake on a moonless night.

Relt had felt anger like that only once before in her life, on the night that some sort of unnaturally sentient emanation had ripped her from the fabric of her own world and haphazardly quilted her into this one, though she felt it probably just meant to kill her and something went wrong. That creature had produced a kind of vitriol easily matched by the sound now ringing in Relt's head, her feet slapping against the hidden floor as she ran. As with the sensation of that night, there was no threat of death in this cry.

But there was a promise.

- - -

"It will suffice," the dry voice said. It was not speaking to the head clerk, whose body now lay in a crumpled heap in a pool of rapidly coagulating blood, but to the empty air. No response was audible, but the voice seemed to carry on a conversation nevertheless.

"The other finalists will be escorted to the arena via more conventional means. It is the final bout, after all. Dramatic locations are important for such ephemera,"

The owner of the voice stood up from its shadowed sickbed, on legs as thin as reeds. Its feet crumbled like sand, flowing across the floor.

"Of course they suspect, but they are irrelevant. Tiny men with tiny dreads, as useless to you now as my erstwhile clerk. And myself, of course,"

There was a pause. The figure shuffled on its dissolving limbs towards the table. Its talon-like hands picked up a bottle of whiskey, brushing off the neck with a tattered sleeve. The hand poured one last glass before falling away as dust, the bottle smashing on the ground. The remaining hand lifted the glass to lipless teeth set in a sallow, skinless head. Two eyes, red-streaked and swollen, stared unblinking into space as drink poured soundlessly down a collapsing throat.

"They believe that we mean to sabotage this tournament, to end it," the voice said, now with some difficulty, "But of course nothing could be further from the truth. Why, if we ended it early, the work would be incomplete. This last fight is the keystone to our archway, and the three who fight in the Obsidian Labyrinth are its final architects. And, indeed, its mortar. Your directions have been followed, for after all-"

The glass tumbled to the floor as well, leaving only a sandy skull resting atop a disintegrating torso.

"-In Your name, we act," the desert man said before dissolving entirely, his duty done.

[Christina Bredith]

“What do you know of that woman, Athenry?”

Athenry Sergio turned and fixed his small brown eyes on his companion; they narrowed suspiciously. He did not like Sivien Arundiel. Corone’s former High Baron was appropriately high-born, with a way of looking down his nose at others that could only be acquired with abundant practice. Even his fellow viceroys were not above his scorn. Athenry usually found the wealthy to be easy to read—they desired little more than the accumulation of further wealth, not unlike the poor they so despised—but Sivien was different.

Then again, he had to be. They all did. How else could they have climbed so far?

The once-Revered Congressman turned his attention to the arena, which the monks had fashioned into a labyrinthine warren of stark right angles. His eyes tried to follow the narrow paths as they branched out from its large circular center like bolts of lightning, but each attempt ended in confusion and failure. When he tried to backtrack, Athenry found that he could not, and realized that the paths were changing.

Clever, these monks, he thought. Too clever by half.

The “woman” to whom Sivien was referring must have been the crimson-haired warrior now stalking her way carefully down one of the paths on the outer western edge of the labyrinth. She had her dark half cloak around her, and with its hood drawn she was almost invisible against the ebony walls but for the warm glow of her hair and the peculiar shimmer of that cursed sword.

“Little enough,” Athenry said carefully, looking at his companion from the corner of his eye. What could the highborn scum possibly have meant by that question? Was he probing Athenry’s own knowledge for some weakness? “’de Havlan,’ she is named. Surely you must know the family, Sivien.” His voice was molasses, thick and sweet. Too sweet, some said, but you caught more flies that way.

“There are no noble families named de Havlan, Athenry,” the balding man retorted with a downward sneer. “Else I would not have asked.”

Now that was interesting, enough so that Athenry forgot his urge to sneer at the condescension. The woman had turned a corner, moving somewhat closer to the center of the maze, but she would need a great deal more of dumb luck to actually reach it. It was unusual for baseborn families to produce knights of any notable worth, let alone anyone who could slay the Lady of Roses, who had proven so troublesome these past few years. Those families also tended toward rebel sympathies because they believed entirely too many of the fairy tales poisoning the streets of Radasanth and its sister cities. Their lack of education made them so malleable, but unfortunately they were not always plied in the correct direction.

“An outlier,” he said at last, which was true enough. Sivien nodded but his expression remained as stonily illegible as ever. Athenry sneered at that.

“Still, she managed to do what even the Scarlet Brigade could not,” the other viceroy said. “A pity Emien could not be here. The look on his face when he found out would have been worth the entire cost of this tournament.”

“How surprising to hear that from you,” Athenry jabbed. “To hear your objections I’d have thought nothing could justify the cost.” Still, he had to wonder. It was very near to what he would call ‘impossibility’ for this woman to have slain such a prolific enemy of the Empire, especially with such… fortuitous timing. No Letho Ravenheart or Edward Stormcrow, to be sure, but prolific nonetheless. The name “Christina Bredith” floated much too sweetly on the tongues of the masses for Athenry’s tastes.

“What can I say, Athenry? I have been pleasantly surprised.”

Something about those words made the hair on the back of Athenry’s neck stand on end, and yet a thin smile crept across his lips all the same. He returned to watching Rosalyn’s slow progress through the ever-shifting maze. A guttural howl split the sky, raising a cheer from the crowd. When Athenry turned to find whatever monstrosity the monks had concocted to make such a sound, his smile only deepened.

It had been a surprising Invitational, and something told him that the best was yet to come.

[Amen]

It felt good to hunt again.

The foot traffic on Radasanth’s streets was thinning out as Marcus Book emerged from an alley. The scent of a spring rain was on the evening breeze, hidden below the city’s native odors. The clouds overhead were pink, but the sunset was obscured behind The Citadel’s distant spire. The templar spat as he considered the far-off structure, and then he sniffed and turned to stalk the roadside.

A plain-dressed couple crossed the street to avoid him. He sneered at them, but after a few moments of reflection he decided he didn’t blame them. The stubble on his jaw marked three days, and he was dressed in the tattered remnants of an Empire soldier’s work uniform. He was carrying naked weapons. Maybe they thought him a deserter. In a way, he was.

It had been a week and a half since the encounter with Kyla Orlouge. Marcus had slipped out of Emien Harthworth’s manor house that night, after having the minor remnants of his wounds treated. The life of a vagrant suited him just fine, he’d decided. At first he spent his nights in various inns and taverns, until he woke the next morning to find his bill paid courtesy the city watch. So the last few nights he spent in alleys and on rooftops.

Two nights ago he woke up beside a smithy, and discovered the work uniform folded neatly on the cobblestones beside him. A letter with the viceroy’s seal lay atop it. He took the clothes, but tore the letter in half without opening it and left the scraps in a gutter.

As far as Marcus Book was concerned, his days of working for Corone were over. He wasn’t a champion, or so he told himself, he was a mercenary and a thug. And not even a very good one, he added mentally. Just good enough to keep myself breathing.

He was also a paladin, but he pushed that thought, the word, and all its responsibility aside entirely. He hunted monsters tonight, but it wasn’t as a paladin. He just needed to make something die.

The war in Corone turned the eyes of authority toward mundane threats – spies and saboteurs, insurrectionists and seditionists – but the shadows in Radasanth grew longer and housed darker things. Flophouses went empty as the city’s undesirables were conscripted. Watchtowers were abandoned as weak and unpopular noble houses were undone. Spiders of a very specific sort began to occupy the neglected corners.

Marcus felt the presence of covens and lurking devils – physically felt it. Black masses were like a constant needle-thin chill on the wind, and the need to stamp them out almost felt like heartburn. He stood now across the street from a slumped tenement building, all stained green bricks and whisper-thin curtains drooling from empty windows. He felt something positive for the first time in weeks as he hoisted his axe up to rest across his shoulder.

Anticipation.

He took two steps and kicked the rotten door off its hinges. He didn’t care if they heard. They could run from him, but they couldn’t hide. He’d spend the rest of the night hunting them down if they did, one by one. That sounded like a good way to pass the time – a meal of many courses.

It felt like…up. He ascended the staircase with thunderous footfalls, and imagined them huddled under their beds. Were they cultists, or witches? Bored merchants who’d stumbled across a grimoire? Let’s find out.

He felt the energy rolling out of the room even through the door, and he could see candlelight leaking from the doorframe. He crossed the hall in two big strides and brought his boot up so that it met just to the side of the jamb, and the wood splintered as the door flew open.

There were five of them, hooded and wreathed in shadow, assembled around a circle drawn on the floor in chalk and salt and illuminated by four candles. Four of them chanted almost inaudibly, bent forward slightly at the hips as they concentrated. They were maintaining a portal of some kind, which was opened in the floor like a hole to nowhere.

Marcus took his axe in hand, and smiled.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Book,” a familiar voice said. “You did not disappoint.”

The templar’s smile collapsed with almost-comical alacrity. “Gods dammit, Emien,” he growled.

The viceroy threw back his hood, and grinned. “You can run all you want, boy. There’s nowhere in Radasanth to hide from me. You didn’t read my letter.”

“I didn’t want to read your damn letter. I don’t care what you want. We’re done. I’m done. I’ll fight in your war, but I’m not taking part in your games.”

Emien held out his hands as if to placate Marcus with how empty they were. “Fine,” he said. “You don’t want the job I was pruning you for. That’s fine. I can use a man of your talents on the field, if that’s what you prefer. The preparations are very nearly complete. I expect that within the week the first companies will set out south and west to secure roads to known Ranger holdouts. If that’s where you want to be, that’s where you’ll be, and my money is as good as ever.”

Marcus turned his head to one side and raised his chin, eyeing Harthworth skeptically. “I don’t want a command,” he said. “I don’t want to be paraded in front of anyone.”

“That works for me,” Emien said. “You’re better than that, but if you want to be a grunt, the Empire can sure as hell use you. Fine. Front of the line. I’ll put you under Knollwood’s command, you’ll like him.”

Marcus narrowed his eyes, and glanced at the chanting wizards. They went about their arcane work, seemingly oblivious.

“What’s the catch,” he said.

“One more job first,” Emien said. When Book clenched his jaw and raised his axe, there was warning in his eyes, but Harthworth again held up his hands palms-out. “No games. No more public relations, no more surprise reunions, no more parades for the nobility. All I need you to do is drop down that hole and kill anything you see on the other side.”

Marcus glanced at the portal, and then turned and crossed the room without another second thought or moment of hesitation. He only paused at the edge because Emien called after him. “You don’t suspect me of trying to trick you, Marcus?”

The templar scoffed. “At best this is another show. At worst you’re trying to get rid of me. The gods’ truth is that I don’t care, Emien.”

He took another step and let himself drop through the portal. He caught himself on the edge with one hand and hung there a long moment, taking in what lay beyond. The portal swirled above him, but on this side he could not see the viceroy or the chanters, only his arm extending up into an impenetrable shadow. He could feel the significant difference in air pressure and temperature between the tenement room and the chamber below, and thin trails of smoke from the candles beyond were drawn forcibly through the gateway to disperse as they rose again.

To either side of him were sleek black walls that seemingly rose into the obscured infinite, and below they formed a narrow path shrouded in luminous mist. Marcus dropped into the mist, half expecting to pass through it and fall forever. Solid stone met him instead, and he grunted on impact.

When he stood straight, he considered his position. The hallway stretched behind him for perhaps fifty feet and then met a perpendicular hallway. In front of him the hallway turned right, but not left. Marcus chose the simpler path, and as he walked and the glowing mist formed whorls around his ankles, he struggled to remember some childhood rule about mazes. Was it to follow an inside wall? He decided to try it.

And he went on trying it for a long time, until all sense of direction was lost. Still he went on, because it wasn’t as if going back would achieve him much anyway. He was almost tempted to try whistling to himself when something bellowed from somewhere nearby – something large, something with a voice that echoed a dark place in Book’s own quickening heart.

He checked his shield, strapped as it was to his left shoulder, and he loosened the tie that secured his mace to his left hip, and then he rested the haft of his axe against his right shoulder and thought, come on, then.

[Relt PeltFelter]

Not every problem can be solved by nonspecific fleeing, but enough of them can that it remains a safe bet in a crisis.

Relt didn't like the way the slick floor caused her flip-flops to skid out from under her, or the chilly feeling of the luminous blue mist about her ankles. She double-didn't-like that these were the conditions under which she would be, presumably, fighting dudes. This horrible place was the location for the final round! This was worse than the hippos, worse than crazy reverse-ghosts, worse than the continual disappointment shading to anger of her opponents disappearing in front of her eyes, like dreams after waking.

As Relt approached yet another featureless wall, she heard a dull, distant roar. Not the roar of the...whatever that had turned her blood the consistency of shaved ice in the hands of a sticky child, but the droning, everpresent semi-rumble of a crowd of people. She pressed her ear against the frigid black stone, wondering at the source of the susurration of humanity.

Realization dawned.

This was the final round of a prestigious event! There were people watching the whole thing. Somehow they had managed to get a stadium and this cyclopean nightmare into the same three-dimensional space. Probably by magic; magic was bullshit like that, it made everything stupid easy. This realization nevertheless left a pit in Relt's stomach.

There was definitely a problem. This tournament had been careening off of the rails since round two; even with magic, something like this must have taken months to organize, and the people she had met at the offices did not seem like the planning-months-ahead type. It was probably that guy who hit her with the brick and whoever he had been arguing with. Snatches of conversation still flitted through Relt's slightly concussed brain. But why? This was an awful lot of effort to put in for the erasure of a silly baby-style fightsman tournament.

Relt pulled away from the wall, massaging some warmth back into her ear. She had calmed down, if only because she wasn't sure what she should be panicking about in the first place. This is the only reason that she noticed the disturbance of the floor mist in time to press herself into an alcove. A blonde woman, sword in hand, stalked past. Relt waited until the sound of footfalls faded into the distance before unpeeling herself from the cranny.

It must be noted, though astute readers will no doubt have made the assumption, that Relt is not a person who responds well to periods of protracted silence. As an inveterate gabbler, such tranquilities make her more uncomfortable than attempting to shove a horse down one's trousers. So, as all such chatty people do, Relt had an inbuilt tendency to talk to herself when presented with no-one else to direct her logorrhea. This is the reason that the otherwise fairly cautious girl broke her cover by whistling the word "Shiiiiiiiiit," through her teeth just a hair too early.

Relt heard the fading footfalls stop, followed by a tentative step backwards. In a moment of sublime clarity, Relt unensconced herself and went galloping into the maze, trusting its evershifting corridors to hide her. This was not the time for face-stabbing or dick-punching; it was a time for getting to the bottom of shit, and the last thing a still-woozy Peltfelter needed was a sword through her scapula.

In fact, Relt didn't stop running until she collided with a bizarre projection from the wall. It was at waist height, extending nearly the full width of the abysmal hallway, and was made of the same black stone. It clotheslined the girl, bending her double over it like a spatially challenged limboist.

"What the fuckashitnuts," Relt grumbled, pulling herself off of the knobbly growth. It was strange; she had been wandering in this stupid place for probably hours (realistically, twenty or thirty minutes) and up to this point all of the hallways she had entered had been geometrically perfect, like she had fallen into some kind of TRON prequel. Now there was a big, kind of person-sized...

Actually, kind of person-shaped...

Relt pulled her cell phone from her pocket, playing its harsh white light over the tumorous nodule. If her blood could run any colder, it would reach absolute zero and cease all molecular motion.

"This is a goddamn person," Relt gasped.

And indeed it was. The form was contorted as if in terrible pain, and it emerged from the walls from the ankles up like it was grown from them, every detail too perfectly modeled for even the finest of sculptors. It looked like someone Relt had seen signing up for the tournament, some sword-having guy with an expression of generic, marginal competence. Disappeared, like so many of the others.

Well, at least he was found now.

Relt patted the man's petrified shoulder as kindly as she was able, and looked into the empty black spheres of its eyes. "Sorry, bro," she said quietly, "Dunno what the fuck happened to you, but I'm gonna find out. I promise,"

The girl nearly pissed herself when the eyes flared like a supernova, tiny pinpricks of intense light that seemed to be coming from some unimaginably distant place. The jaw shifted just a microscopic amount, opening and clenching repeatedly in mockery of speech.

There was a sound, impossibly faint, but in the eerie silence so deep toward the maze's center. Relt grabbed hold of her wits and leaned closer to the frozen man's face.

"...blood..." it said.

Relt reared back, eyes wide.

"...no blood..."

"Gotcha, no blood," Relt said, straightening up and stepping away from the horizontal figure. The light died in its eyes, leaving it as inanimate as the walls and floor around it.

Relt looked past him, into the depths of the maze beyond. It looked just the same as the regions she had hitherto walked, but the mist seemed to move strangely about what appeared to be another of these frozen, human projections.

Except that it was not frozen, and also carrying an ax with the casual air of a man who knew how to use it.

Relt sighed. She was the peanut butter in the sandwich of these two pieces of combatant white bread. Might as well face the music in front of her before dealing with the music behind.

"Hey there, dawg," she shouted. The walls didn't echo, leaving her voice to sound limp and flat as it traversed the air, "You the guy who made all that noise? Shit, nevermind, clearly you have the lungs of a farty shit baby with dick pneumonia. You couldn't have,"

Relt drew the heavy kevlar truncheon from her hastily repaired backpack. It was still pretty badly stained with various visceral fluids, but the SWAT surplus solidity of it gave her some comfort in a place like this. She kicked off her flip-flops, which would only get in the way, and hopped up to perch on the sideways manstone in what she hoped was an intimidating way.

"Clearly there's something happening here, a bad something, but I'm not gonna insult you by suggesting we work together. So howsabout you squeeze your little cry-a-by nutsack and run off to find someone else to hump at? 'Cause I'm busy. Elsewise, we can do this, and I'll bust you up. ¿Comprendes?"

Sometimes, very rarely, false confidence can work as a fair substitute for the genuine article.

[Christina Bredith]

“Shiiiiiit,” something hissed behind her, and Christina froze.

Suddenly, unhelpfully, the labyrinth fell once again silent. Her ears strained in search of any sound, but there was nothing beyond the rise and fall of her own breathing. She stepped back, cursing the shuffle of her leather boots against the hard stone floor, and began to turn in the direction of the sound. Frustration boiled within her belly. Her opponent was here with her, perhaps only feet away, and she could hardly see a thing!

Then there was a flurry of movement and a small form darted out of an alcove carved into the wall. She was a tiny thing with hair nearly as black as the walls themselves. Christina immediately gave chase, but the way the girl scampered made her feel like she was chasing a mouse. The hallways may have been all straight geometric delight, but there were so many branches; her quarry turned a corner, and by the time Christina reached it to follow, she was gone, and several pathways branched off the hallway ahead of her. There was no telling which way the girl had gone.

Should’ve used Rosebite, she thought, but realized that there was no point in wasting the energy when she knew nothing about her opponent. Nothing except that she, too, seemed like a frightened young girl, just like her last opponent. Christina was getting tired of being forced into matchups like that. The organizers of the Serenti Invitational had certainly developed a sick sense of humour under Imperial rule.

Christina let out a deep sigh and slowly pressed forward. She did not lower Rosebite this time, however, and took extra care to check every alcove she passed. Tunnel after tunnel branched out to her left and right, but there was absolutely no hint of where the dark-haired girl had gone. This was truly the most unusual tournament setting she had ever seen; usually the goal was to draw the combatants into conflict, which was exactly what the audience wanted, but she would have guessed this labyrinth was designed to keep them apart.

She chose a branching hallway arbitrarily and pressed onward. Having never had any sense of her location or direction to begin with, any choice was as good as any other. Strictly speaking, it might have made more sense to stay in one place and wait for her opponent to stumble across her, but there was no guarantee that that would happen either. Besides, she didn’t think she could stand to do nothing right now.

Keep moving forward, she told herself. Remember what you came here to do. It’s almost over.

She wondered whether the viceroys were watching her right now, somewhere beyond the incalculable blackness that rose up above her. Did they suspect her of being anyone other than she claimed? Could they possibly know that Rosebite’s edge was destined for them?

Pleasant as they were, those thoughts were dashed as Christina stepped into a large open room filled with a forest of statues. It was more a widening of the pathway, really, as the only exit she could see was directly across from her. Between that exit and her was a literal crowd of obsidian people, none of them particularly larger or smaller than a real human might be. As she walked among them, she took note of how lifelike they were; every feature of their faces, every fold of their clothing, even the finework of their weapons were so realistic that she would hardly have been able to tell the difference were it not for the fact that they were made of seamless black stone.

“If they were aiming for creepy, they didn’t need to go to this much trouble.” She could have sworn some of the eyes followed her as she moved across the chamber. If she didn’t know better, she might have thought they were pleading. She even thought she recognized some of these faces, too many of them frozen in rictus snarls of immeasurable fear. Christina shuddered and decided to quicken her pace.

Then something else hissed. This time, without words.

Again she spun, bringing up Rosebite in front of her, and it took all of her self-control not to scream. Slithering into view from somewhere within the forest of stone bodies was a creature unlike anything Christina had ever seen: its body was not so very unlike that of a woman, armoured in gleaming obsidian with hair and flesh as pale as milk, but instead of legs, it had the skittering feet and sectioned carapace of a centipede.

All over her muscles shivered, and she stepped back in an attempt to put some distance between her and the monster’s two curved blades, so black that they drank in what little ambient light fell across them. The creature hissed again, exposing a mouth full of needle-point fangs, but the black orbs of its eyes gleamed with hungry amusement. It lunged forward; Christina steeled her nerves at long last and followed suit.

She realized that this was no longer a simple tournament. Whoever planned this had planned a slaughter.

[Amen]

In Marcus’ estimation, mages were full of shit and after a point a man should come to expect it. So when he came across a statue in the center of a hallway expressing abject horror, he was confused for a moment, and then vaguely concerned, and then after a bit of thought just plain mad.

It didn’t make sense to put a statue in the middle of a hallway, which itself was constructed of a stone unlike any other and full of an eerie blue fog. The severe angles and stark shadows served to unnerve, and one could not conceive of a being that would call this place home – and that was the point. Marcus decided that this was the work of some juvenile and self-satisfied hedge-wizard out giggling from a cozy 'lair' somewhere toward the center of the maze.

So nevermind the exquisite detail or the painfully accurate representation of terror and fear, the templar slipped past and moved on no more cautious than he’d been before the statue’s discovery. As if on cue, he happened upon another statue, and then another, each more chilling than the last. Marcus inwardly scoffed.

If there was a monster in his closet he was going straight for it biting and clawing.

There were two more ahead now, caught in the midst of a scene wherein one had a hand laid comfortingly upon the shoulder of another, and then the comforter moved. That, Marcus had to admit, was a little creepy. Still, he was on the fearlessly callous road now, and so-help-him he was going to stick to it until the bitter end.

It was a fine thing too, because the moving body turned out to be a short, slim, wiry girl of young but indeterminate age wearing the most ridiculous outfit heretofore imaginable. A normal pair of human eyes might not have been able to make out much more beyond that in the sparse light of the dungeon-maze, but with the twin sparks residing in his Marcus could make out the warm tones of her skin and the dark of her hair – Fallien, maybe, or an exotic expatriate out of Tular or Istraloth.

And then she spoke and utterly destroyed any notion of race or point of origin or mental state, drew a weapon of some sort, and slipped out of her sandals – which were broken, lacking anything to secure the ends to her heels. She hopped up on the actual-statue, and Marcus cocked his head to one side. He was fairly certain she’d just insulted him, but it was hard to say: her words only barely formed a coherent thought and he couldn’t say what ‘pneumonia’ was.

At this point, he could not have hated Emien Harthworth more. The last time he accepted a job from the viceroy, he’d been asked to fight a slight, attractive, and publically well-loved young woman in front of a crowd of staunchly loyal and painfully simple Radasanth commoners – and then Emien told him to win without hurting her. Apparently dissatisfied with that original level of outrageousness, now Harthworth tasked him with murdering a small girl who was also clearly mentally ill.

The imp spoke again, reminding Marcus that she existed and formed some level of threat while brandishing her strangely shaped stick. He considered walking away – he knew he ought to just walk away – but he’d been given a job. Kill anything you see. That was it. And isn’t this what I wanted? he thought. The man with the money says kill that, and you do it. That’s what it is to be a mercenary. Doesn’t matter if it’s man, woman, child. Doesn’t matter if it’s crazy.

You kill it.

He let his axe drop from his shoulder, and caught the haft closer to the blade with his off-hand. And then in one smooth motion, he lifted it high and lunged forward, and then he brought the blade down toward the crazy girl’s head.

In the end, he decided, he would be doing her a favor.

Girl was nuts.

[Relt PeltFelter]

It would be overly generous to assume that Relt had planned any portion of the situation after calling a man a farty shit baby.

This is why, in a thousand alternate universes, when an axe-blade began its inexorable fall towards her bonce, it split the girl's head like a cantaloupe filled with spaghetti sauce. Fortunately, for Relt at least, this was not one of those universes. It has been mentioned several times before now that Relt Peltfelter is but one of billions and billions of Relt Peltfelters, scattered throughout the endless sea of all universes, all linked in quantum, without their knowledge, to form a single, fifth-dimensional ur-entity. Relt did not know any of this, and it would probably not be something she could even wrap her head around, but it did not mean that this state was unable to present itself.

As the axe fell, Relt tensing herself for something resembling combat, everything went all greyish and fish-eyed. The world contracted just a little bit smaller, like a balloon deflating. Relt felt as though she were in a shitty music video from the nineties. Everything seemed to slow down as she watched the blade flying towards her face at the pace of a snail with back problems and alimony payments. There was a moment, just a split-second where she could...could-

-tumble from her ill-chosen perch like a drunken seagull. Just that single extra moment of reaction time was enough for Relt to utterly fuck up horribly and fall down just before the axe would have splattered her head like a cantaloupe filled with spaghetti sauce. She rolled backwards like a fleshy tumbleweed, cracking her head on the nearest wall. Her brick-inflicted wounds now had a new neighbor, from over in Wall County.

The girl stood up, shaking her head. The fuck had that been? That was, like, the third time her brain had just kinda gone into a haze in a crisis. Weird as shit. She had to stop smoking weed. You know, some day. A long time from now. But she would have to stop, definitely. Eventually. She brightened up a bit as she realized someone had tried to kill her and failed.

"Yes!" she said, punching the air, "That's so boss. Real, like, fightsman biz! You were all like whoosh and I was all like ski-dowwww. Raaaaaaad. Man, I wish this shit had started happening in, like, the first round, instead of now with the whole intrigue and conspiracy and head-brickings," The girl felt a trickle from her lip; she had bitten it when her head smacked into the wall, but compared to the pain on her brick-bruises, she'd hardly noticed. Relt felt like looking at the blood and wiping it away dramatically would be a cool-looking thing to do, possibly while panting heavily despite the absence of any real exertion.

She dragged the inside of her thumb across her lips at high speed, sending droplets of blood flying, and managing not so much as to look cool, but mostly to awkwardly flatten her plump lips across her face, resembling more an orangutan groping for a bendy straw than a hard-boiled fisticuffsman from some movie. "That all you got, baby-dick?" Relt taunted. As has hopefully been made dramatically clear to any reader, Relt Peltfelter is not a person of measured restraint who quits when she is ahead.

She is also not a person who bothers to remember things that frozen statue-men just told her like twenty seconds ago.

The spatters of blood from her lip hit the featureless black stone, dispelling momentarily the luminous mist around where they landed.

There was a kind of pulse, not of light or sound but present nonetheless, which passed through the strange stone of the labyrinth. The mist curled in its wake, then faded, leaving the arena shrouded in darkness.

"Shit, somebody blew a fuse," Relt muttered, feeling her way awkwardly along the wall. She felt like her whole cool fight thing was gonna get ruined at this rate, right as she was starting to enjoy it. This whole tournament had been an exercise in combat blueballs. Suddenly a light flared in front of her, much like that in the eyes of the statue-man. It was soon joined by a thousand others, as if Relt were staring not at a wall but into the depths of space. The arena was soon lit once again by a constellation of brilliant points, flaring to life all along the corridor.

Relt looked harder at one of these points. She balked. It didn't just look like a star; it was a star. It kinda looked like...maybe it was inside the wall, but at the same time really, really far away? Some kind of weird magic shit, probably. Basically the walls and floor looked like they were all full of impossibly distant stars. Why did that happen?

The statue that had been a man was still there, similarly illuminated from within, yet still immobile. It occured to Relt that she had basically just thrown blood around after being told 'no blood' by a cryptic figure. Maybe that was what caused all of this? Although, as consequences go, a better lighting scheme and no more creepy cold mist wasn't too bad.

Where the stars didn't show, the walls were still black, but it was no longer the black which fails to reflect light, but the black through which light passes. Relt could see, indistinctly, through the wall to all the corridors around it. She saw the edges of the maze, clearly built of wood and stone by human hands and joined awkwardly to this peculiar structure.

Then Relt remembered the man with the axe. New shit was going down, and even if the dude was all discombobulated by whatever had just happened, he still had an axe. She bolted down a random corridor again, feeling like an idiot for being all cocky and then running away because of wall stars.

Through the wall of the intersection ahead, Relt could see what looked like a freaky monster menacing a blonde woman. Relt had experience with freaky monsters. Generally, you avoided them. Which didn't work, as the corridors retained, in their brightened state, their full measure of capriciousness. Every turn Relt took merely brought her closer to the conflict, and it was therefore a big confusing surprise when the girl stepped into a chamber filled with statues and it took her a moment to realize there was no longer a barrier between her and the blonde-monster conflict.

To her credit, Relt rallied magnificently. With all the air of a person who had intended to get there all along, Relt said, "Looks like you could use...a hand," before jumping on the back of the human centipede and smacking it in the face with her truncheon.

Relt realized, then, mid-smack, that her one-liner was not very good. The centipede creature indeed had many legs, but only two hands. The joke really didn't apply. Relt just hoped that nobody would really process it, what with the battle to the death and the star walls and everything.

- - -

Unbeknownst to the competitors in the labyrinth, there was a portion of it which contained the walls in their unaltered, opaque state. This portion could, to use such crass terms, be considered the center of the maze.

In the center of the maze, He squatted. Or sprawled. Or lounged. To apply such verbs is to make a judgement on both posture and intention; both of these are fluid and immaterial, to Him. One could ask what He wanted, why He had evidently arranged for this entire scenario to transpire through the use of a cult of followers, or why He was apparently imprisoned in the center of this Black Labyrinth. Of course, these are entirely the wrong questions to ask Him.

He was not imprisoned, despite his inability to leave. He did not want anything, at least not in a way which any human mind would characterize 'want'. He had not arranged any of this; the comings and goings of the strange, lesser beings were not His to organize, though of course they were all ultimately dancing to the sad, strange song He played.

But, if one had to put such minute and human terms to Him and His cognition, He was not terribly displeased with the direction that this final round was going. There had been blood from one, and soon blood from the other two would join it. The gears, to use an entirely inappropriate metaphor, were now turning in an engine long-dormant.

Surrounded by an army of long-frozen combatants at the center of the stygian maze, He sat and caressed them with a forest of throbbing, pulsating, writhing appendages. Ten thousand eyes, built from the still-hot iron of a dead star, rolled aimlessly; if they had been directed with more care, one could call it scanning. Whether or not the motions of the three in the labyrinth, or the scurrying of His scolopendran children mattered to Him, who can say?

But whether they knew it or not, it was in His name that they acted.

[Christina Bredith]

To say Christina was surprised by the labyrinth’s sudden merger with the heavens above would be a gross understatement.

She had been dueling with the strange half-woman-half-centipede and her twin scimitars when suddenly something rippled through the arena. She wasn’t sure what exactly she had noticed first, whether it was the appearance of bright blue stars shimmering distantly in the arenas walls, or the sudden and indescribable feeling of wrongness that crashed over her like a tall ocean wave. The entire arena had somehow changed in ways much deeper than the layout of the maze. The change had been something… fundamental.

The centipede let out a hiss and lunged desperately at her would-be prey, putting Christina on frantic defense. They danced around the stone statues, but something about the centipede had changed too, like it had been filled with fervor. It was all she could do to keep the beast’s hungry twin blades at bay; they sang disharmoniously against Rosebite’s damascan sheen, their rhythm now beyond comprehension.

Suddenly the dark-haired girl reappeared in the chamber, and Christina remembered panic rising in her chest. Had this been her design? Sorcery designed to confuse and trick Christina so that she could land the final blow when all hope of resistance had been eliminated?

Either way, the distraction was enough. The monster screeched something in its grating tongue and its right scimitar fell in a vicious arc. Christina could not bring Rosebite across fast enough for the parry, and the black blade bit into the flesh of her side as she attempted to pull away. Pull away she did, but she dragged the jagged blade through skin and sinew as she did, and she let out a cry of pain. Blood trickled in a crimson cascade once the sword was no longer there to stopper it, and splashed wetly on the dark stone floor.

Christina barely even noticed the girl leap onto the centipede beast’s back and begin hammering at its face. That feeling of wrongness crested again, and the heavens now surrounding them on all sides intensified. No longer could she see merely blue pinpoints of stars in the dark fabric of the walls; at even greater distances, and yet somehow still within the walls, she could see multicoloured gaseous nebulae floating serenely amid their blue-hot companions. It was surreal and horrifying—but beautiful all the same.

The sounds of the struggle pulled her back to reality. She tried to move, but her wound stung horribly and she found herself nearly unable to move. The pain was much greater than it should have been for a wound of that size. In this darkness, there was little she could do for it, but there was no choice but to try.

“Nourish, Rosebite!” she exclaimed, and held the sword skyward. Normally she would need the light of the sun to make the most of this ability, nourishing her wounds as the leaves of a plant and healing her wounds; for now, she would just have to make do with what little healing the ability could afford her from the labyrinth’s natural light.

But what happened was very strange. She immediately felt the spell’s warmth flood into her as if it were a bright summer’s day. There was no way this should have been possible, but it was. Her wound was knitting itself up as happily as she could have pleased, and the pain was receding. Could it be… the stars?

She had to shove that question aside, too. There were too many things to wonder at today, and she could not afford any of them while a vicious centipede beast with jagged black blades stood ready to tear her limb from limb. The black-haired girl had the thing quite literally by the throat, but the way it was rearing threatened to throw her against one of the chamber’s many statues at any moment. Christina leapt into action, propelling herself forward with the swiftness of an arrow. Rosebite flashed, reflecting the many colours of the stars and nebulae, and the centipede screamed as one of its arms came away from its body. She didn’t stop there, spinning her body hard and drawing the damascus blade right across her foe’s lightly-carapaced midsection. Hot knife met warm butter; the creature bellowed deeply and the light faded from its yellow eyes as its body uncoiled and tumbled to the floor.

Christina stepped away from the corpse and watched her opponent step down. The girl had just helped her a great deal, but the fact remained that they were opponents. For that reason, at least, Rosebite remained unsheathed.

“That was… unpleasant,” she said at last. “But thanks for your help. Now, I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what the hell is going on here, would you?”

* * *

“An unusual choice for a final round, wouldn’t you say?”

Athenry turned to note the third viceroy, Emien Harthworth, join them on their private dais, and saw that Sivien was doing the same. He removed his cloak and threw it aside, revealing clothing cut very finely from rich wool, but no less practical for it. Where had the repugnant little man been all this time, Athenry wondered? To appear after the entire battle seemed to be going straight to hell—or perhaps to heaven, from the look of it. The whole thing was deeply unsettling, but the crowd seemed pleased, and that was to the good.

“Not at all to your taste, I’m sure, Emien,” Sivien noted dryly, gesturing a servant hovering nearby to refill his goblet. Emien was known to prefer rather more direct methods of conflict. His ideal final round would no doubt have pitted the three combatants in an undecorated arena no bigger than one of the anterooms in their palace in Radasanth. No muss, no fuss. And certainly no monsters trying to stop the contestants from killing each other!

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Sivien,” the other man replied, taking a seat and following in ordering a goblet of wine. “I find it makes for a… refreshing change of pace.”

It wasn’t the words that made Athenry’s stomach turn. It was the tone in which they were delivered. His face twisted into a scowl without his even realizing it, directed at Emien. It did not go unnoticed. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to make faces, Athenry?” the burly man said with a strange smile. “Sit back and enjoy the show. You really have seen nothing yet.” Athenry then realized he would not have called that smile strange; it was disturbing.

Most unexpectedly, a shiver ran down his spine.

[Amen]

Marcus did not resist the weight of the blade as it came down on the horizontal statue, but he kept his eye on his target even as she tumbled away. The blade met that unyielding, stone-like material with a sonorous clank, and then a scrape as he pulled it away and raised it to the ready again.

He felt…odd.

The imp recovered from a nasty head-to-wall impact and immediately launched into ecstatic ranting, at least at first seeming, and Marcus’ first instinct was to grin. It had been a pretty clean swing, and the way she fell away from it would have been swanlike if it hadn’t been so pointedly ungraceful. Some part of him wanted to laugh and slap her on the back and tease her for the knock on the head when the larger part thought what the fuck is wrong with me?

The concern for himself melted away into fresh annoyance as he was taunted, and then the brash amusement came worming its way back in underneath, unbidden. It was as if…

And then the hall went dark.

Marcus blinked, and his eyes soon caught up with the sudden change in illumination. Having eyes that glowed meant he needed no outside source of light to see, but it took a heartbeat for his brain to make sense of what had happened – and then he saw his mouthy opponent groping blindly along one of the walls.

He didn’t even allow himself the wolfish grin; he just stepped forward and raised his axe, intent on ending the girl in her moment of weakness in the silent dark. The blade was overhead when there was another sudden shift in luminosity, and the paladin cursed. An incredible blaze welled up around the imp, turning her into a tiny silhouette, and lights danced and flared in his eyes as he stumbled away blinking.

When he adjusted for the second time, the girl was running away, and that all but cemented things for Marcus Book: this wasn’t just a mage who was full of shit, this was a queer, insane little mage and that explained everything.

He took the briefest instant to take in the changes to his surroundings. The walls were vaguely translucent and painted with heavenly bodies and nameless colors, so that it was impossible to say if the celestial images were inside the wall or seen through it from somewhere beyond. For a moment the templar was awed, but he pushed that away. It was a show, a distraction, and it meant nothing.

He followed the fleeing imp at a quick clip, but he didn’t run. He could hear her bare feet pattering on the stone, and see her shirt through the walls, a dancing off-white blur amidst the aurora borealis, and she couldn’t run forever. He wondered what she’d done to annoy the viceroys, this strange little illusionist, and then told himself he didn’t care.

When he finally caught up, the scene before him gave him pause. A fit blonde warrior-woman stood near and cautious to the imp and between them lay the gored and crumbled body of a demi-human horror somewhere between a woman and a centipede of unholy size. A niggling doubt blossomed in Marcus, causing his shoulders to slump. There was something larger going on here, something…

No. Mercenary. Don’t care.

He kicked the doubt down like a defiant child, so that there was a nagging guilt in his heart when he hoisted his axe up overhead and then brought it forward with all of his might, and then he let it fly at the younger and smaller woman. The axe flew straight but heavy as it came on end-over-end, chomping through the air with a quick, ominous, and rhythmic whoom-whoom-whoom.

Marcus didn’t pause to see if it worked. The haft was hardly out of his hands before he retrieved his shield from his shoulder and then his mace from his hip, and he advanced on the warrior-woman.

I’m a mercenary, he told himself stubbornly.