Monsters of the Maze by Shane Lee | A World of the Stone Maze short story

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Monsters of the Maze

The continent lives in fear of the monsters that took over their land, and their only way to survive is to build a great stone labyrinth to hide their cities. They cannot fight. The enemy is too strong.

Mel is one of the thousands of builders across the land, thrust into this dangerous job and finding himself adept at it. Building a wall is not so hard...

...but surviving when the monsters find your camp and begin slaughtering your friends is something entirely different.

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**Monsters of the Maze is a short story set in the World of the Stone Maze universe, but takes place 100+ years before the events of Book 1: Labyrinth.**

Read the full story below!


 

Mel was a builder, one of the many who constructed the great stone walls of the labyrinth that covers the continent. He was a man of few words, but once he began working on the Walls, he developed a habit of talking to himself. Many of the builders did. It was a good way to stay sane.

In the stories told centuries later, they will say the builders of the Walls were braver even than the warriors on the ground fighting the monsters. They will say that the fate of the world rested in their bleeding hands.

And they will be right.

This is the story of one of those builders, whose name was short for Melrey, of the small city of Etterdon, which has since fallen to the invasion. He was a hero, undeservedly forgotten, because everyone who might have told his tale was too busy dying to the swarm of the shadows.

Melrey of Etterdon had never been accused of being a daydreamer. In his forty-two years atop soil, he had always been on the short list for building jobs because he got the job done. Homes, walls, wells—if it was wood or stone, he would make it work, and he would do it in good time.

Yet the first time Mel went to the top of the Walls, he found that he could wile away minutes, then hours, staring at the horizon. It was entrancing, and he was forced to break the habit of losing track of time up there.

Before the invasion, he had been practicing more intricate stonework. One might call it art, but Mel wouldn’t go so far. He’d sold some pieces around town, his secret delight glittering under his practicality.

But the labyrinth didn’t allow for such things. Mel hadn’t seen his town of Etterdon in over eleven years.

The labyrinth would be the work of many lifetimes, and tonight, this night, was one of thousands he’d spent building the wall.

It would also be his last.

 


 

Mel breathed the night air, feeling it cross his face. The air moved up here; inside the walls, it was dead. It ran through his short hair, black and peppered with gray. It made him scratch at his short beard of the same color when it made those whiskers fidget. Up here was the only place that happened.

Sitting atop the wall, looking at the distant north while his muscled arms and shoulders ached and the sound of the crew hammered away, was the last peaceful moment of the night.

The monsters prowled at night—as they always did, as everyone knew they did—but no one this far south had ever seen them. The northernmost builders and their vanguard of soldiers were over a hundred miles away, and there were many checkpoints and runners between them and Mel’s men. They should have been alerted well in advance.

But they weren’t.

The monsters came, like living shadows. Hidden in darkness, the first note of warning was when torchlight splashed across one’s long, spindly legs. It slashed across a soldier’s throat, who let out a single, gurgling cry before collapsing to the dirt. Then the rest fell onto the men.

Mel’s trained ears heard it right away, and he scrambled to his feet on the wall, which was almost ten feet wide at its top. A hundred feet below him, steel he’d never seen used was flashing in the firelight all throughout the hall. Shadows of deadly battle climbed up the walls of the maze, telling snippets of the story: they were being overwhelmed. They were being killed. And it was happening fast.

Mel had a harness around his waist, hooked to his belt which also held his pick, hammer, hauling loop, and a smattering of other stone-working tools. No weapons. That’s what the soldiers were for. But a sword and a pick would do about the same thing if they were swung at a monster’s head.

That was what Mel told himself as he slid over the edge of the wall, and if he hadn’t taken a fleeting tug at his harness before doing it, he would have free-fallen a hundred feet to the ground and died.

Slack. He pulled on it, and it kept coming and coming. The harness rope wasn’t supposed to do that. Inadvertently, the secure line on the ground and wall had been cut. He couldn’t get down.

Mel grunted and slipped the harness off, letting it drop. He’d been climbing these walls for over a decade, and he’d come fifty feet with just handholds before. This would be twice that, but it was no matter. His people were dying.

Over the edge and down. Mel didn’t hesitate—if he did, the fear would come and freeze his muscles and lock his fingers. He found crags and crevices in the stone and made it down a foot at a time.

The sounds below him grew louder; cries of pain; cries of terror. Steel hitting flesh and stone, and flesh being torn. Shouts, loud and unintelligible. The shadowy beasts were silent killing machines, their claws speaking for them.

Mel couldn’t get a good look at the ground, but he didn’t need it. It was clear that they were being overrun, and by the time he was halfway down the wall, shoulders burning and fingers numb, the sounds tapered off. Silence laid below him like thick mist in the night, and the firelight was tipped to the ground and snuffed.

“Someone’s gotta make it,” he whispered to himself with barely enough breath to form the words. “Someone’s alive.”

In the darkness, his progress was stymied. The moonlight didn’t reach well enough here. He had to feel for handholds, toeholds, every bit of progress. But find them he did, and eventually his boots found the ground. He prayed thanks to the gods and turned to see the carnage.

In the labyrinth, there was very little light, even during the day. The torches burned as long as the men were awake. Now they were gone, and the moonlight didn’t reach the camp.

Mel closed his eyes, letting them adjust to darkness for a few moments before opening them again. In the wet dirt on the ground, he saw shapes. They were men—no, they were corpses. There was no movement or sound, and the smell of blood was so thick in the air that his mouth might as well have been full of it. The sickening stench made his eyes water.

Mel pulled his pick from his belt and gripped it tight, wondering if he was too late to try to save anyone at all.

The monsters seemed to have cleared away, their work done. Mel moved to the closest body and knelt down.

“Gerald,” Mel breathed. A builder like him, but fifteen years younger. Down here eating his cold dinner before he would go back up the wall. The lower half of his face was gone, torn away like tree bark. But Mel knew his eyes, and he closed them before standing up, his hand shaking. He had seen death before, but never this gruesome.

He couldn’t yell to look for survivors. He couldn’t scream, though it was bubbling in him, an urge he hadn’t felt in years, perhaps even decades. They’d all heard of the monsters, they all knew why they were building the maze, but this was the first he’d seen of them, and it was more horrible than anything he’d imagined. Ruthless killers, things the soldiers hadn’t been able to stand up to for more than a few minutes.

It was no wonder that people had chosen to hide rather than fight.

Body after body after body. The blood of his friends mixed together on his hands and knees, painting him a blackish-red in the darkness. After the sixth dead face of someone he’d broken bread with, Mel’d had enough. There was no one to save but himself.

So he started to look for the map.

A soldier would have it, and not just any soldier—the garrison sergeant. The map was the most valuable piece among them, worth more than all their armor, swords, tools, labor and lives combined. It showed them how to get home, and how to navigate their work. It was so critical that it only revealed a small part of the labyrinth—what they absolutely had to see, and not an inch more. Still, that range covered dozens of square miles.

“The fate of the continent is on this paper and others like it.”

That was what the sergeant, Rodney, had told them, and it was the same thing Mel had heard from the other sergeants in his time as a wall-builder: the soldiers and crew leaders both. Though Rodney had been more eloquent.

“There is no one map of the labyrinth. If such a thing fell into the hands of the enemy, we would be crushed. The wielders entrust limited cartography to the builders, one single copy per crew, one crew per section. No map is within fifty miles of another. If it is lost, all resources go to finding it, and if we are overwhelmed, it must be destroyed.”

Rodney had pointed his sword at them then, all of them huddled at the gates of Palanna, a town most of them had never seen before. He’d moved through many towns since being conscripted to build. They all had.

“I won’t be losing this map. None of you will be laying hands on this map. I’d sooner kill you and then myself before anyone touched this paper who’s not named Rodney Haltauer, garrison sergeant of Palanna section. Remember your duties.”

Rodney would station himself northmost of the camp each time they moved. Mel headed that way, looking at the bodies and trying to identify Rodney’s copper-lined helmet. Like everyone else, the sergeant was most assuredly dead, and would not be able to seek retribution on Mel for taking the map. Someone like Rodney, though—he’d try even from the grave.

Mel moved as quietly as possible, keeping his breath steady and his fear at bay as best he could, mostly by not thinking about what was happening. In his mind was a simple mantra.

Find the map, get out. Find the map, get out.

Find the map.

Get out.

Get out.

Get out.

The dirt was soft under Mel’s boots; it made it easy to be quiet. He was well-practiced with stilling his tool belt, too.

The maze was different down here. Mel spent so much time on top of the Walls, it was like he was somewhere else completely. The turns and layouts that made sense a hundred feet up were now mysteries. He kept in his mind where north was and went that way, venturing past where the builders normally stayed, and to the outskirts where the soldiers were positioned.

There was no shortage of bodies for him to mistake for Rodney’s. His company of builders and soldiers numbered almost one hundred, and he was the only the one standing.

There, at last, next to a broken banner—the copper helm, and just a few feet from it, a corpse with rank color on its shoulder.

“Rodney,” Mel breathed, kneeling down by him. He didn’t like the man, didn’t like his way of talking nor how he treated the builders, but he’d heard he was an incredible fighter and he respected that. Putting his life on the line to protect his men, his builders, and the work they were doing.

Around him were three dead monsters: big, dog-like things with black skin and long, clawed front legs. They were the only dead ones Mel had seen. Rodney’s final work, and perhaps the only casualties their company had been able to inflict.

Rodney’s arm was sliced at the shoulder and connected by an inch of gristle. Cooling blood soaked the dirt beneath him. His eyes were open and his skin was an inhuman pale white, drained of color. Even his normally dark mustache seemed paled.

Mel knew where the man kept the map, tucked inside his jacket. He unbuttoned it, smearing blood on the silver buttons, and reached inside the hot, wet mess of the jacket where some monster had clawed at Rodney’s stomach.

“Be here,” Mel prayed, squelching around blindly inside the mess. “Be here, be whole. That’s it.”

Blood, blood, more blood, splintered bone...and then a button. He undid it, breathing silently through parted lips, and his fingertips found the edges of paper. Mel allowed himself a small sigh of relief, and slipped the page free from Rodney’s corpse.

Then the shadow beast came and knocked him clear off the body.

Mel hit the ground hard and the air rushed out of his lungs. The map flew into the air and dropped down to the dirt. He scrambled for his belt, wheezing, wondering, Where did it come from? How could I not see it? What is it, what is it?

Wet tearing sounds—the monster was digging at Rodney. Maybe it thought the corpse was him?

The builder found his pick, the biggest stonework tool he had, and at the same time the monster lost interest in the dead man and turned to the living one.

It was dark down here, but there was just enough light to see the thing. It wasn’t a person, nothing like it—totally black; four feet tall; its body was an uneven mass on some unnatural number of legs, all clawed and digging into the dirt. Its skin seemed to be moving, like it was hot pitch and just sliding off, except that it got swept back under it and into its flesh over and over. A tiny growth on its front looked toward Mel, and—hell’s fire, was that its head? Small; eyeless; no mouth. It wiggled in front of its writhing body. The whole thing was the size of two of Mel melted together. Just the sight of the monster was sickening.

And it was coming for him.

He got to his feet into time to avoid its first strike, an impalement into the ground by its two—no, its three front legs. They sliced into the dirt with ease while Mel stumbled backward, getting a firm grip on the wooden handle of his pick and wishing he’d thought to take Rodney’s sword from the man’s dead body. Not that he’d ever used one, but it had to be better than this—

The monster moved again, eerily fast for such an odd creature. Its tiny, featureless head pointed at Mel, and he swung at it. The blade of the pick nicked across its skull and carved a valley into the flesh. The monster did not crumple, but it missed the builder and brushed across his arm as Mel moved to the side. Its flesh was hot; it singed him, and he gasped in pain.

The monster had felt like tar on his arm, fiery and yielding. How could something like that be alive? How could it walk around and kill trained soldiers?

I am a dead man. Dead. Just...not yet.

Mel saw that he had an unbroken path to Rodney’s body, and he took it, darting across the dirt and looking frantically at the blood-soaked ground.

“There!”

He belted his pick and grabbed the sword where it laid in the dirt. The hilt and handle were bloody, and Mel didn’t care. He wrapped his fingers around that blood and lifted. The broad blade was heavy, but Mel had been a builder all his life—lifting heavy things was his job. Maybe he couldn’t win a sword fight, but he could sure as hell hack at this monster until it killed him.

“Come on, then,” he panted, pain radiating from his forearm where the monster had burned him. “Let’s get this over with.”

The shadow beast had turned, its claws churning up the dirt. It ran at Mel, making no sound besides its many feet against the ground. Fast—it was still very fast.

Mel leveled the sword forward like a spear and ran back at the creature, aiming for its twitchy little head. He would drive it through and end this.

It almost worked. The monster ran straight at him like a wild horse, but the head’s movements were crazed and unpredictable. He sunk the blade into the thing’s (shoulder?) and it ate the metal like nothing; all three feet of steel disappeared inside the thing, and it knocked him to the ground again. This time he kept his wind, but the handle of the sword, sticking out, crashed into his chest and it felt like his whole body would collapse into the wound.

Above him, the monster swiped a claw at his neck, the other claws slicing against his legs, his sides. Pain and blood sprouted from all over his body. He knocked away the killing blow, covering his throat.

Mel had heard before of builders jumping from the wall if their camps were attacked. Now he knew why.

In the corner of his vision was the map, just a few feet away. Resting atop the dirt, waiting to be plucked up by the wind, or the fingers of the last survivor of the builder company.

So close—yet his key to salvation would do nothing to help him now.

Backed into a corner, even the man most willing to accept death will fight. Mel grabbed at the legs of the monster and realized that they were fast, but they were weak. Much thinner than his muscled forearms.

Snap!

He broke a limb like a twig. The creature’s bone pierced through its leathery leg-skin, and Mel grabbed another leg.

Snap! Snap! Snap!

The monster collapsed and Mel rolled out from under it, dabbling the ground with his blood. The pain was superficial now, far away—he had the upper hand.

He got to his feet and came around the monster, which was struggling to right itself, noiselessly suffering.

“Do you feel pain?” Mel asked it as he grabbed the handle of Rodney’s sword and yanked it free of the creature. He looked around at his dead men, all of whom he knew by name, even the soldiers.

I hope so.

Mel swung the sword down with both hands, cleaving into the prone monster’s freakish head. The blade split the skull and went almost all the way through before sticking. The monster went limp.

Dead.

The builder sucked in a breath and groaned at the pain it brought. He peeled back his shirt and felt at the skin where the sword handle had butted him. Unbroken and dry, but sorely bruised. It would be weeks for it to heal, and he’d be grateful for every agonizing minute if he could get out of here alive.

The map.

He tore his gaze from the messy corpse and cast it to his left, and there it was. Lying unassuming in the dirt, not gilded nor laced in glamor, yet practically casting its own holy light to draw Mel forward. He stepped to the map and picked it up, the sight deadening his pain for a moment. He trained his eyes on the paper, but it was too dark to see properly.

There, on the wall, was a bracketed torch. Unlit, because the doused rag had fallen free when some poor soul had been thrown against it during the attack. Mel stepped over the corpse and retrieved the rag, ripping free the portion too dirty to use, and slapping the rest onto the torch. He lit it with the flint from his belt and it flared to life.

Mel took up the map in the firelight...

And felt despair swallow him.

“Shit.”

The map was swallowed in blood, not only the blood of his fellows, but strange black ichor that could have come from the monster he’d slain or any one of the others. It was not totally unreadable to an expert, but Mel was not that man. The map expert was dead, torn open and apart. All that was left was a builder who was faced once again with the reality of his approaching death.

The torch sputtered out as he crawled his eyes across the map again and again, trying to find something, anything that would help him, but the lines were blurred, some covered entirely, and besides—he had no idea where he was. If the camp was marked, it had been blotted out.

Mel dropped the map to the ground, aware that he was still backed into a corner, just a different one, and that there had to be some other way. There had to.

His eyes traveled up the walls, silent monoliths in the dark, where up high the moonlight cast a white blade across the stone. Mel stepped over the map, got grips on the wall behind it, and began to climb.

If I walk on top of the Walls, I might be able to see something. Palanna. Some other camp, if I get that far. Someone else who escaped.

Mel grunted, his chest blooming with pain every time he yanked himself up.

Or I’ll fall and die without a harness, and if I’m lucky it’ll be quick.

But his sure-handedness prevailed, and after long, exhausting minutes, Mel pulled himself atop the flat stretch of the wall and rolled onto his back, catching his breath and brushing the sweat from his eyes. The strenuous climb helped to clear his mind. He watched a wispy cloud drift away from the moon, revealing the fat crescent hanging in the sky, before getting up to his feet once more and looking around.

It was different up here at night, and far less inviting—the labyrinth stretched all around him, the tops of the walls lit like white strips where the moonlight was strong, and almost disappearing when a cloud took that light away. He couldn’t see the ground unless he looked straight down, and he wondered how much of the labyrinth was still left to build. Even the half-walls, unfinished and hidden at this angle, didn’t detract from the astounding sight. There were hundreds more walls to surround them.

Mel snapped himself from his mindless gazing and moved, boots slapping the stone. The night air was colder up here, the breeze uninhibited. He relished the chill against his open wounds and focused on scanning the ground from a hundred feet up without falling over the edge of the wall.

He crossed a good distance atop the wall, taking the turns as they came, but a sound from below made him stop. It broke the silence gently, making his ears strain, and he dropped low to hear it better.

A voice. By the denizens, there was a survivor?

He almost called out, but the words floating up to him, bouncing back and forth off the thick stone walls, stopped that.

“...must be here. They are...dead. Find...the map.”

A sickness twisted in Mel’s stomach. The voice was grating and spoke unnaturally. Breathy, yet loud enough to be heard up here. He’d never heard another person who sounded like that, not in all his years. But it was too dark down amid the Walls to see who it was.

The sickness twisted at him again.

The map.

The map he had dropped on the ground in frustration. The map he had deemed worthless, but in the wrong hands, in hands that had time to decipher it—

He tore to his feet immediately and retraced his steps, knowing his sound wouldn’t carry down below.

Just came up, and now I have to go all the way back down.

Well, it was his own damned fault. And he’d better not die on the way and leave his mistake there to kill everyone in every hidden town nearby.

Mel knew that he had one chance to escape, and it would be gone if he went to go get this map. But he also knew that he’d done it to himself.

The descent would be suicide, and he fell into it gracefully. He and the certainty of death were now old friends. The odd tranquility it brought made it easy for him to find his way down the wall—and the harness rope he found spiked into the wall, twenty feet from the top, made it easier still.

Halfway down, he could begin to see the ground below him. The jutting shape of his burned-out torch, bracketed to the wall, was practically straight underneath him. He’d found his way back\.

“Pretty good eyes, eh?” he congratulated himself. “But...”

Where was the map?

The ground was dark; bare. Ice crystallized in his veins as he thought: Am I too late?

Then the ground shifted, and he realized he was not staring at the black dirt of the maze, but at the broad back of some beast thrice—no, five times the size of the thing he had lucked into killing. Glints of its humped, broad back caught the moonlight, painting a dotted picture of something big enough to carry a house atop it, positioned just above where he had let the map fall to the labyrinth floor.

Coincidence? Maybe. But with that other party searching for the map—

Some kind of monster ally? Or are there ones that can talk?

it might not be. This thing below him could be leading its allies to the map somehow.

Mel held the rope with one strong hand and swore. There was just no way he could fight something this big, not even if he could get his hands on Rodney’s sword again. He was willing to give his life for this map, but to die and not even have a chance at destroying the paper—it wouldn’t do.

He was stuck. He couldn’t go down there with that huge thing on the map. And he couldn’t fight it and hope to live long enough to do his job.

The monster was right below him, some fifty feet down.

His free hand was on the stone, and he brushed across it, feeling the lines of the blocks there. A completed wall would be smoothed over, magically finished by crews that boasted wielders, the rare few with bonds to wild magic who made this construction possible in the end.

But raw wall like this was something he could work with. It was, in fact, all he spent his time working with.

With the rope secured to his harness, he pulled free his hand tools and got to work. The unsealed blocks were big and heavy, over a hundred pounds of stone, shaped and produced by the quarrymen and wielders all around the continent. They sat perfectly atop each other, and Mel knew that if he chiseled away at the border, it could be removed. The wall wouldn’t miss one block.

Gods willing, the block wouldn’t miss, either.

His chisel ground stone into dust, pounding away, the creature below him not caring in the least. Stolen glances made Mel think it was some kind of coiled snake, but long and thick enough to make a coil ten feet wide, with no discernible head or tail.

He didn’t pay much attention to that. He was working.

The border chipped away, he next drove two stone spikes as deep into the block as he could while leaving room to grip them. Then he lowered himself so that his feet were planted on the next block down. Mel grabbed the two spikes, bent his legs, and shoved.

It was a slow process that made his very bones creak, but the moment he felt the first half-inch of the stone move, he knew it would come. Stone never lied; its story was linear and easy to shape.

Inch by inch, it slid from its nest, until suddenly it was no longer supported; the stone spikes tugged at Mel’s shoulders, and he instantly released, kicking off so the block could fall below him.

It was a silent, plummeting missile. Two seconds of nothing, capped by a splintering crash as the huge stone block fell onto the monster, burying its weight into the shelled coils. Mel watched with grim satisfaction, no less aware that if there was one dead monster waiting, there would be living ones to follow. Ones that would not hesitate to spill his guts into the dirt.

No time to waste.

He rappelled down as fast as he ever had, boots thudding against the stone until they hit dirt. The monster’s blood and innards had been splashed against the wall. The block’s corner poked upward toward the sky, buried in the corpse.

Mel looked for the map, glad the monster was dead and at the same time cursing himself for being sloppy. If the map was caught under the stone, then perhaps that would be fine, unless something even bigger than this monster came along. Something under orders to search...

The idea chilled his blood, finally settling in. He had a soldier’s thought—that he wished he knew more about their enemy. He thought—they all thought—they they were mindless beasts with a thirst for blood. But was there more? Had Rodney known?

You all knew something. Keeping the map safe...you don’t keep it safe from simple beasts. They just wouldn’t tell us what else was out here.

Dark blood splashed up his boots and legs as he trod through the soaked dirt. He hovered his hand over his pick. If he had to dig through the body, then so be—

But no, there it was. Just on the edge of the carnage and flipped over, perhaps shoved free by the impact and miraculously unmarked by the gristle the monster had expelled. Mel took it in his hands and smiled for the first time in hours.

Burn it.

He turned, looking for the torch he knew he had already burned out. Maybe there was some scrap of fuel, something he could use his flint on. His boots squished through the wet dirt, the map tucked under his arm as he sorted through the ground in darkness, dirtying his hands in his search.

Nothing. And when he rose up from the ground, there were shapes to his left, farther down the wall. They had rounded the corner and were coming his way.

They saw him, and they started moving faster.

Mel spun, crushing the map in his fist, and ran. Racing around the mess of the murdered monster, he heard the dirt churn in the distance behind him, his pursuers quickening. He tried to think as he prolonged his life second by second.

Can’t burn it—got nothing. Tear it up? Not good enough, the paper is treated, I need tools—no time to bury it—

Mel met a wall and slapped his forearms against it as he turned, losing purchase with his boots. What were the odds he’d come across Palanna? Or an old camp? Or perhaps even just one lonely torch, one that hadn’t been snuffed? He prayed for anything of the sort.

Behind him, the sounds closed in. Whatever creatures were on him were fast, and his lead wouldn’t last. Hope dwindled. He was just running in the dark, the sparse moonlight reminding him only that he was surrounded by walls. There was no goal, no way to do what he had come down here to do. Not only would he die for nothing, but he’d doom his people in the process.

The fear was gone, strained down to pure thirst for escape, and it quickened him. The sounds behind him were still there, still closing in, but he was moving faster than he ever had in his life, faster even than thirty years ago, racing with hunting dogs in Etterdon, laughing as the animals beat him to the rabbit he’d shot.

I used to use a bow and arrow, he thought. I’d completely forgotten. Before the Walls. Before all of this.

He wanted to find that peace again, but the freedom that came with it? That would be gone forever.

Focus—the map—do something!

His panting breath burned at his throat and his fiery footfalls were slowing. Every turn he took was lost in his mind; he’d never find his way back. He wasn’t even sure how far he’d come, and his pursuers hadn’t lost track of him as he had thinly hoped. The maze was their territory now. The people were only safe behind the gates.

“Something,” he panted. “Got...to find...something.”

But it was the something that found Mel.

He didn’t even see it where it lied in wait around the corner. It stuck out a thick, misshapen arm and caught him around the chest, wrapping him up even as it knocked the wind out of him. He wheezed, his body being turned to the side by something strong enough to lift his boots an inch from the ground.

“A live one,” came the guttural words. “At...last.”

The thing holding him looked almost human, or like a human sloppily joined with another. Or like a human boiled down to clay and reshaped by something with shovels for hands. Then blackened by fire.

It was big, eight feet tall at least, and what might be mistaken for bulging muscle from far away were the odd lumps of its body. A big one on the neck, erasing its left shoulder. Bulges in its abdomen, on its hip. Its face, half-eaten by a solid black growth. But the mouth was there underneath, a slit below one half-covered, black-irised eye.

Even struggling to catch his breath, Mel recognized the voice. The same one he’d heard from atop the wall. The one searching for—

“The map,” it growled. “I know you...have it. Where?”

Mel choked. If this thing knew he had the map, why didn’t it kill him and take it?

Its half-eye was dry, staring solidly at him. “You will show...me.”

It’s talking about the crew, the company, Mel thought. Not me—us. So it didn’t know the map was currently clenched in his fist, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. This was no monster, no common beast. There was cunning in its horrid face. Enough cunning to keep its prey alive and to use it.

Mel could breathe again. The map was crunched into a ball, the old blood dried on it. Any moment could bring its discovery, so he did all he could do.

He snapped his fist up and shoved the map in his mouth.

The iron taste of blood swept over his tongue. Sharp paper edges, treated for water-strength, cut his tongue and cheeks. But his teeth were stronger, and they tore it apart. He forced it down his throat.

The monster watched him for a moment, perhaps unsure of what was happening, and by the time it understood and rage lit up its face—

how can it look so angry with only half of one eye?—

—it was too late. It dropped Mel to the ground and wrapped a meaty claw of a hand around his throat. But the map was gone.

“You...you...” The monster’s tongue snaked through its teeth, and the hand around his throat tightened.

“Go on,” Mel said, forcing out the raspy words. The map had cut him, blood leaking in his mouth. “It’s over.”

“I’ll gut you and...take it out,” it said, hissing and grinding the words, “and I’ll...do it while you’re alive, so you...can watch.”

Mel closed his eyes and remembered his first bow from when he was eleven. It had snapped in half after ten days of use, but he had loved it.

More noise in the distance, curling into his ears. The monsters in pursuit, then. Too late to do their master any good.

When firelight tickled at his eyelids, Mel opened them back up, and that was when the hand around his throat drew back. He sucked in wet, burning air and saw a sight even more lovely than the map itself: a fire-carrying, horse-riding, sword-wielding company of soldiers. They stampeded around the far corner of the hall where Mel’s death sentence was about to be carried out, and they saw him. They saw the speaking beast, and they saw its lackeys approaching from the other side.

The head soldier yelled something and pointed his sword toward the pair of them. The charge continued, and there were a dozen—no, two dozen, and they were trained soldiers, not recruits. Even from the ground with sweat in his eyes, Mel saw the colors on their shoulders. Fighters, like Rodney.

The talking monster either somehow knew the significance of the band of men, or at least feared their numbers. He let Mel fall to the ground, the soft dirt catching him gently.

“I’ll kill you...for this,” the strange beast swore, locking its eye into him.

Mel said, “You don’t even know my name.”

The thundering hooves drew nearer, and Mel’s ravaged body gave in. He closed his eyes and let sight and sound disappear.


He awoke to a blessed thing: sunlight. Though it pained his eyes, it made him smile.

He reached up to shield his vision and found that his arms were wrapped in red-tinged bandages, and the sunlight was coming through a window in the room. There was a bed beneath him.

He was out of the labyrinth.

Mel licked his lips, his mouth dry. He sat up in the bed, its thin, hay-stuffed mattress a hundred times more comfortable than camping in the maze. The view from the window was familiar.

“Palanna,” he breathed, and it hurt his throat to do it. Judging by how much pain he was still in, it couldn’t have been more than a day since the fight. If he was still bleeding, it was probably the next morning.

Mel waited only a few more moments before getting himself out of the bed and to the door. The scene outside the window told him he was on the second floor of the soldiers’ barracks, and when he went down the stairs, there was a pair waiting for him.

“Builder Melrey,” one said. He was short and young, but his hair was clean-cut and his sword handle was polished. A recruit; not one of his rescuers. His simple uniform, with the charcoal stripes sewn over the shoulders, looked like it had never left Palanna.

“Water,” Mel said, swallowing splinters.

“Captain Greggs is waiting for you at the gate,” the other soldier told him, and this one was older and his sword handle was scratched. He had blue eyes so light the irises almost weren’t there, and his brown hair was swept to the side. “He and his lieutenants have some questions.”

Mel knew he wasn’t arrested, and he was older than these two put together. He appreciated a man doing his job, but he was thirsty like he’d never been.

“The water,” he said again. “Then you can take me there.”

Two cold tankards later, he walked into the late morning sunshine with the soldiers ahead of him. He didn’t need guidance to the gate, of course, but they would have their orders. The barracks was close to Palanna’s only entrance, a towering wooden gate banded with iron that led out to the maze. Behind it, the small town curled around a sweep of grassland like a scythe blade, stretching along a narrow river which fed under the walls that had been built around it. Homes were dotted along the bank and further back; small, simple things, housing people who were friendly and scared. Palanna had only been fully walled for a few years, and since it was on a building horizon, tales of the labyrinth’s danger made it here quickly, and they stayed. Festering.

Captain Greggs was the highest-ranking official in Palanna—and whatever town he came from before, he held the highest rank there, too. And before that. He had a bald head he woke up early to shave every day with motions so practiced he could do it with his eyes closed. Greggs had a couple inches on Mel, and was just as bulky; soldiers and builders alike talked about how he could wield two broadswords as well as he could wield one. Judging by the marks on his leather armor, he’d had to do so plenty of times.

There weren’t many soldiers who could say that. Usually you only got the one chance.

“Melrey of Etterdon,” Captain Greggs said, tipping him a nod. “I’m glad you made it through the night.”

“Not without your help,” Mel said, returning the nod. “You came just in time.”

“Thank Elanna for that,” Greggs said, and the lieutenant to his right moved her eyes towards the captain. “She has the best ears in the maze. Heard you before any of us did.”

Elanna had marks on her own armor, cuts in the leather that hadn’t been repaired. Her gentle features disguised a fierceness in battle that caught enemies unaware—even the monsters. Her hair was long and black and tied back, draping over her shoulder and half-concealing her lieutenant’s and combat colors.

“You should scream more when you’re in trouble,” she said to Mel, her face serious. “Especially in the maze.”

“I’ll remember that,” Mel replied.

“That, plus luck—we were headed back from a sighting between us and a northern camp—gets you one more chance at life,” Greggs said. “Probably won’t happen again. I need you to tell me what you saw. And why you’re the only one alive.”

Mel shook his head. “I hoped someone else had made it.”

“They didn’t,” Elanna said.

Mel told his story. It was still fresh in his mind, and still just as painful. Rodney’s death did not strike the soldiers’ faces as he expected it to, but—of course, they would have seen it for themselves.

“What of the map?” Greggs asked, as Mel described dropping it when the torch burned out. “We searched for hours and came up empty-handed. I pray Rodney destroyed it.”

“No, captain,” Mel said. “I came back to dispose of it when I realized I couldn’t leave it behind. But I didn’t have a torch or the right tools, so I...ate it.”

“You ate it.”

Snrk.

A laugh, cut off before it could thrive. Captain Greggs whipped his head around to his company, but they were all deadpan.

Elanna’s lip quivered.

“I was in the clutches of some monster who was searching for it,” Mel said. “I had no other options.”

Captain Greggs blinked. “I’ve been a soldier almost forty years, Melrey of Etterdon. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

Mel’s shoulders twitched. “It’s true.”

“Okay. Well, then,” Greggs said, his stern face at last relaxing, “it seems all is not lost, save the lives of the Palanna builder company. I wish we had been on the return sooner, but I’ve never had a wish come true for me.

“Melrey, you are relieved of your labyrinth building duties. It will take some months to gather a new company for this section regardless. Your bravery is appreciated, if...strangely executed.”

Relieved, Mel thought, and realized he indeed felt that relief. If they wanted him out there to build, he would go for his people. But if not...

“I understand,” Mel said. “Once more, thank you, Captain. And Elanna. All your company.”

“Dismissed, then,” Greggs said, and turned away.

“Captain Greggs,” Mel said, stopping his retreat. “The monster who talked to me, searching for the map. This is something you all know about? That they have...that it’s not just wild beasts? That we’re being hunted?”

Greggs caught Mel’s eyes with his own steely green ones. “It’s not something we discuss.”

“That’s good,” Mel said. “It’s not something anyone wants to be thinking about.”

He knew as well that only the builders and soldiers were told the significance of the map, though it wasn’t elaborated on. And that those words were not breathed to the people who didn’t work the maze.

“You are correct,” Greggs said. “No one but me and my army. I will say this, and remember it: we are a thousand steps, twists, and turns ahead of them. Don’t let it steal your sleep.”

Mel returned to his small house in Palanna. He never climbed a labyrinth wall again, and his story died among the firelit night camps of Gregg’s soldier company, where its retellings became shorter and shorter, and the soldiers found less cheer in stories as their numbers thinned.

Captain Greggs and most of his lieutenants would die in the maze over the next few years, and Mel would never know about it. Soldiers and companies moved on; the world was big when you were out in the labyrinth. Hidden in its more provincial pockets, life was different. It was slow and it was safe.

Mel’s work changed, falling back to the intricate stonework that had sparked tinder in his heart when the world was different. His hands grew old, but not clumsy; only practiced. He carved men and women; he chiseled miniature lookalike homes as gifts or trade for their residents; he shaped sitting bowls and hand tools. There was no shortage of stone; the labyrinth saw sure to that.

The carvings he kept at home were the ones from his nightmares, the ones that stole his sleep despite Captain Greggs’ message. The monsters he killed, and the one that held him like a doll and promised him death. Mel’s memory was sharp, and when he etched it into stone, it would last forever.

But he was the only one who knew what these small pieces were, and he kept it that way. Captain Greggs was right: they didn’t discuss such things. It wasn’t something the people wanted to think about. He would suffer that horror alone until the end, when it would visit at night.

Yet the sun was good to him, and the nights where the memory seized his chest with blackened, clawed hands grew greater distances apart. He died happy, and his late stonework carried on the name that his heroism had left behind.

The labyrinth was completed some short years before Mel’s peaceful death in sleep, and the people lived on.

But that safety came at a cost.

The cities of the continent were cut off from each other for hundreds of years, the organization of soldiers and builders dissolving over time until all that existed were rumors and huddles of the people who had survived the invasion. They had their cities and their lives, but the rest of it, even the maze they’d built over years and years and years—that all belonged to the monsters. No one went out in the maze and survived. It stayed that way for centuries.

Until Jost, of Cartha, made a discovery.

And changed everything.

 

The End of this story…and the start of another.


But wait…there’s more! 

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Continue Jost’s Story

The World of the Stone Maze trilogy begins with Labyrinth

…goes deeper with Inhumans

…and comes to an end with Whisper.