A Maze of Glass, Chapter Fifteen, Pt. 1
The music stand hit the floor as Zoe sprinted past it, eyes shut. She leapt over a table and prayed she landed where she’d hoped to land. She didn’t open her eyes to check. All around her, snarls and hisses filled the air. Claws raked at her clothes, tearing fabric. Shallow cuts peeled skin from her sides. She dropped the real-not-real Zippo and dove forward.
She landed in salt. And then—
She fell. Darkness surrounded her. Wind whipped past her ears. Her hair danced away from her scalp. She put an arm out ahead of her as if that would stop her from splattering all over the place whenever her incredible velocity suddenly ceased.
She landed, didn’t explode, and rolled onto her side. Black floor, black walls, black ceiling. She barely saw a foot in front of her. All around: lightlessness.
“Help!” Jill shouted, her voice a directionless echo through unknown halls.
Zoe crashed into a wall. The stonework came to life, squirming wetly into a limb. It lashed out, all claws, and barely missed. Zoe felt the breeze of it against her nose. She stumbled backwards. She had mystically-enhanced sight and she couldn’t see.
“Help!” Jill cried again. Her voice sounded more ragged, now.
Zoe held up the Zippo—which she remembered dropping but somehow still had—and moved through the dimness. Ink rolled down the walls. Her shoes squicked over slick ground. Even with the flame, eyesight-invocation be damned, she saw only three feet ahead.
“The world wins,” a gravelly rasp insisted. “The world always wins.”
“We have magic,” an ovular, inhuman head oozed out of the wall next to Zoe. Its Jill-like voice made her jump. The visage wore no eyes nor nose, only a gaping mouth of layered fangs and angled incisors. Its purple tongue pulsed bloated between green gums. “We should be able to save someone.”
“Never,” an echo invited Zoe deeper into the labyrinth. “Never.”
(every story)
Two clawed limbs swung through the air in front of her. The slashed ribbons from her kevlar and cut into the shirt beneath. Zoe gasped, whirling from the blow, using the momentum to push forward. When she turned back, she saw nothing.
“Oh my god, help!” Jill shrieked, closer now.
“Under the surface there’s nothing,” the gravelly voice taunted. “Under the surface there’s just me!”
Zoe moved forward, breath coming hard and hot through her nose. Loud, too. The Zippo flame wavered. It glowed along the viscous dripping rocks, the damp everything. Stone bubbled tar-like, eyes and fingers and mouths bobbing to the surface and sinking down again. Zoe came to a four-way intersection and froze, ears burning.
“Come on, Jill, one more shout…”
She waited. It worried her that she didn’t hear anything.
Something roughed against the earthen floor behind her. She spun around, the Zippo almost going out with the sudden motion. Squinting into the four feet of visibility she had, she saw nothing but darkness moving against darkness. Another roughness echoed out, feet against ground. Her palms moistened with sweat. Beads of it drooled down her face.
She couldn’t get Jill out of there if she didn’t move. She had to move.
Which way?
The thing scraping toward her found its footing—or whatever method it used for locomotion. It lunged at her from the darkness and it, itself, was so dark that she could barely understand its shape. She threw an arm up against a shelf-like limb, blocking its descent toward her head, and drove a kick into whatever approximated the monster’s center mass. It slid backward, semi-gelatinous. She spun away from it and fled.
A tremor shook the labyrinth. Stones tumbled from the ceiling. Several crashed on Zoe’s shoulders, on her back—a small one cracked off the top of her head before tumbling away. The Zippo went out and she crashed into a wall, rebounded, and kept running. Limbs lashed out from all sides. They clawed her kevlar down to the shirt; they shore strips of fabric down to her skin. Thin cuts trickled claret.
“Jill!” she called out. “Jill, where are you!?”
The ground fell away beneath her. It tumbled into a rockslide. Zoe leapt away from it and flew into—
She stood in front of the music stand. The ritual space crawled with shadows. On the other side of the room, Jill’s sigil lay ruined, salt sprayed all over the floor. A creature exactly Jill’s shape but seemingly constructed from sizzling viscous something bore down over Jill, skin dripping off of its hands as it clasped tight to Jill’s throat.
Zoe blinked, breathless from everything that had or hadn’t just happened.
“The world always wins,” a shade whispered, behind her. Her hand shook around the Zippo that wasn’t really hers.
Jill fumbled at the monster on top of her. Her blows came weak, unsupported. She punched at the Dark Jill’s sides with the strength of a child. One arm went limp, falling to the floor. With the other, Jill held onto Dark Jill’s wrists. Her grip, too, loosened.
“Always,” the shade echoed, its cold-as-corpses breath against the back of Zoe’s neck.
The walls were rocky cave walls, but the floor was the same as Sung-ho’s summer house.
Jill tried to buck against the boiling-skinned track-marked version of herself but Dark Jill held fast. Jill’s second buck barely lifted off the ground.
Zoe pushed aside the music stand and charged. A chorus of shrieks rose up around her. A whirlwind of appendages whipped out from the dark. She dove for the sizzling flesh of melting Dark Jill. Cloth ripped from skin ripped from muscle; shots of anguish sliced her back like a dozen starving whips. She screamed, crashing into Dark Jill. Their bodies plunged into a sigil and—
Zoe rocked back, still standing in front of the grimoire.
Across the room, Jill sat folded in her protective circle. Both of them panted, sweaty and breathless, clothes soaked. Distant, near-phantom pains ached along Zoe’s back and sides, wounds that hadn’t really happened but, in a way, also had. The sensation dissipated quickly.
Zoe blinked, searched for her place on the page. “I promise to you my strength and my counsel. I vow to buttress you and carry you, I vow to lend my aid whenever and always. I steel myself to this will. As above, so below.”
Jill wiped sheets of sweat from her brow. “As above, so below,” she whispered.
All the interlocking spells of the Proclamation triggered. Invocations and psychic wards fused through their bones. Blessings electrified them. Good luck charms, spiritual protections, and physical power; a dozen spells wormed through them all at once.
The candelabra flared, banishing all darkness.
The magic reached its apex. The mysticism fused with them. So much energy thrummed through the room, editing reality, that it lifted Zoe off the ground. She floated with her toes just an inch above the floor.
The Proclamation took. It activated, infused them, and settled.
Zoe landed gently back on the ground. “Whew, okay,” she muttered, wiping sweat backhanded from her brow. “Not so bad, after all. Right?”
Jill chuckled, too drained for real laughter.
Then all the lights went out at once and all the windows shattered.
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