I step out of the mirror and immediately hear Bashe swearing.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

There’s a bit of sensory overload when I first look around to get my bearings; everything in this new area is radically different from any of the previous zones of the Labyrinth (and I am thinking of them as zones like an RPG might have, especially with the weird way they transition).

The graying lichen beneath my feet is probably the most normal part of this whole mess. The wall immediately facing me was hard to decipher from its reflection but now that I’m up close it looks like someone took the interior of a cathedral and melted it: arches meld with warped iconography that devolves into fractal patterns spiraling off into infinity. The walls stretch up and to either side past the point my eyesight can discern, and that’s still nothing compared to what I see when I turn around.

It’s like a cavern, dim and claustrophobic and oppressive, but there’s no end to it; curved darkness gives the impression of walls and a ceiling but there’s no stone, only great ornamented spires and crumbling clock towers emerging at odd angles from the vast dark. Twisting, turning bridges of lichen-choked stone criss-cross over a pit that glows deep down with cold, dim, flickering light.

The air is heavier here, denser, thicker, or maybe it just feels that way? The sensation is strange. My movements are more difficult, even breathing is harder, but the resistance doesn’t seem physical; it’s like every act of motion is just more taxing in this space. There’s something murky about the place, too, in sharp contrast to the perfectly-even lighting throughout the rest of the Labyrinth so far.

I walk over to join Bashe where most of the floor we’re standing on falls away into the pit and a thin strip continues on to the nearest bridge. He kicks a loose clump of moss off the edge and continues swearing.

I quirk an eyebrow at my devilish companion and try to think of a witty line that will make him think I’m funny and charming while also prompting him to exposit about why exactly he’s getting so worked up. I don’t think of one so I just ask, “‘Sup?”

He interrupts his swearing to glare at me. “Really?”

I roll my eyes at the mouthy incubus. “Come off it. Just tell me what’s going on. You’re clearly upset about more than just whatever was riling you before. What is all this?” I ask, gesturing at the vast expanse of darkness, bridges, and jutting towers.

“This,” he hisses, “is a fucking mess! It’s a catastrophe! It’s absolute fucking bullshit is what it is!”

I give him my best unimpressed deadpan stare.

He breaks eye contact, adjusts the straps of his backpack, and mutters, “It’s a dream bubble.”

I blink. “Like in Homestuck?”

“What the fuck is a ‘Homestuck?’” he asks, baffled.

“Well, let me tell you about–”

“No,” he interrupts me, “shut up, I don’t actually want to know. Every time I’ve let you talk about things from your world it just makes my headache worse.”

I glower at Bashe. “Just make with the exposition already.”

He kicks another clump of moss off the edge. “Here’s what you need to know: the Lady of Shards casts off pieces of herself–shards–and makes horrible fucked-up monsters that we call Beasts of the Labyrinth, and one of those Beasts lives at the heart of the city on the other side of this dream bubble: the Beast of Lamentation and Euphoria. Whenever it wakes up, the Beast sheds a piece of itself and sends out a Mourner or a Reveler. This,” he gestures at the eldritch mess of architecture, “is what happens when a Mourner finds a little piece of the Labyrinth it likes and turns that piece into its nest. We call things like that nest ‘dream bubbles.’”

I lick my lips at the new information. That seems like an excellent setup for conflict escalation: start with a Mourner, then fight the Beast, then throw hands with the Nightmare Queen herself. “Okay, so how do we kill the Mourner?”

He throws up his hands. “We don’t! This is not a problem we can solve with violence, and, for the record, I know I was cheering on the idea of killing all the Contrite, but most problems cannot be solved with violence.”

I frown. “That doesn’t track with my understanding of history at all.”

A horrible echoing wail cuts off whatever Bashe says next. The wail is a layer cake of awful: the plaintive cry of an anguished child, a mournful dirge, and an ear-bleeding shriek. The wail shakes the very foundation of the space we're in, knocking loose a stalactite church tower off in the distance.

Bashe's face pales and he immediately starts marching for the mirror. "Nope, not doing this. I am not sticking around any longer."

I chase after him. "You're leaving? Do you know another route to the city?"

"Nope. I'll figure out once I'm not here."

The incubus reaches for the mirror and I grab his arm to pull him back. He's stronger than me, probably was even before feeding on my memories, but he stops and turns to glare at me.

"Let go, Malice."

I curl my lip at him. "Are you really just running away?"

"We can't fight a fucking Mourner. You don't know what they're like, you don't know what they're capable of. It spreads despair like a virus, it infects you and makes you its puppet, and it uses you to spread the sickness to others. You won't even be its slave, Malice, just another infection vector." He looks at my hand still clutching his arm and lowers his voice, tone dangerous. "Let. Go."

I tense, but I can't let him leave. I need to get to the other side, to keep moving forward. Stagnation is death. "What about the Contrite? What about your revenge?" I hesitate, but only for a moment. "What about Muzaffer?"

He punches me in the face.

I don't see it coming and it sends me reeling back. I wobble, vision jagged, world spinning, as pain blooms across my nose and cheek.

“Fuck you,” he spits at me. “You selfish little bastard. Muzaffer was my husband, and the Contrite murdered him, and now you’re going to try and use his name to make me risk my life for you? For your stupid delusions of being important?”

“I’m sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I babble on instinct, responding automatically to being hit while my brain tries to catch up and process what he’s saying. His husband. Muzaffer was his husband.

Bashekehi turns from me and takes another step toward the mirror–

–and it shatters into a hundred shards as a second wail rocks the whole platform we’re on.

The incubus and I both stare at the shattered mirror, shocked. Bashe’s hands curl into fists and as he whirls on me I’m already saying the words, “[Find the Path].”

The burning wheel appears over my hand and the diagram appears in my mind’s eye. Bashe stops and his eyes narrow. “You–”

“Fucked up, yes, I know! It’s all my fault and I am a horrible person and you can call me names and hit me later–please avoid the face next time, the rest of my body is fine–but right now we need to get out of here and I’m the only one with a spell that can do that. Am I wrong?”

Bashe’s lips curl and his fights tighten, but he says, “Fine. Get us out of here, and then we can talk about what just happened.”

I focus on the correct symbol in the spell diagram and activate the text box. “Compass, find me the safest path to the city on the other side of this dream bubble.”

The command is accepted, I engage the activation symbol, and the wheel spins and resolves into an arrowhead once more. Predictably, the first direction it points is straight onto the nearest bridge leading further inside the Escher-esque cavalcade of bridges and spires.

I take a deep breath and exhale. “The only way out is through.”

I lead the way across the stone bridge, shoes squishing into gray lichen as I run and Bashekehi follows. The compass guides my route, showing me when to turn onto a branching line of mossy stone. I’m thankful for my seemingly-neutered fear response as I run across precarious, crumbling pathways.

A third wail shakes more church towers loose from above, great works of architecture falling like stalactites and crashing into distant bridges. Bashe swears but I ignore the carnage and focus on reading the compass.

When I cross the halfway point of another stone span, everything changes. Just like before I breach a threshold and the world dramatically shifts. The endless spires and bridges are gone and I am running through narrow halls of what looks like rusted metal, or maybe those are dried bloodstains. As the compass leads me on I round a corner and skid to a stop at the sight of a corpse lying against the wall.

“Why are you stopping?” Bashe snaps at me, but then he sees the corpse on the floor and jerks back. “Shit!”

The body is a man’s, bare-chested and wearing only a pair of very austere trousers. His flesh is scarred in every spot that can be scarred, a tapestry of scarification that has to be intentional–I would know. His face is blank, eyes glassy, unblinking and unbreathing, but as I watch closely I see one of his eyes twitch and his head starts to move, glacially slow, in our direction.

Zombie. That’s a zombie, right?

“[Abyssal Armament],” Bashe shouts, and the scourge in his hand is wreathed in darkness as he throws it back and snaps it at the not-so-dead body. The whip strikes true and its payload scores the unbreathing man’s chest. The shadows writhe and drink deep of the wound, and when they fade from the scourge their passing is accompanied by the man’s passing as he collapses in place, head lolling.

I stare at the body, unsure if it’ll stay dead this time. “What the fuck was that?”

“The Lost,” Bashe spits. “It used to be Contrite, but now it’s just part of the disease. That is what happens if the Mourner gets you; the virus will sap the will from you until you can’t even breathe, but it won’t let you die either. If you see more of them, don’t let them touch you; they can spread the virus through contact.”

“Unbelievable. You have depression zombies in this horrible world.”

I want to examine the body further, particularly the unique scarification, but mindful of Bashe’s warning and the distant wailing of the Mourner I keep moving.

The compass leads us through a maze of twisting halls and winding stairwells, not seeing any more of the Lost until we turn the corner into a wide hall and see half a dozen of the listless bodies lying there. Bashe raises the whip again but hesitates, none of the Lost seeming to react to our presence.

A terrible wail shakes the hall, and every single body opens its eyes.

Bashe acts first, lashing out with spell-enhanced scourge at the nearest zombie. I activate the same spell and lunge for one on the other side of the hall, reaching out to stab it in the throat while keeping most of myself as far from it as possible. The shadows pour down the dagger and into the Lost, devouring something unseen, and after a moment the body is made a true corpse.

The other Lost are rising, slow but not as slow as that first one. Bashe’s first target falls and he lashes at the second but the zombie’s arm gets in the way and it keeps rising. I carefully step around my own victim and make a few cutting motions at the next Lost in my way. Like with the arm hit, these lesser wounds seem to take less from the Lost.

Fighting the depression zombies is a strange feeling; there’s tension, certainly, as Bashe’s warning rings clear in my mind, but no urgency. The third and fourth zombie collapse as the fifth and sixth are finally moving towards us with arms outstretched, dull eyes glassy.

I don’t want to risk getting tagged trying to stab one of them, so I step back from the approaching Lost and let Bashe handle the remainder. With the scourge he has just enough range to comfortably strike and retreat, and though the last Lost grabs hold of the scourge to try and pull him that just hastens its demise.

As soon as the last one falls and we’re sure none of them are faking it, Bashe tells me, “Keep moving. We have to reach the exit before the Mourner reaches us.”

We follow the compass through more halls and past more of the Lost, though never as many at once; each time we encounter them Bashe takes the lead in dealing with them, scourging them with the power of the Abyss. I feel a little useless, but he inarguably has the better weapon and I’m not keen to risk myself getting close to a depression zombie just for the sake of petty ego.

The tense blend of frantic running and sudden halting continues until the environment shifts again. This time we’re in a vast hall with clearly defined boundaries: the ceiling is arched, the floor is tiled, and the walls are panels of stained glass depicting scenes of suffering from people being whipped until they died to people boiling in a sea of flame.

The way behind us stretches into infinity, but the way in front of us terminates in a glowing doorway. The compass points straight for that doorway and I spare a grin at Bashe as we immediately start sprinting for it, but then that awful wailing tears across the hall and this time it is close.

A quick glance behind me provides my first glimpse of the thing that terrified Bashekehi so deeply: the Mourner is an ethereal existence, a roughly human-shaped mass of diaphanous pale blue fabric cut into a thousand strips all flowing out of a porcelain mask. The mask has eyes of painted pitch that drip down the cheeks like tearstains, and the mouth of the mask is drawn in the distinctive frown of the tragedy mask from Greek theater.

“It’s here!” I shout, and immediately I hear Bashe scream the name of the first spell he gave me and start sprinting even faster. I mentally curse and out-loud shout, “[Adrenaline Burst]!” to keep up and outpace the monster rapidly flying towards us.

We run for the bright white light and the Mourner chases us, the mass of diaphanous fabric soaring through the air without a care for the laws of physics. It screams again, that awful mix of shrieking, a crying child, and a dirge for the fallen. This wail shatters every panel of stained glass in the hall, the shattering spreading out from the source of the scream. One by one the panels crack and glass is sent flying, though the hall is vast enough that none of it comes close to hitting Bashe or me. Beyond the shattered glass I see more endless darkness, the boundless boundary of this strange pocket world.

My body burns, already exhausted from all the running to get here and now being pushed past its limits by the adrenaline spell, but I have to keep moving. The door draws closer, closer, so close I can almost reach out and–

The Mourner wraps a single tendrils of pale blue around my left hand.

On instinct I lash out with “[Ashthorn]!” and cut the fluttering banner from the main body of the Mourner, but as I pass through the door of light I’m already feeling the effects of the monster’s touch as waves of weakness course up my arm.

I stumble out the other side and everything more than a few feet away is a blur, unimportant, too difficult to perceive. The scrap of Mourner falls away from my hand but my hand still feels numb, deadened, unresponsive. There is a deep coldness flickering in my fingertips and creeping across my hand and further, making its way centimeter by centimeter.

Bashekehi is at my side, staring in horror at my hand. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I can feel the poison entering my system, the virus that would love nothing more than to hollow me out and make me like those things in the maze. Lethargy, grief, despair, I feel all these lapping at my mind. Whispers of all my failures and failings, flickering images of mistakes that I’ve made, the deep knowledge that I am unfit to be here, unfit to be important, unfit to be alive. My existence is a cosmic accident, something that never should have been.

But I know that. I’ve always known that. I knew that when I took the knife to the artery in my inner thigh, and I knew that when I cut too shallow and couldn’t bring myself to finish the job. I’ve heard these whispers a thousand times from my own treacherous mind, heard much more seductive promises: an end to pain, the peace of oblivion, no longer burdening others, no longer struggling in vain for things that could never be. I have been tempted before, lured to the brink, made to see no path more viable than utter self-destruction.

Humans, as it turns out, have quite the potent survival instinct.

A fire burns in me and I raise the burnt dagger with the hand not cursed by the Mourner’s touch. “[Abyssal Armament].” The spell comes to life and the diagram appears in my mind’s eye. I focus on the right symbol and declare my intent: “Carve out the rot.”

The spell takes hold, my dagger writhes with hungry shadows, and I stab the blade into the palm of my cursed hand.

There is a terrible sense of something tearing apart, and then everything goes dark.