1
MAZE OF THE DISSOLVED
At the end of a long torch-lit hall, four blinking eyes, each as big as a slither troll’s fist, adorned a stone arch. They were restlessly shifting back and forth, scanning the area for intruders. Wily recognized the enchanted trap at once. There had been one just like it in Carrion Tomb, the dungeon in which he had spent his childhood.
“It’s an Archway of Many Eyes,” he explained to his companions, who were standing behind him in the shadowy entrance tunnel to the Maze of the Dissolved.
“I know what it is,” Odette said, flicking a strand of blue hair from her face. “This isn’t the first dungeon we’ve raided. More like the hundredth.” The acrobatic elf gave Wily a big grin. It was still early in the morning, and she was always extra cheerful before lunch (even if they were deep inside a dangerous maze).
“Let’s not exaggerate,” Pryvyd, the one-armed Knight of the Golden Sun, said. “We’ve only explored eighty at the very most.”
Righteous, Pryvyd’s former arm, now disembodied and floating beside him, started moving its fingers as if counting in its head—not that Righteous actually had a head—or a body for that matter.
“Back me up here, Moshul,” Odette said, turning to the giant moss golem.
Moshul, lacking a mouth, signed quickly to the knight with his big mud fingers.
“I’m not including the haunted temples or the swamp towers,” Pryvyd countered.
Moshul signed back in response. Despite knowing Moshul for many months now, Wily was still struggling to learn sign language.
“That was a castle,” Pryvyd said. “Not a dungeon.”
Moshul signed again even more emphatically.
The knight relented. “Fine, if you include the temples and the towers and the castles, we might have raided a hundred.”
Odette seemed very pleased with herself.
“I don’t think the exact number of dungeons you’ve explored is important right now,” Roveeka, Wily’s adopted hobgoblet sister, interjected.
“She’s right,” Wily said. “Once those eyes spot us, an alarm will sound, and every creature in the maze will know we’re here.” He tapped his thumb against the wrist of his other hand. It was something he did when he was thinking hard, like when he was trying to solve a riddle or studying a complicated machine. Or coming up with a clever plan. “But that’s only if the eyes spot us,” he said with a sly grin.
He moved to Moshul’s side and plucked a dark purple mushroom off his elbow. The moss golem was like a walking garden: vines, toadstools, and vegetables shared space on his lush green body with a hundred different kinds of crawling worms and insects. Wily handed the plump fungus to Roveeka.
“Roveeka,” Wily asked, “how’s your aim with mushrooms?”
“Almost as good as it is with knives,” Roveeka said, weighing the mushroom in her hand.
During Roveeka’s days in Carrion Tomb, she had served as a knife tosser, helping to ambush adventurers searching for treasure. Although she still carried her two precious knives, Mum and Pops, she had been practicing throwing other objects as well since escaping the dungeon with Wily.
“It needs to land just below the arch,” Wily said. He turned to the others. “When it strikes the ground, move fast. Don’t worry about being quiet. It’s an Archway of Many Eyes, not ears.”
Pryvyd and Righteous gave Wily matching bronze-plated thumbs-ups.
“Fast is not a problem for me,” Odette said with a grin. “The question is whether I’m going to do backflips as I sprint.”
Roveeka cocked her hand and, with a flick of her lumpy wrist, flung the mushroom through the air. It hit the stone ground just below the archway and exploded into a cloud of thick black smoke.
“Now!” Wily urged the others.
Odette shot forward in a dazzling sequence of leaps and tumbles, quickly disappearing into the smoke ahead. Moshul grabbed Roveeka by the back of her shirt and tucked her under his arm as he took heavy lumbering steps toward the archway. With Righteous floating by his side, Pryvyd charged ahead, his bronze armor squeaking, clearly in need of a greasing.
Wily raced after his companions into the cloud of black. He could hear his companions moving on either side of him, but the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t even see his own fingers. Worse still, with each breath, his nostrils were invaded by the pungent odor of rotting carrots. The purple mushroom had created an excellent smoke screen, but its smell left much to be desired.
After three dozen steps, Wily emerged from the smoke. With a loud gasp, he sucked in a lungful of cave air. His vision cleared, and he saw Odette already standing there, twiddling her fingers as if she had been waiting hours for his arrival.
Pryvyd, Moshul, and Roveeka stepped out of the haze just as it began to dissipate.
“Did the eyes spot us?” Pryvyd asked, “or did we get by unnoticed?”
“There’s no way to tell out here,” Wily answered. “The alarm doesn’t sound in the main tunnels of the dungeon, only in the hidden maintenance tunnels. We’ll just have to go deeper to find out.”
The group continued down the long corridor to a room whose walls and ceiling were covered in snaking roots and dangling vines. In the middle of the room, a stout man with a tool belt stood on a ladder. He was busy sharpening a row of swinging blades and seemed completely unaware of their presence.
Wily knew at once that this man had to be the maze’s trapsmith. Just a few months ago, before he learned that he was in fact the Prince of Panthasos, Wily had been just like him, stuck doing the mundane tasks that kept the dungeon operating smoothly. He had spent years sweeping Carrion Tomb’s crypts, sharpening the spikes, feeding the rats, and greasing the gears of the crushing walls.
As the stout man performed his monotonous task, he sang an off-key tune:
“Got to keep the blades swinging, swinging, swinging overhead.
Got to keep the snakes biting, biting, make sure they’re well fed.
Got to keep the slime dripping, dripping, then I’ll go to bed.”
Wily hadn’t sung while he performed his duties, but now, thinking back, perhaps it would have made the endless stretches of dullness pass more quickly. Of course there was a lot Wily didn’t know back then. He had been convinced by Stalag, the master of Carrion Tomb, and his surrogate father, that he was a hobgoblet rather than the human he actually was. And he had believed Stalag’s other lies as well: that the sun would melt the skin clean off his bones the moment he left Carrion Tomb. And, worst of all, that his parents had been killed when in fact they were very much alive. His mother was the famous freedom fighter known as the Scarf and his father was the recently dethroned Infernal King. There were still mornings when Wily woke from slumber and didn’t think any of it was true—just a wild, dizzying dream.
Copyright © 2019 by Adam Jay Epstein
