Treking across the Blighted Wastes, Mia discovered, was like being trapped in one of Salvador Dalí's paintings left outside in the rain for a few decades. Everything seemed not quite right, everything cast shadows in impossible locations, and she was reasonably sure some of the rocks were following her.
"Day one, hour three," she said into the recording crystal Magister Aldric had given her. "The landscape is still actively surreal. I've seen purple grass, downward-rooting trees, and what I'm pretty sure was a flower that tried to bite me. The suit works beautifully, which is really less amazing than the murderous plants."
The mechanical suit was surprisingly well-suited to long wear periods. Master Inventor Celia had padded just the right areas, included a hydration system that provided her with water through a tube by her mouth, and even a waste removal system that Mia didn't want to dwell on too hard."Hour five, day one," she continued later. "Five hours' walking and the fortress is no closer. Either it's a heck of a lot farther away than I imagined, or there's something strange about space in this world. Given that a bird made a square flight about an hour ago, I'm choosing door number two."The stinking wildlife was not nearly as deadly as one might have wished but infinitely more annoying. Shadow-rabbits that appeared and disappeared in and out of phase endlessly surprised her, crystal butterflies sang off-keyarias every time she moved, and she was being pursued by what appeared to be a cloud of the shape of a sheep.
"Day one, hour seven," she said, gasping against a boulder that wasn't exactly likely to devour her. "The cloud-sheep is still following me. I've decided to call it Grumpus. Grumpus is friendly-looking but judging."Elena's compass had been unexpectedly handy, though not for its intended use. Whenever Mia approached something that looked especially perilous, the compass would whirl about in circles, then orient itself in the direction of an inevitable detour around the danger instead of through it. It was like having an aggro-crystal GPS with very firm ideas about her own well-being.
As the polluted sun set below a horizon painted with named hues, Mia camped in the ruins of what once was a roadside inn. The building was mostly still standing, aside from its roof, which had been replaced by what appeared to be a dome made of crystallized mist, and its formerly-guest rooms, now infested by colonies of singing mushrooms."Day one, night," she scribbled over dinner on magically preserved trail rations. "I'm camping where there used to be an inn. The mushrooms harmonize very prettily, if you like barbershop quartet music. Grumpus has settled in for the night on what used to be the roof. I think he's watching over things, which is sort of sweet."The Jeweled Blade had resonated increasingly as they made their way towards Shadowhold, and now hummed steadily at a low intensity that she could sense through the suit. It was not painful, but more like having a very slight electric blanket wrapped around her waist."Day one, late night," she continued. "The sword is definitely reacting to something. I hope it's to the fortress and not perceiving some new form of awful menace. Either way, I'd best be getting some rest. Tomorrow I'll either arrive at Shadowhold or discover that the Wastes have a few more creative ways for trying to kill me."She wrapped up in her sleeping bag (especially designed to fit the mechanical suit) and closed her eyes, allowing the quartet of mushrooms to play what amounted to "Greensleeves" if "Greensleeves" had been written by an individual who'd never heard music but had it described to them by a particularly imaginative child.
Sunrise in the Blighted Wastes was more a process of gradual fading from darkness rather than a sunrise in the classical sense, as though the corrupted landscape was begrudgingly admitting day was supposed to come. Mia woke up to find that Grumpus had not been alone overnight, as two other cloud-creatures had joined him—one that looked like a sad cat and another that looked like a skeptical horse.
"Day two, morning," she was observed reporting as breaking camp. "My cloud entourage has expanded. I now have Grumpus the sheep, Morose the cat, and Doubtful the horse. They seem to be accepting of my line of travel, which is either reassuring or deeply disturbing."
The second day of travel brought more impossible landscapes. She swam through an air-filled valley where gravity was like water, needing to swim actually through the air for several hundred yards. She ascended a stream that ran upward and thrummed in harmonies that set her teeth on edge. She passed by a forest where trees grew in absolute spirals and leaves shifted color based on her mood.
"Day two, noon," she wrote, pausing to gasp for breath from the gravity-swimming experience. "I've decided that whoever designed this landscape must have had a very rich imagination and possibly some personal problems of their own to work out. And my cloud friends are excellent at recognizing where it's safe to walk, which means they're wiser than they appear."
By afternoon, Shadowhold was finally, unmistakably close. The fortress loomed against the tainted sky like a monolith to impossible building, its stretched spires pointing towards clouds that crawled in patterns that yearned to be seen face to face.
"Day two, late afternoon," she continued. "I can select out individual windows in the fortress now, so I'm probably close enough to start fretting about perimeter defense. On the plus side, I haven't seen any shadow-spawn or other obvious guards. The minus side is that in a place like this, lack of obvious defenses probably means defenses are just super-duper subtle."
As if summoned by her voice, the world itself changed. The wracked vegetation straightened a little, the impossible colors lost their intensity, and the very air itself appeared to grow denser with eyes watching.
"Or not subtle, either," she corrected, watching as the path ahead of her reconfigured itself into a clear maze. "The fortress is obviously getting anxious for me to arrive and has taken measures to become more actively engaged in our romance."
The walls of the maze were built out of the same black stone that made up Shadowhold itself, and were covered in carvings that seemed to writhe and twist when she wasn't actively looking at them. The passageways were wide enough for her bulk suit but so narrow that they became stifling, and the entire structure vibrated with the kind of low-order magic that makes her bones ache.
Elena's compass spun furiously for a few minutes before settling on a bearing that pointed her straight into the maze. Grumpus and his friends sat above the walls of the maze, apparently content to follow her at a distance.
"Day two, night," she said as she entered the first corridor. "I'm now officially inside the defensive perimeter of the fortress. The maze is definitely magical, maybe intelligent, and probably carefully laid out by someone who didn't really want anyone to come calling. The walls are all covered in what I'm pretty sure are warning signs, but they're in a language that looks like angry script."
The labyrinth was clearly not intended to be mere confusion. With each turn, additional challenges: corridors longer than they appeared to be, intersections where the same corridor led you somewhere different depending on the direction you approached from, and dead ends that weren't actually dead ends when you learned how to enter them.
"The secret," Mia complained to herself after she'd resolved her third spatial paradox, "is not to think of it as a physical space. It's like. Debugging code, the author obviously hated their job when they wrote it."
That attitude was magic. Instead of trying to go through the maze as a normal three-dimensional thing, she began to approach it as more of a logic problem in which the environment modified the rules, and the answer was to find the underlying pattern instead of taking the most obviously shortest route.
"Day two, late evening," she observed after leaving the mazeforo a circular courtyard at the foot of the fortress. "I've survived the defensive maze by approaching it as a really unpleasant software program. The compass was worth its weight in gold, and my cloud buddies provided morale support. I'm presently at the foot of Shadowhold proper, and it's even more hopeless up close than it was from a distance."
The fortress walls towered up into the knotted sky, their fronts congested with windows that offered different views depending on which direction you looked at them from. There were some with starry night skies, others offering miles and miles of library shelves, and a few that seemed to look out over a landscape that definitely was not in Eldoria.
"The building is designed so that the interior has to exist in multiple dimensions at the same time," she continued, studying the structure. "Which is how it can look bigger inside—it is probably bigger inside. Perhaps infinitely bigger."
It was simpler to locate an entrance than had been expected. One doorway, otherwise entirely normal except for being made of what appeared to be shadow crystallized, was at the base of the central tower. It was not even locked.
"Day two, night," she wrote, outside the door. "I've found what I'm pretty sure is the front door, and it is open. This is either because Morvana is so confident in her defenses that she doesn't bother with doors, or because this is a trap. Looking at everything I've seen so far, probably both."She test-ran systems on her suit a last time, settled the Jeweled Blade in its holster at her hip, and looked over at Elena's compass. The needle was instantly pointing straight through the door, rotating once as if to say, "This is what you came here to do."
"Right about now," she reminded herself, more to get herself pumped up than because anyone was going to hear her. "Time to break into a wicked fortress and access a magical control system. How difficult could it possibly be?"
Grumpus made a sound that might have been a snort of disdain."You're right," Mia conceded. "But I'm doing it anyway."She pushed open the door and crossed into Shadowhold, where the real adventure would finally begin.
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