Cel's fingers locked around the crystal ridge. The creature shifted beneath him - muscle rolling, bone creaking - and his body lurched sideways. He flattened himself against warm hide, cheek pressed between formations while his stomach climbed toward his throat.
Ahead, something pierced the sky.
Cel's breath caught.
The spire rose like a blade thrust through the heavens. Violet light radiated from its core with such intensity his eyes immediately watered. The formation seemed to pulse with the maze's heartbeat, each throb sending ripples through the air that made his teeth ache even at this distance.
The creature's course shifted. Its massive head swung left.
Away from the spire.
Cel's exhale shuddered out. His hand almost moved - absurdly - to pat the creature's flank in gratitude. The impulse died as quickly as it came, leaving him hollow. This thing wasn't a companion. Wasn't even a mount he'd chosen. It was just another piece of the maze that happened to be carrying him instead of killing him.
The creature navigated the crystal maze with unsettling precision, its body bending and twisting as it squeezed between formations. Each turn gave Cel new angles, new glimpses of its form. He'd been searching for wings - the sketch had shown wings, fairy-like and delicate. But he saw none. Just the serpentine body stretching endlessly ahead and behind, thick as a cottage wall, covered in dark hide between the crystal growths.
This wasn't the creature from the parchment. Or if it was, the illustration had been wrong.
Around him, the maze opened into wider passages. Cel forced his head up despite the weight of exhaustion, scanning crystalline walls for anything useful. Water. Shelter. Some fragment of knowledge about where the moon had gone or how to find it.
His arms burned. Fingers had gone numb sometime in the last hour, blood from torn palms making his grip slick against smooth crystal.
Movement caught his eye between formations - a glint that wasn't violet light on crystal.
Dark wood. Weathered gray. Standing wrong against the endless sea of razor edges.
He blinked hard, certain thirst had finally broken his mind. But the shape remained solid, growing clearer with each of the creature's plodding steps.
A structure. Man-made.
His pulse hammered against his damaged eardrums. Something built by hands, not grown from the maze's twisted logic.
The structure resolved as they approached. Not one building - dozens.
A village. Or what the maze had left of one.
The first home they passed stood fractured, its walls ruptured outward by violet growths twisting through wood and stone. The roof sagged beneath crystalline weight, beams splintered and rotting. Empty windows gaped like hollow eye sockets, their frames lined with glass shards that glittered among crystals.
More buildings pressed close on either side. A marketplace sprawled ahead, overturned stalls half-buried where crystal formations had erupted through cobblestones. A well stood in what might have been the square, its stonework cracked in spiderweb patterns, violet veins climbing its sides like frozen lightning.
The creature pressed deeper into the ruins.
Cel's gaze tracked across the devastation - homes collapsing under relentless growth, shops with their goods turned to dust, public buildings reduced to frameworks. The ground was chaos beneath the creature's feet, cobblestones and crystal shards mixed in uneven terrain that made each step a grinding crunch he felt through hide and bone.
No movement. No sound beyond the creature's breathing and the haunting melody of the maze.
The formations changed as they moved through the village center. Less random. More deliberate. Shadows within the violet depths suggested curves that shouldn't exist in crystal - rounded edges, angular joints. Then Cel saw what the shapes truly were.
Faces.
Cel's breath shortened.
A crystal formation rose beside a collapsed doorway. A woman's face stared out from within the violet structure, features preserved in perfect detail. Her mouth was open. Eyes wide. The expression carved into crystal was terror so pure it made Cel's stomach clench.
His fingers tightened on the ridge until his knuckles cracked.
More faces appeared as they moved further. A man reaching toward what might have been his home, his arm stretched forward, forever frozen mid-stride. A child pressed against a wall, small body curled tight. An elderly figure collapsed near the well, one hand extended as if grasping for water they'd never reach.
Some wore agony. Some wore shock. All wore the moment of their death like a mask they could never remove.
Cel's throat worked in a dry swallow. His mind reached for logic, for the certainty this was merely a trial, divine illusion meant to test him. A fake village populated by fake people, given faces only to measure his reaction.
His mind reached for logic, for the certainty that this was merely a trial - divine illusion meant to test him.
But when he forced himself to look again - truly look - doubt crept in. The woman's expression captured the precise moment comprehension became despair. The child's fingers were bent from clawing at stone. The elderly figure's robes had blown in wind that no longer existed, fabric caught mid-flutter and turned to crystal.
The details were too perfect. Too specific.
Either the Moon Goddess had crafted an illusion so flawless it captured individual moments of death, or the village had been real. Had held voices. Laughter. The smell of cooking food and the sound of children playing in streets now choked with violet growth. People who'd built lives here, loved here, died here when the maze decided to expand its territory.
Now only crystalline perfection remained - terrible and complete, preserving their final moments in violet stillness.
The creature moved forward, massive feet crushing shards of former homes, indifferent to the graveyard stretching in every direction.
Cel forced his gaze away from a frozen family - mother, father, three children pressed together near a doorway, their expressions identical masks of fear.
'They stayed together. At the end, they stayed together…'
His chest tightened. His own family had scattered like roaches when his father raised his fists. His mother had turned away. Darian had chosen politics over blood. But these strangers - these dead strangers - had faced oblivion holding each other.
'You were better than them. Better than all of them.'
The thought burned worse than any cut.
The creature's next step jolted him, nearly tearing his grip loose. Pain flared through his arms.
He dragged his mind back toward survival. Even if this was all real, it changed nothing. He was still trapped on this beast's back. Still dying of thirst. Still searching for a moon that had abandoned the sky completely.
It shouldn't matter at all.
But it did. And he hated that it did.
'You don't know them. They're already dead. You have your own death to avoid'
The logic was sound. Survival didn't have room for grief over strangers. He'd spent a year learning to cut away everything soft, everything that made him weak.
So why did his fingers still shake? Why did the child's bent fingers keep flashing behind his eyes?
The creature moved deeper into crystallized ruins, past more frozen faces, more shattered dreams. Cel held on and watched in silence.
Eventually, the crystallized dead disappeared behind them. The creature carried him past the village's edge, where crystal had consumed the final remnants of roads that once led somewhere. Led to other villages, perhaps. Other people who'd built lives before the maze decided otherwise.
The sky shifted overhead.
Violet blurred into heat shimmer. Morning's cool gray bled toward gold. Light caught on crystal edges, throwing sparks across his vision.
Cel's throat clicked on another dry swallow. His skin prickled - not from existing burns, but from new heat building in the atmosphere like pressure before a storm.
The creature's pace never changed. Its breathing remained steady and unconcerned. Ancient power moved through muscle and bone beneath Cel's body, indifferent to the assault gathering overhead.
The four suns climbed higher.
Light intensified until Cel had to squeeze his eyes shut or risk permanent blindness. Even through closed eyelids, the world glowed red. Reflections multiplied through crystal formations, each surface catching and amplifying until the maze became a furnace of concentrated radiance.
His lips cracked further. When his tongue scraped across them, fresh blood wet his mouth.
Breath came in shallow sips. Each inhalation scraped his throat raw, the air sharp with heat that dried his airways before oxygen could reach his lungs.
Sweat stopped forming. His body had nothing left to give.
His head throbbed in time with the haunting sound of the maze. The ringing that never left since the first crossing intensified, building from background noise to dominant sensation that drowned everything else.
The world tilted.
Cel's fingers slipped half an inch before he caught himself. His grip was failing - palms slick with sweat and blood, muscles trembling from hour after hour of sustained tension.
His breathing stuttered. Stopped. Restarted with conscious effort. Time fractured. Seconds stretched into minutes into hours into infinity. The suns kept climbing. The heat kept building. The hum kept drilling deeper into his skull until thought became impossible.
The world went black.
His right hand moved without conscious command. Dragged across a crystal edge beside his ribs.
The surface bit deep. Blood welled up along the cut - bright and immediate. Pain flared through his arm, sharp enough to cut through the suffocating blanket of exhaustion.
His eyes snapped open. The world swam back into focus - blurry but present.
But the pain was already fading again, heat swallowing it whole. He needed more.
Cel dragged his palm across another edge - deliberately this time, watching the crystal bite into flesh. Fresh blood dripped onto the dark hide beneath him.
Again. His forearm this time. The crystal opened shallow channels that wept blood.
Each cut bought seconds of clarity. Moments where his mind surfaced from the gray fog threatening to drown him completely.
But the heat swallowed pain as quickly as it appeared. The cuts faded into background sensation, meaningless against the greater agony of suns that wanted to burn him from existence.
His vision darkened at the edges. His grip loosened another fraction.
'No. Stay conscious. You have to—'
He pulled his hand back… and slammed it down onto a crystal spike jutting from the creature's spine.
The crystal punched through his palm.
White light detonated behind his eyes. His mouth opened - throat tearing around a scream his damaged ears couldn't hear. The spike emerged from the back of his hand, its tip dark with blood that ran hot down his wrist, down his arm, dripping onto the creature's hide in steady rhythm.
The world collapsed to a single point of agony.
Then vanished completely.