Chapter 32: Into the Labyrinth

(I painted this in Procreate with the oil paint brush - Chaiga T. Cheska)
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The transformation arrived unheralded.

One moment, they were behind Harthos’s eyes entirely, the Eldertrees rising vast and immediate before them, each footfall his and felt through the soles of their own feet, the cool, green-scented air of deep forest pressing against their faces as if they stood within it. And then, as gently and completely as a tide withdrawing, the vision stepped back from them. Not gone. The forest remained, every detail of it, but now it moved across the stone walls of the tower around them, silver-blue and restless, Harthos’s sight given to the room itself rather than to the four of them directly.

They were sitting. The moss breathed cool and undisturbed beneath them, the meditation circle still and present, the barrier humming steady at their backs.

Oren was the first to get to his feet. He rose without speaking, and the others followed, the four of them standing within the circle as the projected labyrinth spread itself around the room, Harthos’s passage through the deep forest unfurling across every wall. The Eldertree trunks soared past the ceiling’s beams and vanished upward into a vault of darkness that unsettled as much as it inspired. Moonlight fractured through branches far above, scattering across the stone in brief, restless passages that wandered and were gone before the eye could hold them. The air in the projection carried the chill of stone that has not known warmth in a long time, iron-mineral and deep, and beneath it the scent of moss in earth where light never reached.

Tavik stood with his weight forward on the balls of his feet, his gaze moving steadily across the projected image, reading passage and shadow and the dark spaces between the roots the way he read forest track and riverbank. Through the tether, a low and steady pulse moved between himself and Nix, two heartbeats finding one another’s rhythm in the quiet, and he let it settle without reaching for it.

Oren stood close enough to Bran that his arm pressed warm against his youngest brother’s shoulder, his crown of white light burning at his temples in the long, slow pulse it had found since the meditation had woken it fully. He had to tilt his head back to take in the full height of the Eldertrees on the walls, and something in his elvish senses responded to them through the projection, a recognition that ran down through the soles of his feet as though the living moss beneath him were translating the ancient forest floor, root speaking to root.

Nix stood in the deep, held stillness of continuous attention, his ears forward and moving in their small, precise arcs, tracking every shift in the image as the labyrinth moved around Harthos’s passage. His runes worked at a long, unhurried pace along the cerulean blue of his forearms, reading the projected labyrinth the way they read everything, by feel and pressure and the particular shift in the air before something changed.

Bran stood with his eyes slightly unfocused, his Portalsight awake and the image of the labyrinth doubling before him, the visible surface of Harthos’s sight opening inward to a second sight that was cooler and more particular, reading the rings of time laid down in the labyrinth’s stone the way growth rings are laid down in wood, each one its own season and its own weight of memory. Beside him, through the same current, Nix’s perception threaded between those rings in its own way, different in shape and movement, and between the two of them something arrived that neither could have reached alone. The combining was still raw and slightly disorienting, the way a new pair of boots is disorienting before the foot has learned them. But it held, and through it, the labyrinth was extraordinary.

Bran had not expected the extraordinary. He had expected something useful. He had not accounted for the sheer accumulated depth of what lay beneath the labyrinth’s visible floor, the strata of memory pressing outward into his Portalsight in layer upon layer of accumulated time, each one distinct and speaking, and the living things within them, the smallest of them, the roots of things he had only ever read about pressed between pages, all of them breathing and present and within reach of his attention, and he was already beginning to forget that he was meant to be watching the path.

Ahead of Harthos on the walls, the passage divided. Two ways curved into separate darknesses, each one swallowing what little moonlight reached the junction floor within a matter of feet.

Bran pushed his Portalsight forward and felt the paths resolve beneath it. The left path was heavier, older, layered with the compressed memory of travellers who had walked it and found themselves walking it again, a loop woven into the stone so deeply it had become the stone. The right path was thinner, purposeful, built to carry a traveller somewhere rather than return them to themselves.

“Harthos, go to the right,” Bran said. Quietly certain. “The left turns back on itself.”

A beat, and then Harthos’s footsteps shifted, and the projected image turned, the right-hand path rising to meet him.

Oren glanced sideways at Bran, who was watching the walls with his eyes slightly out of focus, and something moved across Oren’s face, between unease and quiet relief, that Bran could see what he, for all his own elvish senses, could not.

The passages tightened on the walls around them as Harthos pressed deeper, the roots more ancient and more interlocked with every step, the dark between the great trunks growing more itself, the iron-mineral cold of it pressing through the projection into the tower. Bran spread the Portalsight wider through the current he and Nix channelled between them, reading the memory layers running beneath the visible floor in their slow, concentric rings, and then something beneath the next root arch caught his attention and held it.

He recognised the scent before the image resolved, faint and specific, a scent he knew from Yilda’s herbal compendium, pressed between chapters on feverfew and yarrow as a curiosity. A plant found only in places of very deep magic, where memory had become a biological function. He had read about it as he read most things at that stage of his training, thoroughly and with genuine interest, without any expectation of ever actually encountering it living in the wild.

Through Bran’s Portalsight, the Whisperweed colony resolved itself in extraordinary detail, and he understood at once that no drawing in any compendium had ever come close.

It grew in a dense thicket at the base of the next root arch, profuse beyond any account he had read, each filament silver-fine and catching the available light in a way that went beyond reflection, fracturing it into something that made the eye want to follow. Hundreds of threads tangled and overlapping, their root systems sinking down through the visible floor of the labyrinth and into the deeper layers where the memory was most concentrated, feeding on it, translating it upward through the filaments in a faint and ceaseless vibration. The entire colony pulsed with a quiet and consistent intensity that his healer’s eye registered as purposeful. The density of it. The depth of the anchorage. The pattern of growth and the intervals between the filaments, and the root depth relative to the concentration of memory in the surrounding stone.

“Whisperweed,” Bran breathed, the word coming out of him on a breath of genuine wonder. “An entire colony of it. I’ve never seen it living; the compendium drawings didn’t suggest they grew in anything like this concentration.” His voice had the tone it took when his healer’s attention had found something worth examining, the tone of someone thinking aloud as much as speaking. “The anchorage goes straight down into the memory layers; it’s not drawing from the ordinary substrate at all. I wonder whether the density is connected to the memory concentration, because if the colony is directly feeding on stored memory rather than soil nutrients, then the implications for how it propagates through a place like this would be significant, and the relationship between colony density and …” Bran abruptly stopped speaking, his eyes rolled up in his head and he crumpled to the ground at his brothers and Nix’s feet. It was so sudden and unexpected that everyone just stared down at him, and then Oren and Tavik dropped to crouch beside Bran’s limp body.

Oren gripped Bran’s shoulders before the shock had finished becoming thought, shaking him roughly. “Bran!” He shook him again. No response. Not even the flinch. He shook harder. “Bran, wake up. Snap out of it!”

Nothing. Bran lay entirely slack, his face carrying the awful peace of someone completely removed from the present, his chest rising and falling in the slow, even rhythm of someone very far away.

Tavik’s face set with a decision, and he brought his hand across Bran’s cheek with a crack that rang off the stone walls.

Bran’s head lolled to one side, but he did not wake.

Harthos’s voice came through the walls with an urgency that stripped all warmth from it entirely. “The plant! Your brother was saying Whisperweed. It has hold of him and is pulling him into the labyrinth. He needs Eldertree Moss placed into his hands directly. It helps to ground victims. A healer of his training will carry some. He must have some!”

Tavik already had Bran’s pack open. He was not gentle about it. The contents came out rapidly onto the moss around Bran’s slack form, his hands moving with the efficiency of someone who had stopped expecting things to go smoothly and was simply acting, setting aside what was not wanted, sorting by feel and by scent, and it was by scent that he found it, the dark earthy sweetness rising from a cloth bundle near the bottom. He wrenched it open and pressed the whole fistful into Bran’s open palm and folded his fingers closed around it.

The loosening came from the outermost edge inward. The silver at the periphery of Bran’s borrowed awareness thinned first, the sense he was being pulled somewhere deep, the repeated pull losing its certainty as the moss’s quiet, deep-rooted magic moved through his palm and into the place where the Whisperweed had settled.

Bran opened his eyes, frowned at his brothers crouched over him and sat up sharply, and his hand went straight to his left cheek, where the print of Tavik’s palm had left its verdict in bright, stinging red. He held it there and looked at Tavik.

“You slapped me!” he said. The affront was profound and entirely genuine.

“You wouldn’t wake up,” Tavik said, feeling relieved and irritated all at once.

“But you slapped me,” Bran said again, as if the fact of it had not yet been sufficiently acknowledged by the universe.

“I’m aware of what I did,” said Tavik, glaring back at Bran. There was something beneath the flat delivery that had nothing to do with remorse. “And if you drift off like that again in the middle of this labyrinth, I will…”

“My pack!” Bran had seen it. His gaze moved from his stinging cheek to his carefully organised Medicinals spread across the moss around him, folded cloths opened, jars tilted, the whole of three months of Yilda’s methodical instruction distributed about the circle. His expression took on a specifically injured quality. “Tavik, I had everything in order…”

“You were unconscious,” Oren said, fed up with both his brothers, his patience thinning.

“My yarrow tincture is open; anyone can see it’s open…”

“Oh, for the love of trees!” Oren gripped his arm and hauled him upright. Bran found himself on his feet before he had finished the sentence. Oren held him there and hissed at both his brothers. “We have other more important things to worry about right now!”

Tavik, who had been drawing breath, closed his mouth and straightened with his brothers, trying not to stand on Brans’ scattered herbs and pack contents.

Oren looked at Nix, who had not moved from his place in the standing circle. He stood exactly as he had stood throughout, his runes working their steady rhythm along his forearms, his ears tracking the labyrinth’s image across the tower walls. But something in him was strained, the look of something that has been bearing a load without complaint and has reached the edge of its willingness to continue doing so without assistance. When his eyes found Bran, they asked one thing only: are you back.

Nix pulled Bran’s arm, not gently, turning him and pulling him back into position at his side. Bran let himself be positioned, swallowing the ongoing objection about the yarrow tincture with visible effort, and brought his attention back to the Portalsight, letting the rings spread outward through the labyrinth’s layers, letting Nix’s current find its threading way through them. The combined magic settled. The labyrinth came back into its full, doubled resolution.

They felt Harthos’s movement in the shifting of the projected image around them, the walls changing as he pressed deeper, the passages tightening, the roots more ancient and more interlocked, the dark between the great trunks growing more itself. Bran spread the Portalsight forward through the current he and Nix held between them, reading the memory layers in their concentric rings, and what arrived before the shape of it had resolved was a resonance pressing just below the threshold of sound, a held note at the very edge of hearing.

Bran saw something beneath the roots to the left of Harthos’s path that came into view: squat and bark-clad and eerily motionless, its form reading so utterly as deadwood and shadow that without the Portalsight’s deeper sight, it would have been invisible entirely. Two points of coal-red light burned low beneath the root, steady as banked embers, patient in the way of things that have learned patience is the only reliable strategy. The creature fed on the spatial certainty of travellers, on the interior knowledge of where you had been and where you now stood, and anything resembling the mind loosening its grip on the present moment gave it something to work with.

“Keep your mind in your feet,” Bran said, very quietly. “In the floor beneath you, in this moment, exactly here. All of you.” He directed himself slightly toward the walls. “Harthos. The root to your left. Move well away from it. Don’t pause, and don’t double back in your thinking.”

He felt Nix hold the Portalsight steady beside him, the combined current tracking the creature as Harthos moved left, the coal-red light following his passage with the interest of something that had outlasted longer odds than this. The resonance in the inner ear faded. The shadow beneath the root settled back into ordinary shadow, and what had almost been a shape receded into it. The labyrinth breathed on, slow and deep.

Tavik’s hand found Bran’s shoulder briefly, a companionable press and release that said nothing in particular and meant a good deal more.

A junction appeared on the walls ahead of Harthos: two paths opening their choice without ceremony, each curving into a darkness that gave nothing back, and at the heart of where the paths divided, through the Portalsight’s deeper sight, something stood.

Bran registered its height first. Impossibly, reed-thin and tall, constructed at angles that were almost human in an unsettling way. A veil of hanging moss curtained it from crown to foot, each strand glistening with its own moisture, and above the curtain two lights that collected every particle of available luminescence at the junction and held it, altered by a very specific and focused interest. The Portalsight delivered its nature with the same clear and immediate knowledge it delivered everything it found: the creature grew stronger at junctions, feeding on the moment before a choice was made, on the pause between intention and action, and the thing it had found in this junction that interested it most was the brightest thing present.

Bran felt the creature’s attention drawn towards his eldest brother’s crown of light.

Oren’s crown burned steady at his temples, the long, slow pulse it had settled into since the meditation had woken it fully, blazing quietly in the amber warmth of the tower. He was watching the projected walls with the same careful attention he had maintained throughout, entirely unaware that something in the depth of the image had found him and was not looking away.

“Oren,” Bran said, keeping his voice low and direct. “There’s a creature at the junction. You can’t see it. It’s drawn to your crown. If you don’t dim it, it will feed on the moment we stand here deciding and grow stronger.” He paused. “I need you to dim your crown. As low as you can bring it.”

Oren said nothing for a moment, the cords in his jaw tightening as he processed an instruction he had no frame of reference for. “How do I dim it? I didn’t know I could dim it.”

“Find out now and do something, Oren!” snapped Bran, elbowing his brother and looking up at him.

“I’ve never dimmed it before! I don’t know how!”

“Just try,” Tavik said, in the voice he used when Oren was overthinking something.

“I am trying, Tav, it would help if I knew how to…”

“Oren!” Bran said urgently, thumping Oren, who caught his arm and glared down at him.

“Be quiet then, so I can try”, retorted Oren.

Oren turned his attention inward, willing to make the attempt. It blazed upward first, the white light surging before it could be brought back, a brief column of it filling the tower’s ceiling, and Tavik stepped involuntarily sideways. Then, with visible effort, Oren pulled inward against something considerably resistant, the crown compressed, folding down and down until it was barely a trembling thread of light at his temples, giving almost nothing.

Through the Portalsight, the creature’s eyes dimmed. The interest drained from them without its source, fraying at the edges, and the thing tested the junction once more with the patience of something accustomed to testing and finding, and discovered only the quiet flatness of nothing sufficiently luminous, and withdrew by degrees into the path behind it, folding back into the dark until there was only the junction and the deep, cool air where something tall had once been standing.

Bran let out a slow breath. “It’s gone. It worked.” Bran glanced sideways and up at Oren and saw that his brother’s crown, though dimmed, was still discernible.

“Left path,” Bran said, turning back to the Portalsight with Nix, bringing his attention back to the junction. “The right turns back.”

The walls shifted as Harthos moved, the left path rising to meet his footsteps, and the labyrinth pressed on around them, its passages older and more deeply interlocked, the symbols surfacing and retreating in longer sequences across the bark as though the labyrinth were growing more forthcoming about its own history the further in they pressed.

Through the Portalsight, Bran spread his awareness outward in the slow, wide rings that were his way of reading a place, and Nix threaded his current through them, and the combined magic worked at the labyrinth’s next stretch the way two hands work at something neither alone could properly manage. The moss of their circle beneath their feet breathed its cool, green breath, and the lightning barrier hummed warm at their backs, and the great trunks on the walls grew older and closer together with each of Harthos’s paces in the dark.

Bran noticed something clustered in the shadow beneath the next root arch, gathered along the underside of a moss-covered boulder to Harthos’s right. Each one still, each one precisely positioned within a pattern that spoke to some form of collective, distributed intelligence. Each leg caught the faint luminescence of the Portalsight’s current along its joints, and the bodies pulsed with a quiet, self-contained regularity that he found genuinely extraordinary, the geometry of the colony mapping itself to something in the layers beneath the stone that he did not yet have the framework to read properly.

“The spiders beneath the next arch,” Bran said, with the tone of someone sharing a navigational detail. “The spacing is remarkable, look at the way the pattern maps across the stone above them, it’s as though they’re not just living in the labyrinth but actively reading it, which would make them a kind of distributed…”

Tavik made a sound behind Bran that was not the sound of his warrior older brother.

Tavik’s hands swept down his arms in rapid succession, then across the front of his tunic, and his gaze dropped to the moss directly around his boots and moved outward in a tight and very methodical circuit, covering every inch of visible floor within his personal orbit.

“Where?” Tavik said, with a particular and very controlled evenness. “Where exactly are the spiders?”

“Oh……um, sorry, Tav,” said Bran, realising he’d forgotten his brother was afraid of spiders and trying to find something less unhelpful to say.

Tavik spun around searching his feet again, and Oren’s hand shot out and closed around Tavik’s arm, firm and immediate, keeping him within the barrier’s circumference. Tavik looked furiously at Oren and Bran and then aimed a thump at Bran, who dodged.

“Not helpful, Bran!” Oren said quietly to Bran, with the tone that indicated the moment for further contribution had already passed.

Nix’s elbow found Bran’s ribs and carried in it the full and deliberate intention of someone who had been holding a shared magic current together single-handedly for the past several minutes whilst tracking a labyrinth’s worth of predators with half his attention and his distraction-prone cousin with the other half, and who had arrived at the very limit of his patience for being the only one entirely and consistently focused on the work of keeping Harthos and all of them, safe.

Bran brought his attention fully back to the Portalsight, let the rings settle and spread, let Nix’s current find its threading way through them again, and said nothing else about the spiders or their distribution or whether they were reading the labyrinth or merely living in it. Tavik’s gaze returned by degrees to the walls. Oren’s hand stayed on his arm for a moment before releasing.

They were in the oldest part of the labyrinth now, the walls carrying the image of a place where the roots ran at depths that began below comprehension and continued, the air in the projection barely moving, the great trunks so closely grown that their crowns had long since merged into a single canopy overhead, darkness complete. Through the Portalsight, Bran reached outward to the furthest edge of their combined range and read the passage ahead in its layers, memory over memory over older memory still, each stratum its own weight of all that had passed through this place and been absorbed into it.

Then, Nix’s ears suddenly swept forward and held there, perfectly and precisely forward, pointed into the projected darkness on the walls with the absolute stillness of a creature that has stopped tracking and started perceiving. His runes had broken their working rhythm and rearranged themselves into a pattern, neither the alert signals nor any pattern belonging to threat, but something occupying entirely different territory, an arrangement for which Bran had never seen before.

And then, at the furthest edge of their combined Portalsight, where the labyrinth’s oldest and deepest layers pressed against the outermost limit of what they could reach together, something pressed back.

Bran could not have named it. The Portalsight gave him nothing he could classify, no creature, no path, no signature of anything the combined current had taught him to read across the hours since their journey began. Only the shape of Nix beside him, drawn taut through every line of him with something Bran had felt in no other moment of this long and careful night.

Then Nix gave a sharp cry, as though he had recognised something invisible to Bran, and before anyone could react, he propelled himself forward, breaking through their protective circle and vanishing at once.

“NIX!” Bran cried out and lunged forward, but Oren was upon him in an instant, one arm locking around Bran’s shoulders, halting his momentum. At the same moment, Oren’s other hand closed firmly about Tavik’s arm; Tavik had already begun his own reckless advance, moving without a moment’s hesitation. Oren’s grip anchored them both, unwavering and decisive, holding each where they stood.

“STAY IN THE CIRCLE!” Shouted Harthos’s voice, reverberating and thundering around them as they swayed in the staggering aftermath of Nix’s palpable absence. The tower chamber about them remained unremarkable, the protective ring of light continuing its steady rotation as they gazed at the spot where Nix had so abruptly disappeared.