My voice faded into silence. Everything had worked okay. Tem, Felegum, and Zeno all said their lines admirably, and we’d thrown (mostly) the gold-wrappéd cookies and not the terrible bricks.
For a moment, I thought I understood why Zeno did all this stuff. Not like, the drinking and the shameless pursuit of mermaids, but like, music and performance. To have that moment of stillness, that beat after a show ended, when you absolutely knew you’d crushed.
It was intoxicating.
I was still panting from all that declaiming (and also from nerves because yikes) when the plaform descended from above.
“A most excellent performance,” said Lord Reinbach from his floating stage. “What do you say, crowd? Do you think these worthy of an advantage in the next bit of the trial?”
He paused, and the crowd roared.
“Or,” he asked, “the dwarves?”
There was a noticeable difference in volume. Across the stage, a mirage disappeared, revealed the other half of the stage and a very put-out looking group of short humanoids with drums.
“What shall the next challenge be? I wonder.” Reinbach said, as a wheel was revealed behind him, one divided into many different-colored slices, with words too far for me to read written on each slice. He spun the wheel.
Helli threw a dagger at the wheel, possibly intending to look awesome (it would have) or stop it on something she saw that was perfect for us (did gnomes have baller eyesight? I’d have to ask later). Maybe she’d really given all she had to the performance, though, because her aim was a little off and her dagger sailed through the audience.
There was a pitiful “aahh!” from the judges’ area.
I buried my face in my hands. Not again. This was terrible. Poor Real Stanley would be mortified.
The wheel, unbothered by daggers or other outside intervention, stopped of its own accord, and Reinbach peered over and read it.
“The Maze! The Maze of Time and Space!” he crowed.
Before the crowd, as another illusion, appeared a map of a maze covered in points and dots. In front of each of us opened up a blue-green portal.
“Step forward into the maze,” said Reinbach, “forward into the portal, take control of the nodes, bring the points of power to the loci, and win the Battle of the Bards!”
That felt very much like a long game play, given that Jaylor Dwift and the Druids were going to verse each other later that night after our show, but it was both nice and unnerving that he believed in us. We did want to win, after all.
Notably, no portals opened in front of the dwarves.
Next to me, Zeno jumped into his. Flabbergasted, I jumped into mine after, because it really would be stupid if we just handed Reinbach the one person he really wanted while all the rest of us chilled out and evaluated the situation.
I just didn’t expect to be, uh, alone.
I was in a gray-green stone room with a dead body on the floor. Frankly, in my short but eventful life, I had had more than enough of dead bodies and decided to leave. The north door, when I pulled on it, was locked, which was fine because I was awesome and locks simply did not stop me anymore.
Except then one of my picks broke off in this one.
I glanced back at the corpse. It was very wet.
I screamed in frustration. “I have a dead body in here and NO ZENO.” I took another deep breath. “Okay, okay, you can do this. Kalends believed in you, you just gave the performance of your life, you can do this.”
By the power of positive thinking (and also possibly the magic of Zeno’s showmanship), I opened the door.
What followed were endless hallways. Since the only thing waiting for me in the last room was a moist corpse, I decided on exploration.
“End of round one,” said a disembodied voice as I walked the hallways of this wacky maze. “Song and Dance Crew. Possession: two focus, zero loci. Dwarves of Egonia: zero focus, zero loci.”
Something seemed to wake up, like something else besides us came alive in here. I did not like that at all and promptly went invisible. After opening another door ahead of me (this time unlocked), I didn’t feel immediately under threat but like, you never knew. This place was big.
Another announcement. “Song and Dance Crew: one focus (E), zero loci. Dwarves of Egonia: zero focus, zero loci.”
I moved through the dark, winding halls of the maze. I was glad that my teammates were doing better than I was because like, I had no idea how to help us win beyond, well, finding a clue.
Movement rustled ahead. I paused. There were sounds of a ruckus both behind and ahead of me in the hallways. Ugh.
“Song and Dance Crew: two focus (D and E), zero loci,” came the voice again. “Dwarves of Egonia: zero focus, zero loci.”
I unlocked the door. Interesting that there were notes attached to the foci. I’d heard periodic chimes of different flavors as I’d moved, but I wasn’t sure if that was me moving over weird spots of floor or something else. I was beginning to suspect it had to do with these foci.
When I pushed the door open, I was greeted with maybe the world’s weirdest sight: a dwarf bonking on a skeleton with two drum mallets.
He seemed to be doing fine, so I invisibly inched along the wall.
The dwarf ran past me, pursued by the zombie.
“Song and Dance Crew: two focus (D and E), zero loci. Dwarves of Egonia: zero focus, zero loci.”
I headed to the northern door of this formerly skeleton-occupied room and tried to open it. Locked again. In my haste, I did not do a great job picking this lock and the skeleton paused in the doorway, then turned to the source of the noise.
I crouched and froze.
There was another ding similar to the ones that had been happening before and I felt the earth shake. The wall next to me started to sway, which is obviously a bad thing for anything structural to be doing while you’re near it, and the zombie skeleton left, distracted by other sounds.
“Song and Dance Crew: three focus (D, E, and G), zero loci. Dwarves of Egonia: one focus (A),” updated the voice.
I walked through the now-open door (having finally picked it) and saw yet more corridors before me.
Not this again.
“WHAT!” came a familiar voice to the southwest.
“Oh my god!” I cheered up, then shouted: “Felegum, it’s me! Come to the sound of my voice!”
The maze made another weird noise and then the announcer came through again:
“Song and Dance Crew: two focus (D and E), one loci. Focus G returned to original location. Dwarves of Egonia: two focus (A and F), zero loci.”
Felegum would definitely be able to tell me what was going on. Whatever we were doing, we needed to keep it up and I wanted to help.
Angsty Teen Breakfast Blog 