Chapter 31

When the light bled away, he found himself standing in a narrow hall. No, not a hall.

A canyon.

He instantly felt claustrophobic. Stone walls smooth as glass caged him in on either side, extending in front and behind him. However, he couldn’t tell how far they stretched as everything further than thirty feet away was swallowed in a thick fog of ash. Red light crept in from above, past where the tops of the walls ended twenty feet up, diffusing through the ash clogged air.

Caleb’s eyes stung instantly from the heat. A bead of sweat had already formed at his hairline and trailed a line down his face. He exhaled once, then shaped his spirit outward, forming a thin translucent mask over his nose, mouth, and eyes.

The mask stopped the ash from reaching his nostrils, but not the air. He could breathe cleanly. Caleb craned his neck back and sucked in a deep breath. The ash looked thinner up above. Perhaps he could climb to the top of the strange canyon he was in and get a better view of his surroundings.

His spirit arms grew from his back and he rolled his shoulders. There was a haze of heat emanating from the walls, like hot asphalt in the summer, but it wasn’t enough to burn him. Afterall, he was still barefoot and his feet felt fine on the stone.

The spirit arms reached around, clawed fingers stabbing millimeters into the otherwise smooth rock face, and Caleb quickly ascended the twenty feet. Higher up, the heat was stronger – Caleb felt yet more sweat tracing lines down his skin, but the ash was thinner.

He could see quite a distance.

Caleb stood atop a narrow black stone wall, eyes sweeping over an infinite landscape of interconnected canyons just like the one he’d spawned in. They stretched into the horizon, miles and miles away. The tops of them were completely flat, as if someone had taken an enormous planer over everything, and it looked like every canyon had a perfectly uniform width. Above him, burned a dull red sun. Canyon connected into canyon, turning at right angles, meeting another canyon, intersecting yet one more, ending abruptly. There was order to the organization, but no pattern.

“Ah shit,” he said, realizing exactly what he was looking at. “It’s a maze, isn’t it?”

He’d never been good at mazes. Whether they were on paper in grade school or made out of corn in the fall. Somehow, he always ended up stuck or walking in circles.

Caleb placed all four of his hands on his hips and started chewing his lip. The maze was huge. Dozens of times larger than any other that he’d ever even heard of before. And even from his vantage point, he couldn’t spy a start or an end. It looked like he’d just been dropped in the middle of a random section of the maze. That very likely was the case.

Did that mean if other people came in they’d arrive in the same spot? Or would they be dropped in a different section? And what about if he’d come in with someone? Eh, no point worrying about that now. He needed all of his available brainpower for maze-solving.

Something caught his attention in the corner of his vision. A blur of motion interpreting the uniformity. Something above the maze, far off in the distance.

Caleb squinted, trying to get a better look. At first, he couldn’t tell what it was, but then the shape came into focus, growing larger.

It was a creature of some sort. Winged. A bird?

But then the creature kept growing larger. Growing so large until it got to the point that Caleb was forced to reckon with how large it truly was. The size of a cargo plane. He swallowed and took a step back, nearly falling backward into the canyon before catching himself.

Two leathery wings beat the air, kicking up clouds of ash from the fissures in the ground as the creature soared directly toward Caleb. It was close now – less than a mile out – and he had a clear view. Grey and crimson scales armored its body from snout to tail. Burning lines of fire pulsed on its breast with every breath, glowing like cracks in cooling lava. Its titanic wings were tipped with ivory talons, and two powerful legs trailed beneath it, skimming just over the tops of the maze as it swept through the air.

At first, he got excited. Finding the boss of the Dungeon, the Hearthfire Drake, was going to prove even easier than he’d expected. But then he scanned the creature and his stomach dropped like a rock.

Molten Wyvern
Aether Level 64

For the first time since this all began, Caleb felt fear. Primal fear. A sensation that gripped his heart and squeezed. He choked up stepping back again, this time not catching himself as his body tipped back and he started to fall into the canyon.

The wyvern opened its jaws and unleashed a torrent of flaming death.

A wall of blazing heat ripped across the sky, washing over the canyon and painting the world in fire. Caleb felt the hairs on his arms curl and burn as he plummeted, the inferno passing inches above him. Close enough to cook him to a blackened smear.

Instinct took over. Spirit claws lashed out, biting into the canyon wall. Stone screamed as he carved deep gouges down its side, slowing his fall just enough before he slammed into the ground with a thud.

The blaze above vanished as quickly as it had come. The wyvern tore past at nearly supersonic speed, its passage blasting the ash and air out of the canyon in a violent gust that sucked at his clothes and left his ears ringing.

What the hell? What the living hell? Aether level sixty-four? This Dungeon was the same Grade as Mistveil Peaks? No. Not possible. Thrymm had only been level thirty-four… that wyvern was thirty levels higher! Thirty! And it wasn’t even the boss!

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Caleb pushed himself to his feet and leaned on the wall, breathing heavily and staring up with wide eyes. He could still hear the beat of its wings, flapping in the distance. If it came back, if it landed atop the maze wall above him and shot fire down into the canyon…

Burnt dinner.

He sprinted through the halls of the maze, turning left, then right, then left. He didn’t care where he was going. It didn’t matter. Just away from that wyvern and away from where it might think to look for him.

It must’ve been two hours or more before he finally stopped running. He lifted his ear to the sky and listened. Nothing but silence. But that wasn’t enough to be safe for certain. He had to see.

If he just poked the top of his head up for a second, it wouldn’t see him, right? Just a second.

Caleb climbed his way up the maze’s walls once more, this time forgoing his spirit arms just in case the wyvern was somehow able to sense his ability. His fingers were more than strong enough to break holds into the black stone walls on their own.

He poked his head over the lip and peered out at the endless expanse of maze. Nothing that he could make sense of. But far in the distance, several miles away, he saw the flapping wings of the wyvern. It flew across the horizon on his left, barely skimming over the top of the maze just as before. He’d lost it.