Brinn was ecstatic. He may have also been—once again—about to die, but that was becoming par for the course over the last few days. There it was. The small, gnomish arm snaking around his throat. The weight settled onto his back. The other hand, holding a knife to his eye. There was little he could make out, but as far as he knew, they’d only loosed one knife wielding, yarn spinning gnome into this labyrinth.

  “Spinny,” he said, a bit of his grin breaking out in the words. “It’s me.”

  “I’m not falling for it twice, ye cog. Where is ‘e? Where did ye put him?!”

  Brinn blinked. What did that mean? He understood if the gnome was a little paranoid, the bard-lich’s illusions being what it was. The knife drifted closer to his eye. Beside himself, a bit of sweat broke out on his forehead. Spinny wasn’t really about to cut his eye out was she?

  “What in the hells are you talking about? What’s wrong with you?”

  “You know exactly what’s wrong you farce,” whispered the voice. It had none of her usual good humor. “Now tell me where you put the boy’s body or I’ll do to you what you did to Greta.” Brinn’s heart sank as something in his head clicked into place. The portraits. The paint creature wasn’t just haunting him, was it?

  “Wh-what happened to Greta?” he said. His voice came out broken. He’d thought that maybe Spinny and Greta were still together. That the three of them might still make it out of this place.

  To his surprise the knife began to drift downwards, its point angling towards the floor. He felt the grip around his neck loosen.

  “Brinn?” said the voice, whisper and malice gone. It was still quiet. Shocked.

  “In the flesh,” he coughed, glad she was coming to her senses. “Most of the flesh is still attached, even.”

  As quickly as it had settled, the weight fell from his back. She must have hit the ground softly, because he didn’t hear a thing. He took a step forwards and turned to face her, keeping his movements slow and deliberate. What he saw shook him to his core. She was small. She’d always been small, next to a human like Brinn; but none of her usual bluster was there. Her shoulders hunched. She almost looked ashamed. The wrinkles and lines carved through her features were distant, now, lacking the sense of the warmth they normally had. Her fingers twitched in an endless hooking motion.

  “What happened to Greta?” he asked again. His voice was steadier now.

  He hadn’t known the dwarf particularly well. She’d been a long time friend of Spinny’s that Alexander hired on when they’d needed extra muscle. Two years this party had been together and this is what was left. A half rate alchemist and a washed up adventurer. He couldn’t believe it. Finally, Spinny opened her mouth.

  “I’m sorry lad, We thought ye were dead,” she hedged. “Ye know there’s some kinda slime monster with yer face on it?”

  “Spinny. What happened to Greta?”

  She stammered. A tear. Brinn knew what she was about to say.

  “The paintings got her,” she said. That would explain why she’d attacked him on sight. The painting hadn’t only attacked him, but it had only copied him. The pair had been attacked by the creature. Only now did he notice the bloodstains on Spinny’s clothes, and just how thick the layer of dirt on her face really was. There were charred, black ends to bits of her leathers. She’d been in a fire.

  “How did it happen?” he said. He looked around for somewhere to sit, but when he found nothing, he simply guided the small woman over to the wall. They set against it together, backs against the wall, hallway extending off into either side.

  “It ignored everything we threw at it, lad. Knives. Even the axe, it was like a water elemental but it kept blasting these gouts of fire. The fire consumed her. It ate her, Brinn.” Her hands repeated the repetitive, hooked twitch.

  Oh, Brinn realized. Oh, no. No, no, no. This couldn’t be his fault. He thought about the creature. The way it seemed to look more like him with every passing moment. The way it brandished its knife at him. The way the knife had become an unstructured mess of paint the moment he’d dropped his own. He’d thought about the massive blast of flame he’d used, invoking fire against it. He stared into the bricks across from him.

  It was copying him. Adapting. Learning from what he did. Knowing his own newfound resistance to flame, he’d only made it stronger by blasting it with fire, even if it kept it off of him.

  “When I saw ye all splattered with paint, I thought it must’ve come back for me. I had to hide when she died, lad. It drifted off down one of the halls, but it knows how to find me now. It knows the yarn leads to me. But I need it. We need it, we need it to find the others, and to keep our heads straight but we can’t hide from something that knows exactly where we are and—“

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Spinny,” he said. “I’m sorry. Favel and Alexander are dead.” It was worse than he’d thought. The look of horror that spread across her face nearly broke him.

  “How?” she said, even quieter.

  “Sacrificed themselves to kill a lich,” he said. “Favel brought down a whole pocket dimension with him. Nearly killed me. I still don’t know how I survived.” He didn’t feel the need to take the credit for Amelia’s death. Their sacrifice had been the only reason he’d been able to fight something that powerful.

  “The lich is dead?” she said, a glimmer of hope in her voice.

  “One of them is,” he said. Spinny only stared at him. He imagined if she hadn’t already looked stricken, she certainly would have by then. Spinny had known Alexander for a lot longer than he had. The two had crossed path many times before. Favel, on the other hand, she had only known as well as he had.

  “There’s more than one?”

  “I met him,” confirmed Brinn. “The bard.”

  “What bard?” she asked, a bit of confusion creeping into the edges of her tone. Brinn sighed. They had a lot to get into.

  They spoke for some time, starting with what had happened to Favel and Alexander in their fight with Amelia—but that had only caused more confusion. He went back to the beginning, the moment that she had seemingly run off down the hallway when they’d first gotten separated. He told her of him and Favel finding the garden, meeting Amelia, the tea parties, everything. It felt good to finally have a moment to talk about it all with someone who wasn’t a millennium-old-lich trying to turn him into some kind of unwilling protagonist in some deathtrap.

  “How the hell are you still alive, out of the three of you?” she said. “I mean no offense,” she clarified at Brinn’s annoyed look. “I mean if Favel invoked war magic in a pocket dimension that destroyed the entire thing, you should be dead.”

  “I know. Something happened just before the explosion. I woke up back in the labyrinth, in the middle of a massive crater.” He told her about the bard, and his encounter with Brinn in the study. He told her about his encounter with the paint monster.

  “And…” he trailed off for a moment, not sure of what to say. “I think the fire was my fault,” he finished.

  Spinny blinked at him, cocking her head to the side. Her eyes were red, and puffy.

  “The thing,” he clarified. “That…portrait mimic. It adapted to what I did. It…copied me. I drove it off with a fire invocation.”

  Spinny sighed. With the admission out, a weight left his chest that he iddn’t know had been pressing down on him. His shoulders slumped. Some of teh tension left his back. But he waited, for Spinny’s reprisal. This was his fault, after all. He’d gotten Greta killed.

  “No, lad,” she said. “That’s not your fault. You can’t have known the thing was gonna come for us next, and you can’t have known it was going to copy whatever you threw at it.”

  No. That wasn’t right. If it wasn’t for him, if he had just died when he’d been supposed to, Spinny and Greta wouldn’t have had to deal with all this. For all he knew, maybe Favel and Alexander could still be alive if he hadn’t been holding hi back. With that thought, the tears came rushing back, the tight feeling in his throat that signaled he was about to completely lose his shit. Again.

  “Boy,” she said. “It’s not. Your. Fault.”

  “I just…I don’t…I…” Brinn’s breathing was heavy, and fast. His vision started to pulse. The mana sickness must be getting to him.

  “Listen, lad,” she said. “I’ve got a way to tell where we’re going. Er, at least, I’ve got a way to tell where we’ve been. If we get to the library, I think I know a way out.”

  That was unexpected. In fact, it stopped Brinn’s panic in his tracks.

  “What do you mean you know a way out?! The labyrinth shifts, it just takes us wherever it wants. Wherever he wants.”

  “It only shifts if you aren’t looking, lad. But I found a trick. You must have noticed.”

  Of course he had.

  “The yarn, obviously, but how? Why?” The yarn had clearly been way that Spinny had foud of navigating this plae, likely inspired by the very same tale that he’d been told as a child. The same that had inspired the adventures of his favorite Artificer in the work of T.B Pierce. It had been a widely known myth. To think that it had worked though—a trick so simple as using something physical to mark your path.

  “What do ye mean why? As for how, I think it’s that if the labyrinth shifted it would give the string a right pull, and then I would know it was up to tricks. It doesn’t want old Spinny to know when it’s up to its tricks.”

  Brinn blinked. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her refer to herself in the third person. Her hands twitched again, that strange forwards and back hook from before. He thought for a moment, then had an idea.

  “You must have more yarn. You should make me a new sash. Do you have your knitting tools?” he said. He hadn’t seen her “knitting tools” anywhere since their reunuion. The collection of lockpicking tools and differently sized hooks had always looked a bit more like some kind of torture instrument to him, but every few weeks she’d come out with some new scarf or pouch. He didn’t really want a new sash. He was just trying to remind her of her knitting, give her something to help her focus, take some time off of things. She had always seemed a little less irritable when she’d worked away with her little hooks. His sash was mostly destroyed at this point, too. He’d never liked the aesthetics of yarn over leather, but the woman had made it for him, and it was freakishly durable and perfectly fit. What should he have done? Say ‘no?’

  “My what?” she said. Brinn had been distracted, and he wasn’t sure what she could be confused by. Had he stuttered?

  “Your…knitting.” He said. Should he be more worried about her than he thought? She’d been through at least as much as he had.

  “It’s crochet, you id’jit.” She snapped, and for a second, a little bit of the stern but friendly companion was back. She sprung to her feet, now only reaching Brinn’s height in his sitting position.

  “We should get moving. I’ll show ye how I’ve been navigating, and we can talk more on the way.”

  “You said something about a library?” he said, standing. “Aye, you’ll see.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “There’s somewhere else I’d like to go first, if you know where it is. Have you seen anything other than blank halls and this ‘library’ you mentioned?”

  “Aye,” she said.

  “How about a massive crater of ash behind a door into a cavern? Mostly sheer rock.”

  She hesitated.

  “Aye,” she said. “Lot of magical fallout there.”

  That surprised Brinn. Just like the labyrinth to bring them so close to finding each other just hours apart.

  “You must have just missed me. In any case, there’s something I’d like to do there, first. I want to put our friends to rest.”

  That got her attention.

  “Aye,” she said. “I can help ye with that. It’s only right.”