Brinn woke to a gauntleted hand shaking his shoulder. The night had come to dawn.

  “Come on,” said a gruff voice. Alexander. “There’s another invitation,”

  He blinked his eyes. The sun. He was outside. No, wait—that was it. right. Brinn was still in the labyrinth. Or, perhaps he was in a forest? Or a pocket dimension. It was unclear, but Brinn knew he’d rather be back at his shop.

  He’d been expecting a second watch shift, but the paladin seemed to take that onto himself. Perhaps it was to help Brinn out, or perhaps the man just couldn’t sleep.

  Brinn groaned. He sat up, and looked around the makeshift camp—nothing but a burnt circle of stones where the firepit had been dug. He saw Favel standing a ways off, examining a tree as if it were the most interesting thing in the world. Brinn didn’t like to judge but the haughty snit wasn’t doing elves any favors. After waking Brinn, Alexander had sat down atop his pack. Clasped in his steel gauntlets was a thin envelope sealed with a thin pink ribbon. He and Favel made their way towards the paladin.

  He began to read:

  “To my three wonderful guests,

  You know the rules already.

  Don’t keep Mr. Trumblekins waiting—he’s quite parched.”

  “We’re doing it again, are we?” said Brinn, as he pushed himself up to his feet. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  “Not quite,” said Favel.

  “Favel and I have been talking. We’re bringing the fight to her.”

  “Alexander, Favel already tried attacking her as soon as we saw her. It went…poorly.”

  Brinn watched Favel shudder as he no doubt remembered the thorned vines wrapped around his flesh, binding him to his chair.

  “Of course it did. Her power is being amplified by something in her garden,” said Alexander.

  “Her phylactery,” said Brinn.

  “It has to be somewhere in that garden. The teapot maybe?” said Favel.

  “Oh, no.” Brinn winced; imagining the feeling of boiling water poured on his philosopher’s stone. It wouldn’t hurt him, but it’s still connected directly to his life force. He shuddered. “It wouldn’t be the teapot.”

  Alexander raised an eyebrow.

  “I know a bit about objects bonded through mana exposure, just trust me—you’d only put it there if you had to.” A phylactery was made much like a philosopher’s stone—but instead of flooding yourself and the conduit with life mana, you flooded it with death mana.

  “I’d rather you explain it,” said Alexander. “We can’t take any chances.”

  Brinn nodded in acquiescence.

  “A phylactery is essentially an alchemical object. You make it the same way you make a philosopher’s stone; binding it to your soul with an extreme amount of mana. Death, in this case, rather than life.”

  Alexander nodded along, stroking his beard with the usual quiet contemplation. Favel looked bored. He probably knew most of this already. The Paladin nodded for Brinn to go on.

  “The key phrase there is binding it to your soul. You wouldn’t want to put that in a fragile object, and especially not one constantly filled with boiling water. It would be…uncomfortable, to say the least.”

  That finally got a nod from Favel. Alexander was still frowning.

  “We still shouldn’t rule it out,” said the paladin. “She’s a child. She might not have thought it through very well.”

  “What else is obvious, then?” asked Brinn. “The bear?” Brinn scraped through his memory of the scene, trying to remember anything else that stood out. There had been a table, cutlery, plates, various finery.

  “Mr. Trumblekins,” said Alexander. Brinn stared at him. So did Favel. Alexander shrugged. “That’s a kid thing to do, right?”

  “I’m not sure we should take her appearance into consideration here. If she really was a child once, I think she was created—she didn’t choose her phylactery,” said Favel.

  “I mean, you’re a war mage, right Favel? I…don’t want to demand you use your fire, but couldn’t you obliterate everything in the garden in an instant?”

  “I could,” said the elf. “But only if I wanted to tear the entire pocket dimension down with me and kill us all.”

  “Is there a…less extreme option?”

  “No,” said Favel. “I can only let out massive amounts of fire mana at once. I’m not just using ice because I want to—it keeps me from accidentally killing us all.”

  Brinn blinked. Mana crucible events could fundamentally change someone’s relationship with a certain kind of mana, but often at a cost. The idea that repeated exposure could damage someone’s control over mana as well wasn’t out of the question.

  “We’ll keep that in the back pocket, then.”

  —

  It didn’t take long to find the clearing. Again, it was perfectly identical to the last. Circular. A table in the middle. The three adventurers broke through the tree line, and didn’t react when they felt the masks reach their faces. They strode side by side into the clearing, each step loaded with a confidence they didn’t have. The girl was waiting, at the head of the table. They sat. Her sewn undead servants flitted around the table, setting the finery and pouring the tea.

  “I’m so glad you all could attend,” said Amelia. She looked at them exactly the same as when they’d first met—as if the three of them hadn’t been trying to kill her the day before. She really does think like a child, thought Brinn.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Alexander. They had decided to continue Brinn’s flattery.

  One of the servants appeared over Brinn’s shoulder. He kept his eyes forwards. He tried his best not cringe away from the smell of putrid rot that wafted to his nose. Brinn waited, and when the creature stepped away and proffered the filled teacup at arms’ length, Brinn took it from the platter.

  He brought the cup to his lips, spat the mouthful of potion he’d been holding into it, leaned forwards, and heaved the mixture Amelia. Just as expected, vines shot up to grab Brinn, but not before the cup left his hand. Reality shifted just as before, but their guess had been right: the reality bending of the labyrinth couldn’t affect their own mana. The mana-infused liquid spattered all over the girl’s face and dress, sizzling immediately as the liquid sank into her flesh. Healing magic. Poison to the undead. At the same moment, Favel let loose a jet of flame that obliterated poor Mr. Trumblekins in an instant, and Alexander’s sword cleaved through the teapot on the table and the table itself in a single blow.

  The vines held Brinn down as he struggled against them, but he scanned the clearing for any trace of the death mana that would exude from a phylactery. Nothing.

  Then he came to a realization.

  “It’s the garden itself!” he shouted.

  Favel’s eyes widened in realization. The vines reached and grasped for he and the paladin, but blinded as she was, the girl couldn’t direct the garden to attack for her. It must have taken an incredible amount of mana to create a phylactery that also served as its own pocket dimension. Something like that could protect a lich from almost anything, Brinn realized.

  Getting a hold on her senses, the girl shot forward, swinging her needle towards him desperately, but Alexander tackled her. There was a flash, and she was gone. She appeared above Brinn again, and he looked on in horror as the needle descended towards his face—only for her to be blasted away in a stream of holy light. Alexander darted towards him and began to hacking away at the vines. Brinn was amazed at how close the sword came to his skin without cutting him. The paladin was a professional. The moment Brinn was loose, he stumbled away, trying to put distance between himself and the table. one of the sewn undead servants charged him. He threw another vial from his sash; healing magic burning into the creature’s skin.

  “Favel,” There was a shout from the table. Alexander had—somehow—gotten his arm wrapped around the screaming lich, catching her out of a teleportation as if he knew she was there. Brinn nearly cheered in triumph as the paladin slammed the girl into the table with both arms, smashing it to pieces. He held her there, and made eye contact with Favel, who stopped his constant barrage of spells. The elf made eye contact with Brinn across the yard and his eyes seemed to make a decision. His eyes turned to the girl, struggling to escape Alexander’s arms as he wrapped her in layer after layer of holy barrier. Suddenly, the lich slipped from his grasp, tearing across the clearing, burying her needle in Favel’s gut. Brinn could barely follow the movement with his eyes, but she left a trail of mana behind her.

  Too late, Brinn realized what the elf was going to do.

  Brinn barely pulled down his goggles in time. In an instant, all of the air seemed to rush out the room. He tried to breathe, but he couldn’t. His lungs moved, but there no air entered them. He watched in confusion, heaving pointlessly as the sweat on his face and hands boiled off in an instant. He felt something pop with a painful thud in his ear, the only sound he heard over rushing blood. Brinn watched in horror through the tinted glasses as Favel’s heat mana spread out into the air, dragging it all toward him, mana and air alike compressing into a single point in front of an open palm. Time seemed to slow as Amelia only struggled harder against Alexander’s grip, face twisted in a silent scream as black ectoplasm poured from her mouth. Her eyes were black. Any semblance of this thing resembling an innocent child was gone, and she drove her over-sized needle into Favel’s gut again and again. She was inhumanly fast. Blood was dripping to the ground, having soaking through Favel’s robe. The look on the elf’s face told Brinn the elf didn’t even notice. Everything crawled to a stop as the war mage spoke a single word.

  The sound carried to Brinn’s ears despite the impossible void. A single word that came down with the weight of an anvil:

  “Annihilation.”

  There was a brief instant where Brinn thought he saw the lich’s eyes open wider, and the Paladin holding her slam them shut. A single heartbeat that Brinn would never be sure was real. The feeling of the elf’s invocation tore through Brinn.

  In a flash of white light, a sun was born. An impossibly hot, impossibly bright ball of expanding flame exploded from the singularity in Favel’s palm. Before Brinn could process it, everything in front of the elf was turned to ash except the lich and Alexander. The paladin only took the rest of that instant to burn away. It blasted through the void in a fraction of a moment, Brinn felt the heat burn the hair off his arms, sear into his skin, the pain coursed into him, tearing him apart from the inside out. He watched as the flame burnt away the garden itself—and then, in an instant, it was gone. Brinn could no longer see, hear, think, but he knew that something had changed. For an instant, he wasn’t sure he was even real—then the pain began.

  Brinn knew he wasn’t dead. He hurt too much. The world was a sea of red and heat and by every God that Brinn could swear by, the pain. Dimly, the detached, analytical part of his mind knew what this must be. Somehow, he had survived the blast; but he was still inside the blast zone, and something was happening to him. He tried to scream, to breathe, anything; the air had returned to the world around him but trying to will it into his lungs only met him with more pain, on the inside of his body instead of the outside. It spread through him even faster than before as numbly; every part of him that remained sane focused on one thing: escape.

  He had no idea if it was working. He could feel himself writhing, the pain, and the ground under him. Desperately, he tried his best to ensure his spasming carried him anywhere. Anywhere was better than where he was right now. The pain didn’t fade, but slowly, his vision began to clear. He was in a massive, empty cavern.

  No, that’s not possible, Brinn thought. It wasn’t the cavern—as if he cared what the labyrinth looked like at any given moment after everything they’d seen. It was the skeletal arm dragging it’s way out of the pile of ash. It held an over-sized sewing needle in its hand. The girl wasn’t dead.

  Brinn willed himself to stand. He had to finish her off. His alchemical flame would be enough, in this state, anything would be enough. But as the corpse dragged herself from the ashes the flesh was already reforming over her skin. Brinn dimly registered the mana coalescing around her—the same he’d come to recognize from the teleportation magic—but nothing happened. The garden is gone, thought Brinn. She can’t return to it. He still had a chance.

  He pushed with everything he could, trying to calm his mind, roll to his feet—but it was too much. Black spots begin to grow from the edges of Brinn’s vision, blotting out the scene. The last thing Brinn saw before unconsciousness took him was the girl’s form disappearing in a flash of light.