1. Brinn travels through the dungeon for a time, reflecting some more on what just happened.

  2. Brinn stumbles across Amelia.

  3. Tense scene where Amelia reveals some of her backstory while they go through the motions of the final tea party.

  4. Brinn poisons the tea.

  5. Amelia drinks the tea and dies.

  6. Close out on the bard’s slow clap.

  Brinn limped down the hall. One foot after another. The labyrinth hadn’t shifted much during their time in the garden. The same halls, the same walls, the same motifs. But something had changed. He wasn’t sure exactly how, but the mana flow felt different. His goggles hung loosely around his neck. His hair was greasy and caked with sweat. He could tell, somehow, that he didn’t need to worry about getting lost. He’d been invited to another tea party. The labyrinth would do what he was beginning to realize it was designed to do. It would bring him to Amelia. It would further the narrative. Now that he’d spent so long inside, and had some time in the garden to use for contrast, he’d began to get a feel for how the mana shifted here. Looking back on when he and Favel had been separated from the others, Brinn could identify the feeling when the labyrinth shifted around them. This was never any normal maze, and it wasn’t even just shifted with illusions. It was rewriting itself to the whims of a story.

  Dryly, incredulously, Brinn found himself chuckling. Every step of this journey so far had just been far too convenient. Every moment leading into the next with too little time for him to consider how much of it made sense. It was all just too convenient. He even got tragically timed flashbacks.

  “You’re a bit of a hack, you know that?” called Brinn into the empty hallway. It returned nothing but silence.

  As he expected, the hall was far shorter than when he and Favel had traveled through it before. That had been a trek just conveniently long enough for them to finish their conversation and enter the garden. Now, only a few hundred yards down its length, Brinn had again come face to face with a door. Faintly, he heard music behind it—not a harpsichord, as before, but a piano this time. The door was a dark, heavy wood, and iron bands crossed its length. Its brass knob was oddly polished for the dusty labyrinth environment. Idly, Brinn began to wonder if the labyrinth itself was alive—watching him. Or was it simply the will of its undead master?

  He reached for the knob. Turned. As his arm came into his vision, orange-red mana still raced through the conduits in his body. The door opened into a study. There was a piano—playing itself—a table, two chairs. A roaring fireplace. Amelia. She sat at a small table. There was only one chair. They’d destroyed the rest of her friends. The knob started to burn his hand, and he let it go. A trap?

  No, Brinn realized. That’s my own mana. He still didn’t understand what surviving Favel’s invocation had done to him.

  The girl herself was midway through regenerating. Without her phylactery, the natural regeneration of a lich wasn’t enough to bring her back to good health—or at least, not in the amount of time that she had left. Brinn stepped into the study. Tyou he air inside was dry, and arid; it smelled of old books and dust and ink.

  A log split and shifted in the fire as Brinn dragged out the chair in front of him. He winced as the leg of the chair against the hard, stone ground. He was going to end this here. But he had some questions first.

  “Why the hell are you doing this? You know I’m going to kill you.”

  Amelia’s face was expressionless. None of the manic, childlike glee.

  “That’s the story father wrote,” she said. It was simple. She knew as well as he that this that she wasn’t going to walk out of this alive—or undead, as it were. “Three days. Three tea parties.”

  “Your ‘father’—he’s not your real father, right? The bard. Did he find you like this, or did he do this to you?”

  The girl tilted her head in confusion as Brinn stood to get the tea.

  “Of course he’s my father,” she said.

  He looked around the room for—there it was. A tea set. It was on top of the piano. Brinn stared, blankly, at the keys, magically plinking away a note at a time on their own. The song was a tight, mournful collection of arpeggios. He poured the tea. If the girl was being forced into this ritual, they might as well

  “You’re of his blood, then?”

  “You’re of your father’s blood, aren’t you?”

  “What about your mum?” he said. His back was still turned to her. It wasn’t a concern. Idly, he noticed her sewing needle leaned against the wall. She’s not even carrying her weapon.

  “I don’t remember her,” she said. It was simple, matter-of-fact even. She didn’t seem to miss a maternal figure in her life. Brinn still thought the idea was sad.

  “Were you…raised here?”

  “In the labyrinth?!” she cried. She broke into a fit of sobbing noises Brinn realized were giggles through her rapidly reforming flesh. Some of the childlike mirth had returned.

  He went to boil water in the kettle with his alchemical flame, holding his palm close to the the surface at its bottom; only for the spell to come out white hot once again, immediately heating the water well past a boil. A great gout of steam shot from the kettle as it glowed white hot, bits of it began to drip; a glob nearly hitting his hand before he dropped the kettle and kicked it across the study.

  Amelia’s giggling finally subsided, Brinn’s antics having dragged it along farther than it would have otherwise done.

  When he glanced about, inexplicably, there was another kettle, atop the piano. Just where the last had been. He looked back towards the one he’d kicked across the floor. It was gone. He grasped the kettle, and walked it over to the fireplace. There was a small iron rod protruding from it, with a ring just wide enough he could place the kettle atop it to come to a boil. He set it on top, and turned back to Amelia. That hadn’t been there before.

  “Not here, then, I take it.”

  “No,” she said. “Not here. We came here after he made me this.”

  “So he did make you this way.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Father made me perfect.” Brinn blinked. Amelia stared, nonplussed. The kettle came to a boil. It let a scream out across the study, and Brinn lifted it from the metal fastening with his gloved left hand. Making his way back over to the tea set by the piano, he poured it into the teapot with a selection of herbs from the nearby tray. He gave it a few moments to steep—lightly, there was no need to drag this on any longer than it needed to be—and went about pouring himself a cup, as well as one for Amelia.

  He took a sip of his tea. It tasted fine. A little tangy, maybe. It wouldn’t matter.

  Amelia sipped at her own cup, making eye contact with a look of grim finality on her face.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Hm…?”

  “Your father,” Brinn clarified. “The bard,”

  “Oh, it’s been a very long time since father came to visit.” She took another sip of her tea.

  “So you’ve been alone? For how long?”

  “Oh, it’s been ages! I miss him sometimes…but father knows best,” she said. There was something wrong with her demeanor. The way she was reacting to his questions. That is to say, there was something wrong beyond the fact she was some kind of undead child abomination haunting the halls of a labyrinth run by a murderous bard-lich. She still felt scripted. Just how deeply had the bard lich’s narrative wound its way around her mind? Her motions were all childish, but everything she said was monotone. Functional.

  She finished her tea.

  The two stared at each other.

  The Bloodleaf in Amelia’s tea began to react. There was a gurgling, spitting noise as she choked up black bile. In her weakened state, an interruption to her constant regeneration is all it would take. She continued to gag and heave against the toxic life mana that had begun to take her apart from the inside. Brinn could only look on in pity. He knew that this was what needed to be done, but that didn’t make it feel any better to watch the light go out of innocent eyes. Brinn doubted the girl even had the capacity to understand what she’d done—or even to understand that just like him, she’d only ever been a pawn in this bard’s game.

  He stared her in the eyes as she collapsed onto the table.

  The thing—the child, a part of Brinn reminded him—was dead. All the way dead—something Brinn was coming to know as an important decision in a place like this. The thing had been a child. But Brinn stood.

  It was done.

  A slow applause broke the silence behind him.

  “Bravo, lad. You’ve proven a more…resilient protagonist than I’d expected.”

  Brinn whirled, and found himself facing a man in a dark, wide-brimmed hat. He struck a dramatic silhouette, sat at the piano, wine glass in hand. Undead lips curled in a rictus grin.