Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

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Up above, the sky is a sun-washed silken blue that deepens into forever and the bees are going from blossom to blossom while life is warm. Yellow grains dust their bodies.

Akayla Sethrys’s boot hits the door just below the lock.

She’s been kicking these things in for eight or nine years now and she knows where to put her emphasis. She favors a pair of bespoke basilisk leather and steel sabatons for this purpose; today some additional luck is with her in the form of rotten wood. Jagged wet splinters fly as the broken door slams inward, peeling out of its frame. Another dungeon chamber breached.

“Onward!” cries Sethrys, crouched over her shield, blade up for quick thrusts past the rim.

Pinpoints of ominous red light flicker in the darkness. Fleshless eyes. Something stirs, rattles, rises. A dozen white frames of the dead. Human bones invested by insatiable ghosts, hungry in the dry sockets of their teeth, hungry in the hollows of their time-leathered marrows.

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