When we opened the door in the kitchen we saw something from an Escher painting. Did Escher actually paint or was it charcoal or something? Whatever. The point is that we opened the door on a topsy-turvy labyrinth. And this time there weren't any footprints. I was more than a little intimidated, but we went in anyway. We tried the usual trick of keeping your hand on the right wall, but somehow that didn't work. It turned out there was some kind of spatial loop that just zapped us back to the someplace a little further from where we entered. I started taking notes, but it was Brennen who found the way out of the first loop.
The air here seems somehow more rich. The whole place is fertile with possibilities, both good and bad. I think it's making us both more of what we already are, which might have been how I guessed the nature of the enchantment in the caves. If I'm right, then Brennen's fey nature is being nurtured by this place, allowing his instincts to guide him through the maze. He brought us through at least three loops and I think he was even starting to anticipate the way gravity would sometimes change directions. Then the Small Folk noticed us.
We'd seen a few of the sprites and pixies darting around almost as soon as we entered the maze, but they hadn't shown any interest in us. That changed after about thirty minutes of wandering, though. At first they were just flitting around us trying to entrance or mesmerize us with their lights, but then one of them made a series of taps on one of the bricks and just as soon as I started to feel suspicious the gravity of the area got switched around and we got slammed into the new floor. It took us a few seconds to stagger back to our feet and check ourselves for injuries, but before I had quite finished my attention was seized by the sound tinkling, lyrical laughter. I looked up and saw the Small Folk darting around, cartwheeling through the air, and giving the general impression that this was the best game they had ever played.
We ran. The faeries thought that made it even funnier.
It turned out that screwing with gravity wasn't the only thing they could do. They also delighted in moving the walls around, rebooting the spatial loops, and activating enchantments such as one that flipped our perceptions of left and right or another that forced us to walk on our hands. I don't know how to describe what it was like when we tried to walk normally except to say that it wasn't allowed.
Eventually, I grabbed Brennen by the shoulder and said, "Stop, stop. We're never going to get through this way." I sat down and gestured for him to join me. "We have to make a deal."
Brennen had taken everything he could of his more arcane birthday gifts along for precisely this purpose. The trouble was that faeries were legalistic in nature and could be easily insulted, especially when it came to the Small Folk. So instead of just trying to call out and ask for a bargain we stayed seated and started looking at the haul. We played with the ones that leant themselves to games, and made sure the rest were visible. A sprite tried to steal a glimmering marble, but Brennen scolded it and said that it was a gift from Felebrul of the Daoine Sidhe. The little faerie wandered away with a look of shame. Then they changed gravity again, but as soon as we were able to get off our backs we just resumed the same position. The Small Folk tried the same trick four more times, and we kept on ignoring them despite the abundance of scrapes and bruises. I was feeling a mix of suspicious relief over having not fallen at an unfortunate angle and excitement at the way the faeries were starting to flit closer to us when I heard a loud, whinnying shriek and distant hoofbeats started echoing through the labyrinth.
There's a good handful of things that could have been (not counting shapeshifters), but there was one thing that immediately leapt to the front of my mind. Contrary to popular belief, the original headless horseman is not a ghost at all, but rather a faerie. It's called a dullahan (or maybe the Dullahan; I don't know if it's a species or a single one-of-a-kind creature) and if the banshee is the doorbell of death then he's the delivery boy.
Fortunately, the Small Folk didn't run for the hills, so I got Brennen to make deals for safe passage as quickly as he could. The rushed deals meant he had to give up more of his stash and he wasn't happy about that, but I didn't really care. Did you know dullahans carry around whips made out of freaking spines? Because I do, and not just because I'm an expert who knows this stuff. I know it because one was riding along the ceiling as we closed the last deal.
And so we ran. A lot. We had a head start and I think he was having just as much trouble figuring the place out as we did. At one point it looked like he was right behind us until it turned out he was stuck in a loop. I can't say how huge a relief that was. But I still didn't feel safe until we found a cabin in the middle of a particularly large room. I swear the horseman's whip was an inch from my neck when we slammed the door.
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