I stumbled on this while going through old journals a little while back. It’s one of my biggest regrets that I didn’t write nearly as many short stories as I could have, because I feel like I could have been well suited for that kind of thing. It’s also the sort of activity that sets you up for better and better writing as a writer.

Writing short fiction is kind of the barometer of whether you can make it as a writer when you’re in the early stages: it’s manageable, and it’s a way for you to get your name out there, through getting added to a variety of publications.

In any case, seeing this short story I’d written, years before The Cherale and even before Polite Conversation, took my breath away. Not because I think it’s particularly good or anything (I’m a writer, babe, I don’t think any of my writing is any good), but because it’s kind of like proof that I actually did write fiction. Which is silly: I wrote a 300+ page manuscript back in 2015, for Fumes, which still remains my white whale and I promise to harpoon that bad boy someday.

But I think that I’m sharing this now because I think it deserves to be paid some respect. I wrote it, after all, and while it could dwell in digits on a drive, I’d rather deliver it to others and pay homage to it for giving me a chance at this Great Dream I’ve had all these years.

The Maze is a nod to horror but in a more fantasy setting, and also happens to have come out of something of an obsession I was developing around that time. Living in Buckingham at the time, just 20 minutes down the road from Milton Keynes, itself a kind of bizarre, modern maze, offered ample opportunity at the various collections of mazes on display in England. In fact, there was a walking path maze right near where I worked at Mercedes-Benz, the Willen Lake Labyrinth.

Labyrinths are a fascinating symbol and metaphor for the human journey. They’re rich with history and they also happen to be a visual symbol that doubles as a puzzle, a riddle. I joke that I’m like a vampire who can’t stop themselves from counting when it comes to me happening upon a puzzle. I just can’t help myself.

I guess it’s that same “I can’t help myself” I’ve had with writing…

At any rate, here’s The Maze.

He was lost.

But that was the point. The dirt and the dead grass were just as dismal as the grey, dominating walls that connected the dark concrete above to the sand below.

He was lost, and he was lost for the third day now.

He had entered like the rest of them had entered. With naive hope, bold confidence, stoic pride. Now he was the last of them, and he would soon die like the rest of them.

They had listened to the stories, of course. They had listened to the words exchanged over muddy drinks in the hushed corners of the ale house. They had eschewed their brethren’s coinage, waving their hand emphatically, buying round after late night round. They were plying with booze and coin and charisma for the clues. The clues which might reveal the heart of the maze.

It was a leviathan. It bled molten metal, it breathed smoke, it hungered for flesh, it rended flesh and turned its inhabitants insane. It revealed itself like an onion, but it was thought to be infinite.

These were the initial tales, and the adventurers had patiently waited them out, nodding thoughtfully as though this was the first time they had heard such tales. In truth these were the same tales told over many kingdoms.

They persevered. Round after round.

Round after round.

Soon the stars came out, a clear night sky shining happily from the Mother’s Moon and Cyrax, smiling brightly and wickedly on the City below.

Another round.

Soon the stories became more sobering, less fantastic and more subdued. Soon the attempts to truly map out the maze were talked about.

The maze had existed long before the city. Long before the first People who had come to make the city. Long, long before the first People had existed. Before that, was another race, another kind, a kind that had not walked this plane in thousands of years.

Before that, there were gods, at least to these people now. They had built many great empires and lost even more in the millenium that stretched out their power to make it weak and crumble. In the wake of that, few things still existed. One of them was the City, and with it, the Maze.

As the rounds stretched on, and the tongues wagged, the people in the tavern gathered round and before he knew it, there was a gathering of people listening to how the many, many heroes and travelers before had attempted to unlock the secrets of the Maze.

There were of course the valiant heroes who entered with their sole reliance on their wits and determination, and their courageous bones filled the front steppes of the Maze’s inner halls.

There were the more established scholars who had worked in groups, poring over papyrus and parchment, scribbling down their explorations before finding themselves victims of the labyrinth’s many traps and pitfalls.

There were the legendary ones, few and far between, who had some hold of magic and equally sharp of mind. Some had brought twine in a ball that they kept on a pouch as they leapt and vaulted among the Maze’s inner secrets. Their bones were admirably deep in the Maze, but all became eternal residents.

There were also the Pilgrims, who deliberately sauntered into the Maze, proud of their fate to be met with the embrace of the inner machinations. These bones were never seen, but they equally never emerged.

The attempts had thinned, and indeed the land had grown dim of personalities. What few could traipse the land were consistently threatened by the reality of the Maze, which called to all legendary warriors, sorcerers, rogues, and bards alike. It begged for blood and flesh, and still its voracious appetite slowly dissipated, along with the population of so-called ‘heroes’.

Ever since the Great War, however, the vagabond groups of heroes and travellers had swelled, and while the reputation of the Maze grew still greater, its call was ever more haunting. More came to its chasmic maw, nearly as many turned away.

The few who stayed had done so due to the myth. The myth had lured almost all beforehand. The mountains of skulls that adorned the interior of the Maze were all the product of the myth, the legend, of the Peacock.

It was a loose-lipped legend, one that had become so brazen in its embellishments it had become the subject of entire epics that most in the City could recite entire passages of, if not the entirety of its haunting verses.

It spoke of the nightmarish fury that lay dormant in the Maze. It was a power, a seething light that would evoke agony and enslave the Peoples of the Land. And they who could happen upon and activate the light could either use this power, or expunge it forever.

There was more. There was also tell of the myriad charms, a cornucopia of vivid evocations and wondrous enchantments. There was talk of infinite lives, infinite power, and infinite sight. There were rumours of endless flight, unlimited strength, and the transmutation of self. It was an assortment of lures and proud temptations which attracted the best and worst and everyone in between, much like the Peacock who adorned the various outer rims of the Maze.

In this Land, there were those who would stop at nothing to dissolve the power and either transubstantiate into oblivion or bend its will.

There were the kings who had exhausted entire enslaved armies to drilling and burrowing through the Maze. Where the impregnable walls failed, the vicious pitfalls obliterated men in the torrents of molten rivers, geysers of acid, or the choking grips of charring smoke. And of course there were those who either entered the Maze or ran away, to seek death of their own volition. These Kings either exhausted their kingdoms, or died old from the effort, and even a handful who met their own fate in the void of the Maze.

There were the emperors who sought to choke the Maze with swarms of criminals, pilgrims, and fanatics, outcasts and vagabonds, homeless and forgotten masses, screaming and panicked hordes engorging the Maze, all in an effort to gum up its works and satiate its appetite, that they may enter unmolested. The Maze proved eternally ravenous, and these emperors soon commanded their own armies in an effort to bridge the gap, but soon lost all of their empire to the organs of the labyrinth.

As they sat and spoke, these stories were turned over and over, graveyard robbing old tales and indulging fantasies. The booze flowed, and loose lips told of some who had almost made it to the end.

They began to sadly tell of their own hypotheses of how one could defeat the Maze. These old men and women spoke of their own inability to carry through these suggestions, as they had grown enfeebled with wearying age and poxy.

The new heroes had assembled all their knowledge, and strategised. A common goal to a common Few, who named themselves such, and asked for the blessing of God and entered the Maze.

And now he knew. He knew it was utterly hopeless. The inside of the Maze proved as disastrous as one could ever imagine. He had once sat spellbound as an old rabbi had explained their concept of Hell. And he knew now that anything that had been spoken of at that fireside all those years ago described this twisted, infernal Void.

He had survived longer than most. He had passed the booby trapped Main Hall which went on for what seemed like ages, covered in the dusty bones and smeared entrails of tens of thousands, the swinging scythes still sharp after all these millennia, and still able to pick off one of the Few. They continued past bridges and through tunnels and up winding passages. All the time, the crafty devices and malicious treacheries of the Maze’s machinations brought promises of sudden and excruciating death.

They had descended into what could only be known as The Void. It was Night Eternal, and the horrors that emerged to greet the Few were nightmares made reality. Even less made it past the ghouls and spirits that guarded this passage.

And then of course they were in the Hall of Bones. Great mountains of skulls touched colossal ceilings, while molten magma swirled through dried granite. Golems, anointed with viscera and bone fragments, stalked the halls of bones, dragging ancient swords that sparked along the flinty earth of the barren tomb. None of the Few were safe from the Golems, great stone beasts who delighted only in engorging the Hall with more sacrifice.

He had made it through all of this, though not without losing much of the rest of the Few. Those lucky Few, he thought. He wished for death now, and knew he would only find the agonising temptation in this place, just another realm inside a realm. For he knew now that passing the threshold of the Maze’s entrance transported you into a different plane. One that stole your soul and delighted in your torment.

He was in a cold place now, stone walls and blue faeirie lights chilling him to his core. As a coldness set his teeth to chattering, he could hear its echoes moving down infinite halls, and still he kept moving, trying to avoid death at this stage. He had been in this place for what seemed like a lifetime, and as he moved towards yet another blackness that began to steal the last hints of life from him, he understood now that the cruelest torment in all this was that he had chosen this.

Outside of the Maze, the old men and women of the tavern sat at their tables. They laughed and rolled dice. They cheersed and cursed and sang old songs. Some pulled sleeves back and revealed old tattoos made millennia ago. They were runes of an infernal script long ago forgotten. They smiled and their features turned lurid and wicked.

They were the keepers of the Maze, and they would keep it fed as long as it existed.

The Maze, from the journals, 2017.

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