Selene…
When she passed through the doorway following Sarah and Terrance into the Labyrinth, the air became uncomfortably dense.
The ventilation of the door opening for them caused all of the trapped air to rush towards them. The staleness and humidity of the stagnant air slammed into her like a wet blanket.
“Is it always like this? Why does the air feel so heavy?” Selene asked as she held her hand in front of her face to try and block the air from wafting in her face.
“Don’t be complaining now! Its only going to get worse from here on out,” Terrance said as he pushed forward.
“Remember how we said that the Labyrinth is a living thing? We were being very literal. This is what its like to stand in the first stratum of its respiratory system. What you’re feeling right now is its breathing at rest state. You’ll want to avoid drawing its awareness to your presence so soon, so try to avoid using as much of your magic in this stratum as you can. Try to rely on basic physical enhancement alone, and even then try to limit your release level significantly. If you want to make walking through this easier, then reinforce your body to help,” Sarah explained.
Once all three of them had passed through and entered the first stratum, the doors began to close behind them.
“Will they open back up?”
“Of course. You can force them open with your magic. The labyrinth isn’t designed to imprison you with locks and keys, its designed to trap you with its confusing and ever changing architecture. Terrance, mark the entrance because we’ll only be exploring the first stratum,” she ordered and he nodded.
Once he finished applying his mark, the three of them started their descent down a staircase until they reached a great arch with stone pillars propping it into place.
It reminded Selene of Lysandra’s Brotherhood Hall that she modeled after the stories Artemis told her of her temples from her homeland.
“I’m sensing a pattern here…,” Selene said as they passed through the arch.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Sarah asked.
“The letters on the entrance to the Labyrinth are in Greek, the prophecy on the Tower of Alken is written in Greek, Lysandra Vulcara’s brotherhood hall is based on a Greek Temple that was made in my mother’s honor, and Marcus can read all of this. I don’t think the Labyrinth’s Greek aesthetic in its architecture is a coincidence. He might know the origin of this structure and how it was built, but not how it came to this world,” Selene suggested.
“But even Ruvick doesn’t know its origin. Don’t you think you’re putting too much faith in what Marcus may or may not know?” Terrance asked.
“Maybe, but even if he didn’t know, I would trust him to be able to figure it out,” she said as they turned around a corner, and as they did, the corridor behind them started to shift as a wall began rising from the ground to block their way back.
Selene felt nervous seeing it for the first time, but Sarah assured her that this was normal procedure. So long as they maintained the anchor link, they would have no trouble returning to the surface, especially within the first stratum where the likelihood of a Chaos Bringer appearing this early is extremely low.
“If we had the Maze Key, would we be able to control the way the Labyrinth changes its paths?” Selene asked.
“Not only would you be able to control the routes in the Labyrinth, you would be able to feel instinctively what path to take. There is however, a theory that was proposed by Lord Azazel that by infusing the blessing of Wrath into the Labyrinth itself, you could manipulate a limited area around you and force open corridors or walls that were shut before. With a powerful enough soul, you could even control some of the upper stratums without the need for a Maze Key. Unfortunately, we haven’t bothered to test that theory to its fullest extent yet, so we are in the dark about that as well,” Sarah explained.
The three of them then passed through a long hallway until they reached a balcony over looked a cavern so vast that it could have contained an entire city within it, but instead, it was a massive expanse diverging paths and routes within the Labyrinth.
Selene then noticed that only a handful of paths that made up the Labyrinth had an actual roof on top of it.
“If this thing is designed to trap us by confusing us, why don’t we just jump on top of the paths and just travel that way?” she asked.
“Well we can, but that’s mainly for the early stratums. It does speed up the process for sure, but it also makes it easier for the Chaos Bringers to catch us and hunt us down. Most of them are very large, which makes it better from a tactical standpoint to use the Labyrinth to outmaneuver them. Once you reach the later stratums, things become far more difficult to navigate, and you won’t be able to just hop out of the path it sets for you and run over it to the end,” Sarah said.
While the two of them were distracted from talking, Terrance seemed to notice something as he raised his hand to stop them and said, “Hold on. Something’s not right…”
Sarah ran into him from behind and asked, “H-Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Do you feel that?”
She frowned as she stood next to him and tried to sense what he was feeling until her eyes widened.
“Dammit. Of all the days for a Chaos Bringer to show up in one of the early stratums,” she cursed.
“You mean there’s one here? I thought you said that the chances of one showing up in the first stratum are very small!” Selene exclaimed.
“Very small doesn’t mean none. The Labyrinth must have sensed your strength and decided to send one after you,” Sarah said.
“Shouldn’t be too much of an issue though. With this just being the first stratum, the effects of the two realms won’t effect any of us at all, and we should be able to take care of it with little to no issue. Selene, how about you take point and show us what you can do?”
“What, me? You’re trusting me to fight something like this all by myself?” Selene asked, not particularly concerned, more confused that they would give her that much responsibility so early.
“You helped take down Malthael. I’m sure you’ll do fine against a first stratum Chaos Bringer,” Terrance said.
“I’ll be sure to support you if it seems like you’re struggling,” Sarah said helpfully.
Selene took in a deep breath to prepare herself for battle as she unsheathed her two swords and said, “Alright then. Lets go!”
In spite of being thrown into a new environment and expected to fight against an enemy she wasn’t familiar with, she did not feel afraid.
Even as a deep fog rolled over the area, blanketed everything in a haze, and blurred her senses she felt like she could deal with it.
In fact, she was excited, invigorated with purpose.
She felt more than prepared enough to face whatever it was that might try to kill her.
Once the three of them rushed through one of the main corridors into the main section of the first stratum and came into a clearing, there it was.
Even with the thick fog, the massive creature was clearly visible as the haze seemed to be emitted from the creature itself.
The Chaos Bringer was like a deformed Centaur, much like the lower body of a horse and an upper body of a man’s torso.
However, the difference with this was that the lower body was entirely skeletal with red mist swirling around each bone. And instead of skeletal horse legs, it was two pairs of skeletal human legs, which didn’t make much sense to her.
And rather than a human torso on top, it looked more like a man fused with the head of a bull. The man-bull torso was flesh as he held a spear with tattered cloth clinging to the shaft.
The clattering of the skeletal feet hitting the stone floor of the Labyrinth caused Selene to shiver at the sound.
The Chaos Bringer then sniffed the air and turned to face her as she noticed its eye sockets were hollow with nothing but red smoke coming pouring out of them.
Selene then released a small fraction of her sunlight magic as she prepared to attack, but before she could take a step forward to attack, her flames suddenly changed into a cloud of fog.
What the-!
Before she could even blink, the tip of the Chaos Bringer’s spear slammed into the center of her armor at frightening speed.
Neither Sarah nor Terrance were fast enough to react and warn her, but luckily, they didn’t have to.
The spear tip shattered against her armor harmlessly and only caused her to stumble back because she was startled by the speed of which she was attacked.
Even the Chaos Bringer was shocked to see that its attack had no effect on her. It tilted its head in confusion as it flicked its right wrist and a scythe of fire, made from Selene’s own Sunlight Magic, appeared in its hand.
The flames grew brighter and brighter as it condensed the energy to hit her with everything it had managed to take from her.
Selene stared at the fog magic coming from her right side and thought for a moment.
So this beast hunts its prey by spreading fog over a large area to hinder its senses and track them by smell?
But how is it able to switch its magics with its target?
Selene then remembered one of her father’s stories about how her mother fought an Elder Dragon that could use Chaos Magic. It would alter the nature of its enemies’ magic to confuse and disrupt the flow of battle.
If this Chaos Bringer was able to use that same kind of power, then it sort of made sense to her that it would be able to swap the natures of their magic so it had something stronger to fight with.
Unfortunately for the creature, Selene had more than one form of magic to call upon.
The scythe of fire cleaved through the air and would have been a hairsbreadth away from severing her head from her torso had she not parried it aside with her mother’s Moonlight sword and the magic that paired with it.
The flaming scythe was scattered into harmless sparks as she shattered the flame magic apart.
Before the Chaos Bringer could react in time to launch a counter attack, Selene lunged forward with her mother’s magic and slashed her left blade through its skull.
“Crescent Divider!” Selene shouted, echoing her mother’s war cry and slitting the creature in two.
When she landed back on the ground, she turned to face Sarah and Terrance who were staring at her with slight worry on their faces as they weren’t sure how the fight was going to end.
But as soon as they witnessed her victory for certain, Sarah threw her arms up in celebration and shouted, “Nice work there!”
Terrance folded his arms and smiled approvingly and Selene, who wasn’t even hard of breath, said, “That wasn’t so bad.”
When the three of them returned to the surface, Sarah and her husband wished her a safe return home as they called it a day and said they would continue things tomorrow.
Of course, she felt excited that she finally found something to do that suited her, but when she was alone again, her thoughts returned to earlier.
She figured that she would have to tell Marcus the next time she saw him, but she wasn’t sure how to go about doing it.
She dreaded talking about it with him so soon, but when she got home, she let out a sigh of relief that he hadn’t returned home just yet.
That relief then turned to guilt as she felt like she was hiding something from him. She was determined to let him know what she learned as soon as she saw him again, but at the same time, she felt like she needed more time to think it over.
What would it mean for us if he decided to go home? Would he want to take me with him or leave me behind to return to the person he left behind on Terra?
When she collapsed on the bed they shared, she couldn’t help but stare at the ceiling thinking to herself in silence until she became too exhausted to wait for him to return and fell asleep.