LeGrange's home was on the outskirts of Moorhaven. We arrived a little after midnight, which felt like the correct hour for something this foolhardy. The hedge maze was the first sign that Eversley LeGrange had more money than sense, or possibly exactly enough of both to know the difference didn't matter to him. I was looking down on it from the top of a high ridge. The maze surrounded the palatial manor on all sides and seemed incredibly complex. Even Kael couldn't get a grasp on the correct path from the distance we were at."Why would LeGrange have a hedgemaze?" I pondered aloud.Stevie chuckled. "It's a rich person thing. They usually use them for garden parties and fancy galas, to show off how much money they have. There are three of them in Moorhaven on the outskirts. One of them is the Emperor's, and that one can have you lost for days."Tessa pulled a face. "That's so stupid."
"I agree. Especially since he doesn't receive company here, which means – ""Which means it's probably used for security," I finished for her."Correct."I sat with that for a second. We had no choice but to go through the maze. Not only did we have to navigate it, but we would possibly have to also contend with guards. Or worse. I didn't relish the thought."Let's go over the plan one more time." Stevie said.
"Tessa," Stevie said, "you're on the maze. Once you're in, I want eyes on ambient mana. Old estates like this usually run a decorative flow through hedge mazes — feeds the plants, keeps them healthy without a gardener babysitting every inch of it. Follow the strongest thread and it should take you close enough to true center that you can work out the rest by sight."
"And if there's no flow?"
"Then we're improvising, and I'd rather not think about that part yet."
Tessa nodded, looking simultaneously terrified and delighted, which had become something of a default expression for her over the past two days.
"Kael. Dogs."
"Dogs," Kael confirmed, patting the satchel on his back, where SCRUB rode, folded up. "He's faster than anything they've got. He leads them on a chase, loops back around, we're through before they've caught their breath."
"You're sure he can outrun them?"
"I built him to outrun problems. This is just the first time the problem has legs. That's where his new upgrade comes in."
"Callister. The ring."
"I know."
Stevie had informed us that there were multiple wards around the grounds. Most of them were for scrying spells and magical assaults, but one was an alarm ward. The guards and staff all wore a ring that allowed them to pass through without triggering the alarm. Multiple people could pass through if they were touching the person with the ring. She was unable to acquire one.
"You knock him out clean. No noise, no struggle he can shout through. Take the ring, leave him somewhere he won't be found for at least twenty minutes." Stevie's eyes found mine, serious now. "Don't get creative. This part doesn't need creative."
"Understood."
"Alara. Once we're through the gate, the door guards are yours. Whatever you're planning—"
"I have something," Alara said, which was as much detail as she'd offered anyone all evening.
Stevie studied her for a moment, then apparently decided that was sufficient. "Good enough."
She looked around at the four of us, and for just a moment, something in her expression shifted — not quite warmth, but something adjacent to it.
"Once you're inside, you're on your own until you find the study. I'll be out here, watching what I can watch. You've got the earrings." She touched her own ear, where a small, unremarkable stud sat, and I reached up to confirm mine was still in place. "Anything goes wrong, you'll hear it from me first. Anything goes wrong on your end, say so. Don't be brave about it."
"Define wrong," Tessa said.
"You'll know it when it happens. Trust me."
Nobody found that especially comforting. I don't think it was meant to be.
"Alright." Stevie stood, brushing dust from her coat, already turning to make her way down the ridge toward the treeline that would give her the best vantage on the grounds below. "Let's go be stupid."
We crossed the outer treeline in a loose line, Kael's satchel bouncing gently with SCRUB's weight, and stopped at the maze's first entrance — a narrow gap in the hedge wall, dark enough inside that it looked less like a garden feature and more like a mouth. Tessa had already activated Mana Sight. As we entered, we could see what Stevie had been talking about: gently flowing lines of healthy mana flowing down the paths and around corners. I was glad the intel had been correct on that one, at least for now. My stomach dropped when I noticed another detail:The maze, I could see now, had a barrier. The same barrier dungeons had. We all noticed. No one spoke it out loud.The maze swallowed sound almost immediately. Outside, there had been wind, animals nearby, the ordinary noise of a night going about its business. In here, all of that dropped away, replaced by the stifling quiet of tall hedges pressing in on both sides — dense enough to block any real moonlight, dark enough that I found myself grateful for the glowing thread of mana Tessa had lit up for all of us to see.
"This way," she whispered, already moving, following the mana. I noticed that every turn or bend we saw had the trail through it, in every direction, but Tessa moved with a certainty that would have looked reckless if we didn't know how skilled she was
The paths themselves were disorienting even without the darkness — narrow gravel walkways bending at angles that seemed designed specifically to make you doubt your own sense of direction, dead ends branching off every few turns that led nowhere except back to where you'd started. Nobody wandered in here by accident and found anything except confusion.
Kael kept close behind me, one hand resting on the satchel at his back, murmuring something under his breath that might have been reassurance to SCRUB or might have just been nerves given voice.
Twice, the mana-thread forked, and both times Tessa paused only long enough to squint at the two options before choosing without hesitation — the stronger flow, she explained quietly, always led closer to the maze's heart, where whatever fed this whole elaborate garden must have originated.
We moved quickly. Nobody spoke above a whisper. Somewhere beyond the hedges, faint and distant, I thought I heard a dog bark once, and felt every muscle in my body go tight before the sound faded and didn't return.As Tessa made to take a right-hand turn around a corner, I reached out a hand to stop her. I had a bad feeling. She looked at me, confused, until my concern was vindicated by a low growl nearby. It definitely was not a dog.I pulled Tessa behind me and motioned for the group to back up. I reached into the supply pack that I had assembled for this excursion and brought out a hand mirror. I approached the hedge corner carefully, angling the glass above me so I could see around the corner.
The mirror caught it a heartbeat before I understood what I was looking at.
It was pale — not white exactly, more the color of something that had never once seen daylight, fur so pale it seemed to glow faintly against the dark hedges. Built like a great cat, low and powerful through the shoulders, a long tail coiling behind it with a restless, patient motion. Its mane didn't sit still the way fur should. It drifted, strand by strand, like it was underwater, or like the air around the creature simply didn't apply the same rules to it that it applied to everything else.
Where its face should have been, there was nothing. No eyes. No mouth. Just a smooth, blank curve of pale fur where a face belonged, ears pricked forward on either side of an absence that was somehow more unsettling than any expression could have been.
It wasn't looking at us. It couldn't have been, not with anything I could identify as looking. But its head was turned in our direction, utterly still, the mane continuing its slow, underwater drift, and I understood with total certainty that it knew exactly where we were.
I lowered the mirror very, very slowly.
"Dungeon creature," I breathed, barely audible. "Has to be. Nothing natural looks like that."
Kael's face had gone the color of old paper. "He's got one of those as a garden feature?"
"Not a garden feature." I thought of the case Stevie had described, the paranoia built into every layer of this place. "A guard."
The thing hadn't moved. It didn't need to, I realized. It was waiting to see if we'd be stupid enough to come around the corner ourselves.
I pressed two fingers to my ear.
"Stevie." I kept my voice as close to silent as I could manage. "We've got a problem. Something in the maze. Not a dog."
Her voice came back immediately, low and sharp. "Describe it."
"Big cat. Pale, almost white. No face. Mane moves like it's underwater."
The silence on the other end lasted a beat too long.
"You're sure about the face?" She finally asked.
"There isn't one. Just smooth fur where it should be."
"That's a Pale Stalker." Something in her tone had shifted, gone flatter, more careful. "Dungeon creature. Shouldn't be anywhere near a private estate. LeGrange must have had it brought in and tamed, or as close to tamed as something like that gets."
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
"Can we kill it?"
"Theoretically. I've seen it done exactly once." A pause. "Uld put one down with brute force. Hit it until it stopped being a problem. Took him longer than it should have, and he's built like a small building. I don't know a clean way to do it. I don't know its weaknesses. Nobody's studied these things closely enough to write anything useful down.Those that try get mauled to death pretty quickly."
Tessa's face had gone pale in a way that had nothing to do with moonlight. "So we can't fight it."
"Not the way Uld did, no," I murmured back to her, then to Stevie. "What do we do?"
"Don't fight it," Stevie said. "You don't have the muscle for a brawl and you don't have information for anything smarter. Find another way around.""There is no other way around. It's on a corner with no other paths until further down.""Then improvise. I'm not there to assess the situation."
I looked at the mirror still in my hand, then at the blank, drifting shape waiting, patient and faceless around the corner.
"Understood."The others were looking at me worriedly. I scrambled for a plan.
"Sound," I whispered. "It's got no eyes. No face at all. What if it hunts by sound?"
Kael's hand was already moving toward his pocket before I finished the sentence. "The charm. If it's tracking vibration or noise instead of sight—"
"Only one way to find out."
He pulled the cord over his head and pressed the small stone at its center. The air around us went strange — dead silent. It was disorienting; I could see Tessa's mouth moving and heard nothing at all.
Kael pointed at himself, then at the corner, then made a small, questioning gesture with both hands. I understood. Someone had to test it, and it had to be someone who could move fast if it went wrong.
I pointed at myself instead.
He didn't argue. There wasn't time to.
I took the charm from him, felt the strange muffled weight of it settle around my neck, and stepped toward the corner.
The Pale Stalker hadn't moved. It was still there, mane drifting in that slow, wrong current, blank face angled precisely toward where we'd been standing a moment ago.
I took a breath I couldn't hear myself take, and stepped into the open path directly in front of it.
Nothing happened.
The creature's head didn't turn. Its posture didn't shift. It stayed exactly where it was, patient and still, tracking a sound that wasn't there anymore because there wasn't any sound at all.
I let out a breath, slow and controlled, and took a step forward. Nothing. Another step. The creature remained unmoving. A few more steps and I stood within inches of the thing. I could see every detail of its "face" now. Rather, it was more of a lack of detail. Where there should have at least been the texture of flesh or fur there was only smooth white. It almost didn't look like a physical surface at all. The face then gave way to relatively normal physical features. My stomach turned.I stood there for several seconds before carefully stepping backwards. I was calculating every possible scenario in which this could go wrong. If it moved, I wasn't sure if I could use Night Step. Did the spell require the sound of the incantation? I couldn't be sure. I'd used in unintentionally before, without the words, but those times were involuntary in moments of panic. I had no idea how to make that happen intentionally, or if I even could.
I stepped all the way back to the group and gestured for them to follow. Tessa went white-knuckled the entire way past it. Kael actually closed his eyes for the last few feet, apparently deciding he'd rather not see it up close if he didn't have to.
By the time we were all clear, well past the bend and moving again, I felt the charm's silence drop, and the world came rushing back in — my own breathing suddenly loud in my ears, Tessa's whispered, relieved swearing, the faint, distant sound of a dog barking somewhere else in the grounds.
"That was insane," Tessa whispered.
"That was Kael," I said. "Good work."
Kael was turning something over. "Apparently the charm only works for two minutes. I didn't calculate for this.""Two minutes was what we needed," I assured him.
"Yeah…"
After our narrow escape from the Pale Stalker, the next step of our journey into the maze could've taken twenty minutes or six hours. We were unsure.The path widened unexpectedly, opening into a small, circular clearing with an ornamental fountain at its center — dry, cracked, clearly decorative rather than functional, the kind of thing a gardener would point out proudly to guests who never actually came here. "Is he mocking us?" I wondered aloud.There were two corridors leading out of the small space. One made two turns and came to a dead end, so we retraced our steps.The other was a long straightaway, and I could not see a corner or turn from where I stood. What I could see was that the hedges in this stretch were not smooth, meticulously trimmed hedges, but wild, thorny, and sharp. Dangerously so."Don't touch the walls," I warned."Thanks, Eagle Eye," Alara smirked. Her ribbing, these days, was almost always clearly joking, so I returned the smile briefly.I led the walk down. It took even longer than I had thought it would. We reached what I had believed to be the halfway point to find we still could not see an end to the path. That didn't make sense."An illusion?" Tessa posited."Or magical replication," Kael responded.As we mulled over the possibilities, we were all apparently somewhat distracted while walking. "Stop! Now!" Alara snapped suddenly from behind us.It took me a second to process what she said and I took another step. I was filled with dread as I heard a muffled click! from beneath the gravel underfoot.In the distance, I saw two sections of hedge, opposite each other, smash violently together in the center of the walkway. Before they even had a chance to recede, another, closer pair of hedges did the same. "Trap!" Alara yelled.The colliding hedge segments were rapidly chaining toward us. I estimated we had maybe ten seconds.We all snapped to our senses and began to check our surroundings.Ten."Trap's magical," Alara spoke quickly.
Nine."All traps still have a mechanism," Kael responded, hurriedly but without panic.I saw that the hedges were doing the same thing on the other side of us. There was no running.
Eight.I watched both their eyes dart about them.Seven."THERE!" Tessa shouted, pointing to a point on the hedge, twenty feet back the way we had come, where a glowing ball of mana sat deep inside one of the hedges.Six.Alara gave it half a glance. "Mana contained in a mechanism!""Got it!" Kael pulled the folded-up SCRUB from his back.Five.Getting his legs under him, SCRUB whirred to life, beeping innocently. His head swiveled toward the sound of violently shifting fauna, and he let out a shriek that would have been hilarious at literally any other time.
Four."SCRUB! The mana device in the hedge! Disable it!""BEEP! BOOP BEEP!"SCRUB disappeared into the hedge.Three.The hedges were now colliding terrifyingly close. I bit my lip nervously.Two."Come on SCRUB…" Kael murmured nervously.We were done for.One.I could hear the hedges on either side of us groaning before I saw the movement. Then a lurching, snapping sound as the violent foliage began to launch. I watched it almost in slow motion before closing my eyes, unable to watch it further.A long silence.Nothing.A triumphant beeping from scrub, somewhere in the hedge.I opened my eyes to find a wall of thorns a mere few inches from my face. The others were similarly close to it.Then the walls began to recede slowly."Good boy, SCRUB," Kael sighed in relief."Beeb-boop-boop-brrtttt.""Good call, buddy. Stay right there for now."None of us moved. "With a trail this long, there's bound to be more triggers. The fact that we didn't hit one sooner is a miracle." He looked to Alara. "Nice catch on that."She nodded. "Sure. Why wasn't SCRUB out already?""This is his first re-deployment…I'm worried…" Kael said, embarrassedShe seemed to accept that. "He'll be fine Kael. We need him." "Yeah…"All of us stayed right where we stood, as Kael instructed SCRUB on the next steps. Ground scans, trigger identification, disarmament. It took a long time, but we were eventually able to keep moving.The maze row had not, in fact, been an illusion. It was just that long. We eventually reached a corner and were dismayed to find an equally long switchback as our only recourse.So much for progress.