The Maze

 

The Maze

A broken expanse of stone stretching to the horizon, cut by shallow shadows and washed in the same sun-bleached limestone and reds as everything else. There are no peaks to catch the eye, no towering walls to announce themselves. It feels open. Almost simple.

Until you begin to understand the scale.

What seemed like faint lines are not lines at all, but chasms. What looked like gentle undulation resolves into a violent fracturing of the earth, as if the ground has been shattered and then left exactly as it fell. The closer your gaze lingers, the more the terrain refuses to settle into anything coherent.

There is no single canyon. There are thousands.

They fold into one another, overlap, double back, and disappear. Walls rise and fall without pattern. Pathways seem to promise direction, then narrow, twist, and vanish into stone. Light pools in strange pockets, leaving entire corridors in shadow even under the open sky.

It is not a place you can hold in your mind. It resists mapping.

The people who named it The Maze were not being poetic. They were being literal.

Down within it, the sky becomes a thin ribbon overhead, shifting with every turn. Sound dies quickly, swallowed by the stone. Even the wind seems uncertain, moving in brief, confused currents that never quite resolve into direction.

And always the oppressive heat and the dry, parched air.  No water, nothing grows, other than the occasional hearty cactus. 

The air does not stir, except for the Black Wind that comes at sunset and sunrise, stealing memories and power. 

Distances lie. A passage that looks like a hundred paces stretches into miles. A ridge that seems close becomes unreachable without circling through corridors that feel… intentional. Not designed, exactly, but shaped in a way that suggests the land is not indifferent to movement.

That it guides, or perhaps misguides. And then there is the silence

Not the quiet of absence, but the quiet of containment. As if something vast has been pressed down and sealed beneath the stone, and the weight of it holds the world in place.

Standing above it, you can almost convince yourself it is just geology. Time and erosion. The slow, patient work of water and wind.

But once you descended, there was a moment where the mind hesitated.

Because the Maze does not feel like something you enter.

It feels like something that closes behind you

But still, based on the map provided to you by the Awakened Ushabti this is the best of bad options.

"This map shows the main canyons of the necropolis and many but not all of the smaller offshoots. The priests say the main canyons were once mighty rivers, but now the whole land is dry and without water, save for a very few locations (such as this temple). This is less of a hindrance than you might think, for one such as your servant requires no food nor drink, and neither do the Dead. However, for the living, it can be a problem. 

The main canyons are large and wide, and have good roads leading toward the pyramid of the Black Sun, where The Watcher at the Gates dwells. Most of the tombs and catacombs can be found along these routes. However, it is along the roads that the armies of the dead are most common, as they war with one another for control. For the Watcher at the Gates has withdrawn his hand, and the dead and worse stir all along the Necropolis. Chief among them are

• Nephren-Ka, the Black Pharaoh, holds the central canyons with his army of undead and dark priests. You have already faced his hordes and declined to fight your way through miles of them.
• The Empress Dowager Ahmose-Ishtar holds the northwest; the Ushabti knew little of her other than her hordes of undead are possibly even larger than the Black Pharaoh's.
• The Faceless Princess to the northeast seems even stranger. No army of undead there but unquiet spirits and restless ghosts. All the Ushabti revealed was that she and her handmaidens were damned and nameless and "stole the names" of those unfortunate enough to encounter them.
• Roth and Varcenaazx, the undead dragon and his rider bar the skies. The shadows of the Ancient Red Dragon and the legendary hero who slew it, facing them on their home turf seemed unwise. 

Braving the Maze seemed the wiser choice. Of course that route also meant possibly encountering The Burning Man. The Ushbati did not know who he was originally- ruler, warrior, priest; his origin was lost to time. As was what he did to so anger the gods, or even what god he angered- but all know his sentence. To burn eternally, never quenching, never dying, cursed to wander the sands in despair and agony until the world ends. 

He is quite mad; the Ushabti knew that much. No one knows if the destruction he leaves in his wake is intentional or if he is even aware of it. But he became such a hazard that Anubis himself bound him and locked him away in the depths of Hamunaptra. And even the dark god cannot always keep him restrained; he occasionally breaks his chains, and when he does, he leaves chaos in his wake.

Still a route must be chosen and you chose this one, following the footsteps of The Red Prince (Dakir's father), toward the great pyramid of Anubis, the Pyramid of the Black Sun