05/11/2026: The Maze of Deserved Sorrows

The Hag’s Arms is a faded memory far behind them. The truck pulls up to the wall which contains a closed gate. 

The maze lies beyond.

They rest before entering. This is the sensible decision, the adult decision, the decision that every resource management framework and dungeoneering manual would endorse. It is also, in Malbolge, something of a gamble.

Night in the sixth layer of Hell is not restful. The hags are gone from their tavern— evicted from their own establishment by the combined chaos of a truck through the roof and the riot — but their influence lingers. They are invisible, pervasive, and doing the quiet work of preventing the party from sleep. Three members of the party wake poorly. Thunk and Kiki surface from sleep with that particular heaviness behind the eyes that signals the body has been somewhere unpleasant while the mind was supposed to be recuperating. Vali wakes worse, if that can be imagined — he went to sleep already fraying, and whatever the hag-touched dreams found in him found purchase. He leaves the bedroll with the gray, cotton-brained feeling of someone who has slept twice and rested not at all.

They enter the maze anyway. There is no option.

⚔

Other than dark and tall, the Maze of Deserved Sorrows does not announce itself. There is no gate, no threshold, no sign. The roads simply ends, and the door into the wall of the maze simply swings open.  The air is charged with arcane energy, rippling their clothing and hair.

Arman enters first. Two large doors face one another, both closed, both locked. Cautiously, he moves to the right and begins to pick the lock of the very large, very thick, very ancient door. Once it is open, they are confronted with two corridors that run side by side. Reklaw and Arman Slip into the left side followed by Fork, Vali, Thunk and Kiki, who head into the right.

⚔

Arman and Reklaw locate the devil before the devil locates them, which is how they prefer it. It is crouched in a junction ahead, with the stillness of something that is not sleeping but is waiting. The two friends communicate relevant information to each other without words: they will charge, attack and keep attacking until the devil ceases moving and they can get by it. 

They do not achieve surprise. The devil, whatever its other qualities, is not surprised. It Misty Steps with a sound like a problem relocating rather than resolving, and appears in the corridor they have just passed through, behind them. Unhelpfully, the devil is now between them and the rest of the party.

From its new position, it calls out.

But not to them.

⚔

Vali hears his name.

The devil begins with little fanfare, “I want to discuss the rooster.”

Vali blinks. “Rooster?”

“You consigned it to an eternity of service to Glaysa, a princess of Hell” the devil continues, with the mild interest of someone reviewing a case file that has already been decided. “A creature of artificial intelligence, you’d say. Granted sapience by a magical headband, not by nature. A chicken wearing borrowed cognition, so to speak.”

“Chickens,” Vali says, with the conviction of someone who has thought about this, “are stupid. The rooster was stupid before the headband. The headband made it talk. That’s not the same as making it worth protecting.”

The devil considers this. In the silence, the locked door does not creak or rattle. It simply waits.

“I am called Verum, and I am a truth teller in the Circle of the Nine Hells that punishes liars and frauds. You didn’t regret abandoning the rooster,” the devil says. This is not a question.

“No.”

“No guilt about this abandonment.”

“None.”

“But even an innocent if stupid creature — would one such as this deserve that fate? And this was a creature that could speak. It understood what was happening to it. It wore, as you note, a Headband of Intellect — which does not, by the way, confer intelligence so much as amplify what is already present.” A pause. “But you’ve made your argument.”

The bard nods. Vali has made his argument. The argument is coherent. The argument holds together. It is the argument of someone who has decided where they stand and has found the words to stand there convincingly.

The devil intones, “You have spoken your truth, harsh though it may seem.” 

The door swings open. 

In another life — a less honest one — it would not have. The devil does not elaborate on Vali’s answer. It does not need to. The door is the answer, and the door has been decided.

⚔

Kiki’s challenge is a door of a different kind, and her approach is mechanical rather than philosophical, which suits her considerably better.

The lock in the door out requires a key. The maze has not provided a key. What it has provided is raw materials: a pile of random seeming items lead and the implicit suggestion that a sufficiently creative artificer might combine them to create a key to open the door.

Kiki examines the problem. The problem examines her back.

She constructs the key from what she has — a candle stub, lockpicks modified and positioned, resin to hold it all together. The first attempt snaps the candle. She casts Mending. The candle reassembles itself with the slightly confused quality of an object that has been hastily repaired. She tries again. The candle snaps again. She casts Mending again. This continues for long enough that the exercise takes on the quality of a conversation between Kiki and the candle, neither of them entirely willing to concede.

Eventually, the lock turns.

Kiki opens the door with the quiet satisfaction of the designer of a solution that has been tested and found adequate.

⚔

Borark’s chamber is quieter than any of them.

The woman who steps out of the dark is not unexpected — not by Borark, and not, perhaps, by anyone who has been paying attention to the shape of his particular backstory. She is his mother. She has been dead for some time. And Boroark himself is the reason.

She does not attack him. She does not forgive him immediately. She does the harder thing, which is to look at him with the full accounting of what happened between them and ask, without theatrics, whether he understands what he did.

Borark understands what he did. During their last, catastrophic meeting, the one where he struck his mother down, told her to go to hell.

And here, in the Malbolge, the SIxth Level of Hell, his mother stands.

What Borark did was indeed awful. Now, in this chamber, with he feels guilt and the judgement of his new companions. He does not argue with his mother. He does not explain himself to her or to his companions. He offers his mother what remorse he feels — without performance, without negotiation, without considering that admitting guilt will make him seem weak or small.

His mother looks at him for a long moment.

The door behind her opens.

She does not say anything else. She doesn’t have to. The door is what she has to give him, and she gives it.

He leaves, calling over his shoulder, “I love you.”

The old woman does not answer him. The door closes between them, and Borark carries the silence with him into whatever the maze intends to show him next. It is not forgiveness. It is not absolution. It is something quieter and more durable than either: the knowledge that he said the true thing, at last, to the one person who needed to hear it.

The companions move deeper into the maze, unsure what challenges will present themselves next.