05/18/2026: More Tests

The Maze simply continues — corridor by corridor, door by door, each turning in on what the traveler least wants to examine. This is, by design, the point. The party is scattered, exhausted, and negotiating with closed and frequently locked doors.

Kiki’s movement through the maze is slow, her small clawed feet working harder than they should have to. She crouches before the next locked door and applies her thieves’ tools, but her hands tremble with fatigue. The door remains stubbornly locked.

Arman, the other of the party’s rogues, approaches. His reliable talent, he explains, should make this simple. He is, by his own assessment, incapable of failure.

He inserts the first pick. It becomes lodged in the lock. Shrugging, he inserts a second. It also jams. He shakes his head, disbelieving. A third follows, and tangles with the others.

Improbably, all three of his thieves’ tools are now jammed in the mechanism and cannot be removed. They bristle like spines, hopelessly stuck in the lock.

The door pops open nonetheless.

“I no longer have thieves’ tools,” Arman announces, sadly.

⚔

To the west of the central corridor, Reklaw finds the statue.

It is a feline figure — the size of a large cheetah — seated on its haunches on a low plinth, mouth slightly open, forked tongue visible, tail curled behind it. Its eyes glow. The glow is arcane in an uncomfortable sense: it radiates outward in waves that have a distinctly vinegary quality in the back of the throat. Reklaw, standing before it, can feel the strange emanations from it.

He sincerely hopes they do not carry any negative effects.

Reklaw walks around the statue, examines the plinth, and discovers a door cunningly hidden on one side, set beneath the statue’s rear end.

The door is locked. Reklaw elects to kick it open.

It bangs open. Inside the plinth, set on a small shelf and wobbling from the impact, is a porcelain vase.

The vase looks expensive. It is also tipping toward the packed earth floor.

Reklaw catches it mere inches from disaster on his fingertips. Something rattles within the vase. The monk peers down its neck. At the bottom wobbles a small red egg, covered in scales like a fish, slightly smaller than a chicken’s egg, and warm to the touch.

Egg and vase both go into his pack.

Behind him, the statue’s eyes dim. The corridor smells faintly less vinegary.

⚔

Arman, passing through a door — the small spray of broken lockpicks springing from the keyhole in his wake — finds another feline statue looming from the darkness to the south. Someone has clearly already been here; whatever the plinth contained is gone. He continues on his way, flips a coin at the next junction, and goes south.

⚔

Reklaw shows Kiki the egg. She squints at it.

“It’s an egg,” she reports. “It’s red.”

“Thank you,” says Reklaw. This is not helpful information.

⚔

Arman arrives at this moment, having jogged through the corridor to catch up. He inspects the egg with the air of someone who expects to be more useful than the previous consultant.

“It looks fiendish in nature. Something that may contain a devil.”

“That’s very helpful,” Reklaw says, dryly.

Arman pushes past him and continues down the corridor. In doing so, he jostles Reklaw. The egg lurches from the monk’s hands. Reklaw catches it two inches from the floor — again — but this time a small fissure appears across its surface, a hairline crack tracing from the rounded top halfway down one side.

Through the crack, visible only to Kiki who is still watching: two tiny claws, working at the break from the inside.

By the time anyone else’s attention returns to it, the claws are gone. The inside of the egg is simply empty, visible through the crack like a window into a hollow room.

“Invisible?” Reklaw asks. “Or something else?”

No one answers. The corridor offers nothing. The question travels with them.

⚔

Meanwhile, Vali and Borark discover that their section of the Maze has a dead end.

In frustration, Borark punches the wall, damaging his hand. The wall is unmoved. He switches to his greataxe and strikes it with full rage. The stone masonry absorbs this with the particular indifference of infernal architecture encountering a barbarian.

Vali, who has a different idea, polymorphs into a giant mole.

He digs beneath the wall and emerges on the other side into a hallway extending both north and south. Borark follows through the tunnel. The dead end, conceptually, is no longer a problem.

⚔

In the eastern branch, the corridor bends toward Thunk’s challenge.

Thunk arrives to find Reklaw already standing before a door. Nearby, hanging upside down by a rope over a vat of acid, is his once friend, but now dire enemy, Clunk. He is gagged and struggling. The rope binding his ankles lowers him by fractions with each passing moment toward the bubbling liquid.

As Thunk stands in this space, glowing letters appear on the side of the vat:

Speak the name of the one you choose to help. Then speak the name of the one you failed. Only one guess. One answer, and you may leave. The other answer, and you remain here for all time. In the dark.

Reklaw, who has already had an eventful turn, suggests that he might paint a lid to cover the acid vat using his Nolzur’s Marvelous Pigments. Clunk continues to descend. Thunk deliberates, but he is running out of time.

The challenge, Thunk realizes, is not actually a puzzle. It is a reckoning. Two names. The one you would help. The one you failed.

Clunk is dangling in front of him. Clunk is also someone Thunk once knew, then forgot, then remembered only poorly — the Cave of Lost Things having taken most of what he felt for his dear friend. He cannot currently recall that he loves him.

“Clunk,” Thunk says. “And also Clunk.”

The acid and the image of Clunk dissolve. The door at the end of the corridor swings open.

“I’m acknowledging my own faults,” Thunk notes. “Not many people can do that.”

This is correct.

⚔

In the western corridor, Reklaw stands before another door bearing glowing letters:

Paint the Guardian to open the door. What you make, you must face.

The Nolzur’s Marvelous Pigments are already in his hands.

His first attempt: a skeleton. It materializes, turns to the door, grabs the handle, and fails to open it — the lock requires more strength than the skeleton can reliably apply. The skeleton turns to Reklaw instead and attacks. The monk deflects it, lands a critical strike, and reduces it to clattering bones and dust before it can attempt a second swing.

The door remains stubbornly shut. The pigments need time to replenish.

Thunk, who has just arrived, turns to the side helpfully and holds still.

“You think I can open a door?” Thunk says, when Reklaw explains what he needs.

“Yes,” says Reklaw. “I have confidence in you.”

“I’m flattered,” says Thunk. “You may paint me.”

A Thunk-shaped figure emerges from the pigments: bugbear proportions, mace, the full complement of cleric features. It turns to the door. The keyhole, shaped like a bugbear’s hand, yields immediately. The door swings open.

Then the painted Thunk turns to Reklaw.

The pair face off. The painted Thunk’s Harm spell nearly drops the monk where he stands — only his relentless endurance keeps him upright. Reklaw answers with a stunning strike. The painted Thunk’s eyes roll upward, dazed but still standing, and the two of them remain locked in the corridor, neither finished with the other yet.

⚔

Deeper in the Maze, Vali — still enlarged, still a mole, moving through the corridors with the particular dignity of a large burrowing mammal in an infernal labyrinth — finds another cat statue.

This one still glows, eyes and tail aimed at the ceiling. He finds the door in its plinth, locks it, tunnels beneath, and emerges to catch the tumbling vase before it hits the ground.

Within: a tiny blue egg, scale-covered, rattling gently inside the glass.

He tucks it carefully into his pack alongside the vase.

Two eggs now, in two vases — one red, one blue, both warm, both unidentified. Neither of them hatched. One of them, perhaps, already empty.

The Maze continues south, and gives nothing away.