I slumped to the ground holding my wounded hand, squeezing tight to try and stem the flow of blood, finally giving in to the despair lurking in the back of my mind this whole time, finally allowing the tears to fall. I was going to die here.

Porridge was next to me, sniffing my hand, trying to lick at the wounds, and for a second I took some small comfort in it. Then the knight whistled, her ears pricked up, and she abandoned me to return to her master.

I felt the pressure shift, and something huge emerged around the corner. A long snout, white as stone, scales shifting and rippling like a rockfall. A shaggy coat of deep green moss sprouted from the gaps between the scales. It was like the moor itself had come alive.

The head forced itself around the angle of the corner, a milky white eye as big as my head with a sheep-like figure eight pupil that blinked at me, layers of nictitating membrane gliding across the surface with a series of sharp wet slaps.

“Mother,” the knight said, raising his arms. Moss sprouted from the gaps in his armour, blooming with unnatural speed. Porridge barked, started to back away, but the knight whistled again and she fell to heel.

The living earthslip shifted, the stone scales where its lips should be pulling back to reveal jagged shards of smoky grey quartz. A forked tongue flicked over them, and then it opened its maw and exhaled.

Instinct saved me. Once again I had fallen into that dreamlike state of observation, that feeling that everything was happening in slow motion, that I had seen it all before and knew everything in an instant before it occurred. As the beast the knight called Mother drew in its breath I did the same, sucking in air to the deepest parts of my lungs and clamping it down.

She exhaled, and the corridor filled with a thick cloud of shifting spores that roiled and churned in the lantern light. The knight opened his arms wide as though welcoming them, striding forward into the cloud and disappearing into the haze with Porridge at his side.

As the cloud of spores cascaded down the corridor I lost sight of the dragon, and it was like a spell was broken. I found my feet, and I ran.

7

This is the part of the tale that people always find the most unsatisfying.

“Where did you run?” they ask. “What did you see in the maze? What did it feel like when you finally found your way out?”

All I can do is shrug.

The memory of that final flight is fragmented, shattered into mirror shards that shift and fall at random. Some days I remember things that I later forget, or else that later memories directly contradict.

I think that we were down in that maze for only an hour or two. I was found on the moor, collapsed in a peat clough, the stumps of my missing fingers packed with moss I had torn from the ground beside me. When I didn’t return from escorting the knight by mid afternoon my dad gathered our neighbours and they set out across the moor to look for us. Night hadn’t even fallen when I was discovered.

I don’t remember my escape. I don’t remember packing my wounds. I don’t remember being found. I don’t remember the days immediately after being rescued. Sometimes I dream of it, but dreams can’t be trusted.

Eventually I was lucid enough to direct people to the maze’s entrance. I begged them not to go looking for the knight, tore my throat raw screaming that nobody should go down there, that they should seal that shaft up for good. Pour hot lead into it, make it so that nobody can ever go back in there.

They chose, instead, to seal it with a thick grate and good locks. And I was thankful for that, if I’m to be honest with you. Despite the horrors I had experienced my urge to explore never waned. I welcome the dreams when they come, relish the chance to walk beneath the earth and learn what secrets it held.

One day, when I’m older, when I’ve walked under different suns and delved into different cracks in the earth, when I’ve learned some of the things the knight never had the chance to teach me, I’ll come back, pry up that grate, and throw down a new rope.

The stumps of my fingers still ache from time to time. Sometimes, late in the year when the days grow short and the wind carries a chill that fights with the lingering heat of the dying summer, when the air is pregnant with the promise of coming rain, my scars grow white and begin to crack open. I’ve grown to love the feeling of it, the way the tiny shoots poke through my skin, the way the moss blooms and flowers on my flesh. In those moments I feel a connection with the land that nothing else can match.

On the nights when the moss takes root in my flesh, the dreams are more vivid than ever. I remember the knight, and Porridge, and the distant clang of ancient machinery powering whatever lies at the heart of the maze. Protecting it. Guarding it.

But mainly I remember Mother. And I remember that I was shaped by this land, this desolate place of moss and lichen, poison and fire. This place where dragons are buried.

END.

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