Lucas took a bite of savoury apple as he made his way down a dark corridor, his faithful feline companion trotting along at his side, an ever-present shadow. Jamie had finally deigned to join him on his excursions once it became clear he could push back the foliage effortlessly. The cat had been hesitant at first, almost skittish, but had calmed down over time.

  His vitality hung in a spherical orb around him, keeping away any plants. Their aggression had lessened since his near-death experience, but he wasn’t feeling like taking any chances. Even if keeping this up made him feel like his soul was constantly out of breath.

  Beats having the breath wrung from my lungs by branches as strong as steel. I’ll endure this happily.

  Even now, with a nominal assurance of safety, the memory elicited a swooping feeling in his stomach.

  The area surrounding the domed hall was a veritable labyrinth. Even with the near-clairvoyant vision granted to him by piggybacking on the vitality flowing through the mass of plants, it was way too easy to get turned around. The size of the complex was just too big to wrap his head around, so he’d settled for exploring the place one section at a time, not confident enough in his magic to stray too far from the safety of the circle yet.

  So far, he’d checked all of the rooms immediately surrounding the domed hall, as well as gotten a decent look at the domed hall itself. With his ability to clear away plants little greater than five metres in all directions, it was impossible to get a full, unobscured view of the grand mural painted onto the floor; the foliage would grow back in his wake, and he couldn’t clear the whole room anywhere near fast enough. But a methodical approach walking back and forth across the hall over the course of a day had given him a decent mental image.

  Unfortunately, even with plenty of time to mull it over, he still had no idea what it was meant to be.

  “What do you think, Jamie?” he muttered.

  The cat gave no answer. Didn’t even look at him, the stuck up little furball.

  “I don’t know either,” Lucas said. “It’s beautiful, though.”

  Multiple curving columns radiated out from the circle of safety at the centre of the room, forming something that looked like a spiral galaxy that stretched across the entire floor, right up to the walls. Each arm was elaborately designed, full of densely packed symbols, hieroglyphs, and pictograms. Scripts flanked and occasionally weaved through each arm. It was incredibly intricate, and somehow all flowed in a way that pinged at his memory.

  It was a work of art as impressive as anything he’d seen, the sheer scale of it boggling his mind when he thought about how much effort it must have taken. The floor space was probably thrice as large as a football pitch. Humans could do incredible things, when they wanted to.

  And it looked familiar.

  Which makes no sense. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m pretty certain of that.

  But it was still niggling at him like a splinter in his toe. He’d definitely remember encountering a giant magical array. Because that was what it obviously was, though its purpose was unclear. He had theories, but… no way to verify anything right now.

  Ultimately, sating his curiosity had only left him with more mysteries.

  Resolving to come back to that later, he got started on delving deeper into the maze, picking a direction and exploring a zone in that area, always making sure he knew where he was in relation to his nominal base of operations.

  Jamie was actually a help on that front, oddly enough. Even if Lucas had had no other way of figuring out the way back, his cat companion always appeared to know which way to go. More than that, he seemed eager to return, setting off at a trot whenever Lucas declared himself done for the day.

  It set Lucas to wondering just how long Jamie had been living in this place—he evidently saw the central circle as his home to return to. Or something like that.

  When he looked down into those little amber eyes, he couldn’t help the feeling that there was something unusual about the cat. Talking to him had started as the average emotional-support animal deal, but, over time, more and more indications were popping up that Jamie understood more than a cat typically would. Many times now, requests had been answered with surprising accuracy.

  This world clearly had magic in it, after all. A too-smart cat wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities.

  “How much of what I’m saying do you understand?” Lucas couldn’t help asking him.

  Of course, the cat would just look up at him. Maybe he’d blink. However much he understood, he still couldn’t exactly speak. That trait was still reserved for children’s cartoons, sadly.

  Frustratingly, there was little to report regarding the complex around the dome. Every room was empty, marble walls bare. There were discoloured areas that implied there were once rugs on the floor and tapestries on the walls, and indents that might have once held torches or something.

  Every time he cleared out another room without finding anything of use, his irritation built. He was keeping up hope out of stubbornness more than anything, but it was looking more and more like the overgrowth had devoured absolutely everything, somehow.

  The only thing looking up was his magic.

  Magic.

  The word always gave him a little thrill when it came to mind. He wondered if that feeling would ever go away. He hoped it didn’t. He had little else to be positive about right now. Hell, everything positive in this situation came back to magic.

  Experimenting with his vitality, using the plants as test subjects, was his best source of hope right now. His skill with ‘customising’ the plants had grown in leaps and bounds, hence his nice, savoury apple. Scientific knowledge probably would’ve made things much easier, but it wasn’t too difficult to fiddle around until he got approximately what he wanted. He could have cried when he bit into his seventh attempt and found it wasn’t sweet.

  He was thoroughly sick of sweet things. If he never saw a berry again, he’d be just fine with that.

  Commanding the plants to clear out of his way was getting easier too, and his control was improving, bit by bit. It still wasn’t fast, objectively speaking; if he didn’t walk slowly he’d quickly find his path barred and end up having to wait anyway, but he felt he was able to move faster than he had yesterday, and he’d be even faster tomorrow.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  By far the most technically adroit feat he’d managed so far was his roughshod clothing. Scratchy and rough as it was, it was decent enough for a first attempt. Plenty of plants could produce gossamer-thin fibres on command, and, though it was finicky, his vitality let him weave them together.

  Over the course of many hours of tedious work, he’d bodged together a robe that was about as attractive as wearing a burlap sack but protected him from the elements well enough, formed some strips of rough cloth-like material that he wrapped around himself like bandages for warmth, and woven together a pair of reedy soles that he lashed to his feet with spun cord so he wasn’t constantly mushing cold refuse under his feet with every squelching step. He even had a sack flung over his shoulder in case he found anything useful.

  It wasn’t the height of fashion or quality clothing, but it beat out his shredded, dirty PJs.

  Truth be told, there was probably more he could be doing with the plants, but most of his attention was pointed within. Even when he was deploying his vitality to battle back the plants, it was still only a fraction of his focus. When he wasn’t actively exploring the sprawling corridors and rooms around the domed hall, he didn’t bother with plants at all. Mapping out his channels took top priority.

  It was by far the hardest thing he’d done with his magic. Everything else had mostly come easily, to the point he suspected he was fumbling his way through some amateur plant magic techniques that little kid wizards and witches could’ve done. This was another matter entirely.

  Even with total concentration, it was a struggle to force vitality into the little sub-channels that split off from his larger circulatory system. If the main channels his vitality flowed through were akin to rivers, then the sub-channels were hose pipes. Once he’d picked up the trick of finding them, he realised there were hundreds of sealed channels splitting off from the main loop. Opening them up came with a feeling like a needle piercing him from the inside, and anything but the slightest trickle of vitality flowing into them caused a bone-deep ache.

  It was a frustrating process, but also exhilarating.

  Frustrating, because once he’d opened those channels, he had to actively pay attention to them to keep vitality flowing into them or they’d close off again. Unlike the main channels, these were more like veins. They constricted, and reset to their closed form by default.

  Exhilarating, because wherever vitality was coming from, his body produced more of it to fill up the new space, thus increasing his overall power. He’d only opened three new sub-channels—two in his upper left arm, one in his right forearm—and he was already feeling the difference. Small, but there. Unmistakeable.

  And that wasn’t even mentioning the fact that the sub-channels had multiple sub-channels of their own. Opening and maintaining them all was a daunting project, but the thought of how powerful he’d feel when the task was done almost had him salivating. He wondered how big his vitality range would be at that point.

  Not that there aren’t bad parts to magic.

  That thought was a bit of a downer, but he couldn’t afford not to face it. In absence of other compelling evidence, he had to assume something supernatural also brought him here. Whether it was an accident or deliberate—though he couldn’t fathom why someone or something might have actively targeted him—magic had ripped him out of his living room in the middle of breakfast and dumped him in a hostile environment, where he almost certainly would have died in some horrific manner at the hands of some murderous foliage.

  He wasn’t stupid. He could put two and two together.

  Man finds himself in a strange place plus a giant freaky magic circle present in said place equals the giant circle brought him there.

  It was near certain that there were other magic users out there. There was no way he was the only one. Hell, ample evidence of that surrounded him. Whatever controlled the plants didn’t seem smart enough to make the magic circle, but there was still a certain consciousness to them. He didn’t yet know how he’d handle the situation if and when he ran into something more intelligent.

  Feeling vindictive, he directed his vitality to wither a few branches rather than retract them. It cost him a few seconds as the more complicated task was carried out, but it made him feel a little better.

  His exploration lasted most of the rest of the day, Jamie remaining ever-present at his side. There was little direct sunlight this deep in the corridors, but he’d been learning to tell the time by the feeling of the more distant plants. When he concentrated for a moment while piggy-backing off the overgrowth’s vitality, he could feel when the sun was no longer shining so brightly on the plants outside.

  So he knew it was late afternoon when he found the first skeleton.

  At first, he didn’t know what he was looking at. Not counting the hivemind intelligence that suffused the plant life, the only creatures he’d seen were small insects. For a moment he just stared in bafflement, suspicious of these strange white plants that had plopped out of the greater mass and weren't obeying his vitality when he ordered them away.

  Then the skull clacked to the floor, and comprehension dawned like a blast of sunlight directly in the eyes.

  He yelped, hastily backing away. The bones fell outside of his range, and the plants moved to cover them once more. They were small enough that they simply got woven back into the great tangle, not registering as a gap in his vitality sense.

  Lucas stared at where he knew them to be for a long time, his chest heaving as he panted for breath.

  That really was a dead body, wasn’t it? Someone died here.

  Had they gone the way he almost had, trapped and constricted and choked? The thought horrified him, but he imagined it was the most likely explanation.

  Someone died here.

  Intellectually, he’d known the plant life was hostile. It had been trying to kill him for almost two weeks now. Had nearly succeeded.

  But for some reason, the thought that it had killed others hadn’t yet crossed his mind, and the revelation was harrowing.

  Moving carefully forward, he forced the plants back once more, and inspected the bones where they were still lying innocently on the dirty marble floor. Jamie followed along, leaning forward to sniff at them before looking over his shoulder at Lucas as if saying “what am I looking at here, human?”

  They weren’t as white as he’d expected they’d be, a subtle yellow tint to them. He supposed that made sense. Of course they would’ve been dirtied by the plants, if they were held there long enough for the flesh to be stripped away.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  There was no hint of flesh or muscle, nothing mummified. Lucas didn’t know what that indicated, but that probably would have spoken to how long it had been to someone with the right knowledge. Years? Decades? Centuries?

  Nor were there clothes, or any kind of personal belongings. Nothing to identify them, or give a hint as to who they were and how they ended up here. For all he knew, they might have been like him, waking up confused at the nexus of an overgrown labyrinth, then gotten in over their heads.

  Staring into the skull’s empty eye sockets, he tried to imagine what this person looked like. Their eye colour, the shade of their skin, the style of their hair. Had they had any scars? Blemishes? Were they beautiful/handsome? Hell, he couldn’t even tell their gender.

  “Some biologist types could probably tell, but not me,” he said, cursing his lack of knowledge.

  He felt a disconnect. A strange, instinctive rejection. Looking at a skeleton, it was hard to imagine it had once been a person, with thoughts and feelings and desires. A human being who’d lived an entire life, only to meet their ignoble end here, trapped in a snare of brown branches, terrified and in pain.

  Is there anyone out there who misses them? Had someone, one day, long ago, wondered where this person had gone, why they’d missed an arranged meeting? Had they called out for this person, in their final moments?

  At least it’s probably an adult, judging by the size of the bones. Small solace.

  The only reason he’d seen it was because there was a little bit of light creeping into this part of the corridor from a small crack in a wall. Were there more out there, and he just hadn’t seen them in the dark?

  Lucas drew in a shaky breath. So many questions, so few answers. It was a running theme, ever since he’d found himself in this place.

  Eyes stinging, feeling off balance, Lucas shrugged his makeshift sack off his shoulder and got to work gathering the bones. He didn’t know what this poor soul’s wishes would have been for their remains, but he’d figure something out. For now, he set off back the way he’d come, feeling melancholic.

  Over the course of the next few days of exploration, he found a dozen more skeletons.

  Not all of them were adults.