The Direction of Down

Sella started down before the voice behind the black door could finish laughing.

The footprints waited three steps below her.

They had not been there a moment ago. Four impressions darkened the pale stone, each shaped like one of the party’s boots. Beyond them, more prints appeared one at a time, descending into the angled dark.

Brannoc came after Sella with his shield held over his head. “If those things start matching my stride, I’m going back.”

“They already match your stride,” Tassa said.

“I meant emotionally.”

Iven remained at the threshold. He was staring at the door’s iron plate, where the words THE PARTY HAS NOT ARRIVED had begun to lose their letters. The first and last words stayed fixed. The middle shifted through several arrangements before settling again.

THE PARTY HAS NOT ARRIVED.

“Sella,” he called, “we should record this.”

“Write it down.”

“I did. The writing changed.”

“Then remember it.”

“That has been unreliable lately.”

The landing tilted beneath Sella’s feet. Not suddenly, as it had before. The stone seemed to consider its angle and choose a steeper one. Brannoc’s shield slid against his arm. Tassa caught the wall with one hand. Iven made a small, offended noise as his spellbook nearly fell into the stairwell.

Sella grabbed the rope around her wrist and wrapped it twice around a jutting seam. “Nobody move until it settles.”

“It’s a floor,” Brannoc said. “Floors should not settle.”

The stone stopped moving.

The footprints continued.

Sella tested the next step with her boot. The print ahead deepened, accepting the shape of her sole before she touched it. The stair beneath her foot remained solid. She put her weight down.

For an instant, the world turned sideways.

Her stomach rose into her throat. The pale steps became a wall. The black door hung below them, its hinges pointing toward the ceiling. Brannoc cursed. Tassa laughed once, sharply. Iven shouted a spell that ended in the word “left.”

Then gravity returned.

They were standing on the same staircase, but the black door was gone above them. The landing they had left stretched impossibly far overhead, a narrow shelf of stone with four dark footprints beside its edge.

Brannoc looked up. “Did we fall?”

“No,” Iven said.

“Did we climb?”

“No.”

“Can you give me one answer that helps?”

“I can tell you that neither verb applies.”

Tassa peered over the stair’s edge. “Wonderful. We’ve reached the floor where verbs are decorative.”

Sella ignored them and looked for the prints. They continued below, though the staircase now ran through a narrow shaft with no visible bottom. The four sets separated as they descended. One hugged the left wall. One crossed over the stair’s center. One went straight through the stone risers. The fourth stopped at every third step, as if its owner were waiting for the others.

“Those aren’t all leading the same way,” Sella said.

“They are,” Iven answered. “The direction is consistent. The route is not.”

“That sentence means nothing.”

“Exactly.”

At the next landing, the staircase ended before a blank wall.

The footprints did not.

They climbed the wall in four parallel lines, boots pressing into the vertical stone as though it were soft mud. At the top, they disappeared over an unseen edge.

Brannoc planted his shield against the wall. “No.”

Sella studied the stone. There was no seam, no crack, no hidden latch. The prints were already changing. The leading set turned sideways, crossing the others. A fifth print formed above them, smaller and bare.

It pointed toward the wall.

“Could be another gravity shift,” Iven said. “If we align ourselves—”

“Don’t,” Brannoc said.

“If we align ourselves with the original—”

“Don’t align anything.”

Sella crouched beside the lowest print. It was not deep enough to hold dust. The stone around it felt warm. When she touched the impression, a word appeared inside it, written in a thin line of black moisture.

HERE.

Then another word formed beside it.

NOT.

Tassa leaned over her shoulder. “The dungeon has discovered pointing.”

Sella looked back at the staircase. Above them, the last flight had become a ceiling. There was no visible route except the wall.

“We climb,” she said.

Brannoc closed his eyes. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

They used the rope. Sella went first, hammering pitons into the wall between the footprints. The stone accepted them reluctantly, then spat two back out. Tassa followed, carrying the coil. Brannoc came after her, shield strapped to his back. Iven climbed last, muttering calculations that changed whenever he spoke them aloud.

“Thirty degrees,” he said.

The wall tipped.

“Forty-five.”

It tipped again.

“Ceiling.”

“Stop naming it,” Sella called.

The wall shuddered beneath them. For three breaths, their bodies pressed against it. Then the stone became horizontal, and they landed on a floor that had not been there when they began.

Sella rose with her knife drawn.

The chamber was round and bare except for a waist-high stone pillar in the center. Four narrow passages opened around it. Each passage was marked with one word.

HOME.

BELOW.

BEFORE.

TOGETHER.

The footprints entered all four passages.

Sella’s set went toward HOME. Brannoc’s toward TOGETHER. Tassa’s toward BEFORE. Iven’s toward BELOW.

For the first time since they had begun following them, the prints did not continue ahead in one line.

Brannoc removed his shield from his back. “We choose one.”

“No,” Sella said.

“Why not?”

“Because the dungeon knows what we want.”

Tassa tapped the HOME passage with one finger. “It knows what you want. I want a bath, a locked room, and a week without hearing your voice from a corpse.”

The passage marked HOME lengthened. Its darkness drew back, revealing a warm yellow glow and the distant sound of rain against roof tiles.

Tassa’s smile vanished.

“Fine,” she said. “It knows some things.”

From TOGETHER came the smell of Brannoc’s kitchen: onions frying in oil, bread cooling on a board, the faint smoke of the stove. Brannoc’s hand tightened around his shield strap.

The passage marked BEFORE showed a red dawn over the village where Tassa had first joined them. Somewhere within it, a younger Tassa was laughing.

Iven stood before BELOW. His passage was filled with blue light and the orderly chime of turning mechanisms. “That one,” he whispered. “That is not bait.”

“How can you tell?” Sella asked.

“Because I want it.”

The pillar in the center of the room clicked.

A line appeared across its top, cut into the stone by an unseen blade.

THE PARTY MUST ARRIVE SEPARATELY.

Brannoc looked at Sella. “That’s a rule.”

“It’s an instruction,” Iven said.

“Same problem.”

The four sets of footprints began to withdraw. Not backward. They simply re-formed farther inside each passage, drawing each of them toward a different promise.

Sella caught Tassa by the wrist before she could step toward HOME. “Nobody goes alone.”

The word alone hung in the air.

Her own footprints vanished.

Sella stared at the empty stone beneath her boots. “What did I say?”

Tassa’s grip tightened around Sella’s sleeve. “Something the floor liked.”

The chamber changed.

The pillar moved away from them. The passages widened. Brannoc stood three paces farther off, though he had not moved. Iven was on the other side of the room. Tassa remained beside Sella, but her hand had become cold and unfamiliar.

Then the stone beneath Sella’s feet showed a new footprint.

It matched her boot exactly.

It appeared behind her.

A second formed ahead, at the mouth of HOME.

The chamber was not separating them by distance. It was deciding where each of them had arrived.

Sella pulled Tassa close and shouted, “Brannoc! Iven! Stay where you are!”

Her voice reached them from the wrong passages.

Brannoc answered from BEFORE. “I’m here!”

Iven answered from TOGETHER. “I have arrived!”

The passage beneath Iven’s word sealed shut.

Iven’s voice stopped.

Sella felt Tassa’s fingers dig into her arm. “He said the wrong thing.”

“No,” Sella said, watching the last of the stone close over the blue light. “He said the true thing.”

At her feet, a new line of writing appeared in the floor.

THE PARTY HAS ARRIVED.

The letters trembled, as if the stone were trying to decide whether to believe itself.

Then, from the sealed passage marked BELOW, Iven knocked three times.

Sella tied the rope around her waist and thrust the other end at Tassa. “We’re going to bring him back.”

“Through the passage that no longer exists?”

“Through the one he arrived in.”

Behind them, the word HOME began to fade. Ahead, the footprints reappeared in the wall.

This time, they were leading upward.