(Scars do not appear to be cause of death –shock ... - Bad Request

moss with a trickle of blood crusting down the corner of her lip. I'm not sure
she lived up to the legends of her cruelty, "Let's get the Hells out of here."
"Portal detected!" Nordom whistled.
"I'm telling you, Nordom. They're ev-" I paused. Something in my pack felt...
active, as if it were setting off the nearby portal Nordom detected. This
wasn't something I expected: in the first maze I'd escaped from the portals
were ever there.
I pulled my pack open.
The space beneath one of the overhanging branches began to glow softly,
and flickers of the nascent portal revealed what looked like a small
brambled room beyond. The strange black-barbed charm Ravel gave me was
writhing, like a dying snake.
Keeping my pack open, I moved closer to the overhanging branch.
The strange charm, using its barbed seeds, bit gently into my skin. Using its
barbs like treads, it climbed up my left hand, where it wrapped itself tightly
around my index finger. In response the light grew brighter, beckoning us to
step through.
Fortune favors the bold.
We were still in the maze, but the floor of the new chamber was puckered
with rough polygonal indentations, like the scales of a wrongly-healed scab.
Here and there mounds of violet dirt lay barren save for three sickly twigs in
the center... it looked as if they had devoured all the other vegetation
around them.
They were like thin, grasping fingers, and had none of the black barbs that
coated the branches elsewhere in the maze. As I examined them, however,
a magical vibration in them thrummed with a melancholy song, like the faint
vibrations in the rest of the maze. Yet they were more insistent, like the
wailing of tiny children.
"Hey chief, when you're done playing in the mud there we should probably
get going..."
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