Path of Dragons

Elijah was afraid he would once again lose himself if he shifted back into his predator form, so, as he headed through the maze’s entrance, he did so as a human. Holding his staff in front of him like a spear, and naked as the day he was born, he crept forward one tentative step at a time.

But nothing attacked.

He knew it was coming, though. So, he maintained vigilance as he continued toward the first intersection. He kept close to the moss-covered wall, dragging his hand along the ancient brickwork until he reached his destination. Taking a deep breath to steady his nerves, Elijah peeked around the corner and saw nothing but more of the maze. No monsters. No giant predators. Just a long, empty corridor that looked no different from the way he’d come. Glancing back in the opposite direction, he saw much of the same.

Glancing up at the overcast sky, he let out a sigh of mingled relief and disappointment. Relief, because he truly didn’t want to fight any more monsters. Certainly, gaining a few extra levels would be beneficial, but as had happened in the Sea of Sorrows, his progress while in the Primordial Jungle had slowed to a crawl as the diminishing returns began to take effect. Killing the same creatures over and over was no way to advance.

More than that, though, he was just tired of the constant killing. That was one of the reasons his panther instincts had taken over. In his predator form, Elijah didn’t have to worry about stress or morality or anything else. He could just hunt, eat, and live. Everything else had faded into the background. And while that had made his journey through the primordial jungle much easier to endure, it certainly wasn’t a state to which he wanted to soon return. He was a human, not a panther, and though it was sometimes beneficial to let his identity slip toward the latter, it was also dangerous.

Elijah knew just how close he’d come to letting his human identity disappear, which was a horrifying testament to his adaptability.

So, he was relieved that no foes were in evidence.

However, he couldn’t help but feel a little disappointment, too – mostly because it meant that he probably had starvation ahead of him. After all, the jungle, for all its seeming normalcy, was an artificial space. There was no fruit. No edible fungi. If he wanted to eat, he had to kill. And without any other creatures around, Elijah had no source of food.

He wouldn’t die, but the prospect of slowly wasting away was distressing enough that he turned around, intending to exit the maze and gather some food to carry with him. The meat would likely spoil quickly, but a quick pulse of Touch of Nature would take care of any problems that might present. So long as he got some calories in him, he would be okay.

The exit had disappeared. The corridor he’d just traversed was a dead end.

“Damnit,” he muttered, his voice sounding odd in his own ears. Or maybe it was the silence of the maze that rendered it strange.

Elijah had been in a few jungles in his time. Not only had he lived in Hawai’i, but he’d also visited the Amazon during college. And one of the many things that set a natural, Earthly rainforest apart from his current location was the ubiquitous presence of insects. Yet, Elijah had yet to feel the sting of a single mosquito. No biting flies. No spiders in their webs. Nothing but dead air and rain.

If he let himself notice it, Elijah found the whole thing incredibly disturbing. Forests should be alive, but the Primordial Jungle and the attached maze were anything but living ecosystems. Never had anything felt less real than the moment he realized that.

But that was what it was, wasn’t it? The whole tower was just a manifestation of Ethera. That was Elijah’s understanding, at least. Perhaps there were more steps involved, but he felt confident in that basic assertion.

Then again, aside from satisfying his intellectual curiosity, knowing that didn’t change anything. The dangers were still present, and they would certainly kill him if he didn’t treat them as reality. So, with that in mind, he turned back toward the center of the maze and sank to his haunches to think about how he wanted to attack the challenge before him.

Elijah was no expert on mazes, but he was familiar enough with them to know a few basic strategies for the traversal of a labyrinth. First among them was what was known as the right-hand rule, which was a technique that, fittingly, given the name, would require Elijah to keep in contact with the right-hand wall at all times.

The right-hand rule wasn’t foolproof, though, and stood a chance of getting him even more lost than if he’d just wandered around aimlessly. So, he wracked his brain for another method, and over the next few minutes, he came up with what he felt was a viable solution.

Basically, it came down to mapping the maze by keeping track of which paths he’d taken and how many times he had taken them. So, each time he reached a path, he would make one of three marks. The initial mark would come during the first encounter. The second would, predictably, come if he crossed that path again. And the third would be for dead-ends. So long as he prioritized unmarked paths, he felt that he could eventually find his way to the center.

There were two major problems, though. First, he suspected that using this method would be extremely time-consuming and require quite a lot of backtracking. Yet, he didn’t see any option that wouldn’t have that issue, so he could discount that as unavoidable. The second problem was that he didn’t have any way to mark the paths.

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That was easily solvable, though. The walls were helpfully covered in moss into which it was easy to scrape a pattern. So, he settled on one line for the first crossing of a path, two lines for the second, and a giant “D” for dead-ends.

“Keeping it simple,” he muttered to himself.

Then, he stopped hesitating and got to moving, marking his first path. Over the next few hours, he continued that pattern, carving a single line each time he reached an intersection and chose a direction. Eventually, he crossed paths he’d taken before and marked them appropriately as well. The same was true of dead-ends.

Like that, he kept going for some time until, at last, his fatigue finally caught up to him. So, knowing that he wasn’t likely to traverse the labyrinth in a single day, he settled down to rest. When he awoke, Elijah continued on as he had before.

And so, his days took on a pattern where he kept to his strategy. Each time he passed one of his markings, he made sure to refresh them by using his staff to re-carve the appropriate lines in the moss. Otherwise, after only a few days – or even weeks – they would have grown over.

It was in the second week when the hunger got overwhelming, and he resorted to eating the moss. It wasn’t tasty, and Elijah felt certain that it wasn’t really edible. However, he had Touch of Nature on his side to deal with any lethal side effects, and it was the only real solution to his hunger problem. He had no idea if he really got any nutrients from it, but it did fill his stomach. So, there it had that going for it. And with the ubiquitous rain, at least water wasn’t an issue.

Boredom was the real killer, and Elijah occupied his mind in a few ways. Most of the time, he dwelled on thoughts of the world at large. Largely, he worried about his sister and her family, but he did give some thought to the rest of the population.

One thing he’d discovered since being stranded on the island was that his mind often drifted to his past, and when that happened, his memories seemed far more vivid than they ever had before. That was the nature of extended solitude, he supposed, and he appreciated the ability to remember the good times he’d had with his family and friends. However, it also highlighted just how lonely of an existence he led.

One day, he’d leave his island. And when he finally found his family, he would no longer take them for granted.

Before that, he had to complete the tower, though. Not only was it the only way of protecting his island from an invasion of Voxx, but now that he was committed, there was no way out but through. And to do that, Elijah suspected he would have to be much stronger.

With that in mind, he focused on his neglected cultivation. Upon reaching the Opal stage with his mind, his ability to regenerate Ethera had received quite a boost due to the widening of the aperture through which the ambient energy was funneled into his soul. By comparison, his soul cultivation had decreased the casting time of his spells. Finally, his body reaching the Wood stage had made him stronger and more durable, almost as if it had made each point of his attributes count for more.

He had no idea how to improve his core cultivation. Although, he suspected that when he did finally figure it out, it would be even more impactful than the rest of his improvements. Part of that certainty came from a suspicion that it was all meant to work together. So, when he reached the first stage of improvement with all of them, the whole would add up to more than the sum of its parts. However, the majority of his surety was rooted in the feeling he got from his unimproved core. It was the battery upon which everything about him was built. He was all but useless without it. So, it stood to reason that any improvement to his core would be incredibly impactful.

It was a shame, then, that Nerthus had refused to give him any information on how to improve it. Perhaps he could figure it out on his own at some point.

All that and more flitted through Elijah’s mind as he slowly traversed the labyrinth, making his marks along the way. Days passed into weeks, and as he’d expected, his time in the maze eventually eclipsed the one-month mark – at least as far as he could count the days. In the absence of a sun, he’d taken to marking the days via how often he slept. It wasn’t exact, but at least it gave him some degree of context.

As he went, the monotony of the labyrinth dulled the edge of his mind until, suddenly, everything changed when he stumbled across a dead body.

The corpse was unidentifiable, but given its general size and the color of what little fur was left, he suspected that it might have been one of the giant primates that called the jungle their home. His time in the jungle was a bit of a blur, but he remembered enough of it that he could confidently label the primates as deadly foes.

And something had killed one.

Had it simply wandered into the labyrinth and died of hunger, thirst, or some combination of the two? Maybe. But given the state of the corpse, it was clear that something else was within the maze. Something that had probably killed and then feasted upon the fearsome sasquatch-ape.

Elijah knelt beside the body, then, with a shake of his head, started rummaging for anything useful. It was disgusting, and it took far longer to sift through the pile of meat, fur, and bones, but eventually, Elijah came away with a simple stone knife and a collection of broken sticks and string that might’ve once been a bow. There were no arrows. Nor did he find a quiver.

Not that he would’ve used such a crude weapon. Perhaps if he’d taken the Ranger class in the very beginning, but he currently had much more potent means of attack. If it came down to a battle, he would rely on his spells or his predator form.

After looting the corpse, Elijah backed away. He had a choice to make. He had to keep moving forward, but the question was what form he would take while doing so. There were benefits to both options, and as Elijah settled down into a squat, he considered the choices before him.

His human form gave him the opportunity to carry the items he’d looted. Neither the knife nor the broken bow were immediately useful, but he didn’t have to get creative to think of ways that could change. The knife, especially, was invaluable – especially after he’d lost all the equipment he’d brought with him. Only his staff had survived so far.

But as a panther, he didn’t really need tools or weapons. More, he could traverse the maze almost undetected, which seemed much more important now that he knew he wasn’t alone within the labyrinth.

Clearly, his panther form was better suited for the task. However, Elijah found himself hesitating. Did he dare risk letting those animalistic instincts overwhelm him again? If they took hold, there was every chance they’d never let him go.

For a long time, Elijah thought it over, but in the end, he decided that he couldn’t simply ignore such the defining feature of his class. Shape of the Predator was part of him, and he couldn’t run from it. Instead, he needed to use it to his advantage. He had to control the wild nature of his panther form, rather than let it control him.

With that in mind, Elijah renewed his enhancements, casting Essence of the Monkey, Aura of Renewal, and Essence of the Wolf. Then, for the first time in more than a month, he embraced Shape of the Predator and took on his mist panther form.

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