Got randomly inspired to finally write this chapter upon reading an update for a Labyrinth fic that I am heavily invested in. Check it out: Tanglewood, by Viciously Witty.

Thanks to everyone who is still reading this, despite me taking forever and a day to update! All I can do is promise to try and get better at making the time.

Chapter 3: Ponderous Puddles

It seemed to get a little darker as soon as the doors closed behind them, the sky a dull grey above, and the gust of wind from the slamming door causing goosebumps to break out across Eve's arms. She rubbed her hands over them to warm up, eyeing up Sarah's jeans with a little envy.

"What should we do?" She asked, looking left and right at the equally long stretches of corridor presented to them.

"I don't know." Sarah gnawed her lip, frowning at each direction in turn. "They both look the same. I can't even see where they end!"

She thumped the crumbling wall before them infrustration, a small shower of gravel the only response she was given.

The paths did look so similar, and no end or bend in sight on either of them. Drawing up her memory of the maze from the outside, in spite of Sarah's confidant; 'It doesn't look that far.', Eve remembered just how vast it had indeed looked. An idea dawned in Eve's head, not one that she was terribly keen on, but probably their best option for finding Toby.

"There are two paths, and two of us..."

"Eve, no!" Sarah protested. "We need to stick together."

"It makes sense." Eve defended. "This place looked huge from the outside, with both of us trying different directions, it stands to reason that at least one of us will reach the castle."

Sarah opened her mouth to argue further, but Eve cut her off.

"Besides, isn't this how it always works in the stories? The heroes are separated on their quest, but always find their way back to each other for the climactic ending."

"Yeah, in the stories." Sarah pulled a face. "Not in real life."

"Look at where we are, Sarah, I think story-logic is more applicable than real-world right now."

Worry tightened her friend's features, but Eve knew that Sarah would agree, the stakes were too high not to.

"Come on, I'll go left and you go right, we need to find Toby."

Eve used her best I'm-older-and-wiser voice, the scowl that Sarah shot her let her know that it had been heard loud and clear.

"Fine, but here." Sarah took out her lipstick, breaking off a piece and handing it to Eve. "Use it to mark up, so you don't get lost."

"Be careful." Eve pulled Sarah into a tight hug, the younger girl squeezing back tightly.

"You too."

Then, lipstick in their hands, the girls set off in different directions. Eve looked over her shoulder a few times, but within minutes she and Sarah had walked out of sight of each other. That didn't seem like it should be quite right, remembering how long the corridors had seemed, but Eve didn't have time to double back and investigate.

She walked for five minutes, ten, half an hour, and still no change. The walls stayed the same, the vines continued to trip her, and she had to keep on jumping over the puddles that peppered the pathway.

"Come on, come on, come on." She muttered to herself, picking up her pace to a light jog again.

Caw! Caw!

Eve had time to look around, swear, and duck as a bird flew just over her head, bright purple feathers a stark contrast against the sky. She heard a soft 'plop' as the lipstick piece flew out of her hand and into a puddle, and glared after the responsible avian. It continued on its way heedless of her stare, wings carrying it off over parts of the maze Eve wondered if she would ever reach.

"Stupid bird." She muttered.

Her forehead creased as she cast around for the bright red splash of lipstick, expecting it to be in one of the nearby puddles, but unable to see it anywhere. She stood for a better vantage point, but could still find nothing. The only thing in the water was a slight magnification of the ground below.

"But, things don't just disappear…" She crouched down to trail her fingers through some of the puddles, but no invisible lipstick was snared by them.

"Okay, well, no time to lose. Let's keep trying down this path, more vines and cracked bricks to see."

She continued on her way, muttering a soft commentary as she went, it was amazing how quickly she had turned to speaking to herself to alleviate the silence. She trailed a hand against the wall as she walked, hoping that maybe it would catch on an invisible door, or brush against a magical handle. To no avail, all she found were grazes on her fingertips.

CAW!I

There had been no beating of wings, only that last minute sound to alert Eve to the bird diving directly towards her face.

"Ahh!"

She recoiled from the animal, the back of her foot spashing into a puddle and going in so deep she had to scrabble at the wall to pull herself upright.

Trying to catch her breath, the bird forgotten, Eve stared down at the puddle she had tripped into. It was no deeper than the others, barely a centimeter from what she could tell. Crouching down, she pressed her palm to it, the water didn't even cover the back of her hand.

"It can't be." She whispered softly.

It was harder to take all of this in alone, she missed Sarah. It was so much easier to think the impossible with her friend beside her. Too many times in the last few minutes had she begun questioning everything around her. The evidence before her eyes told her she was right, it wasn't possible, but she was so sure that her whole ankle had dipped in. She checked the back of her heel, the whole ballet flat was soaked. She pressed her hand to the puddle again, it was no deeper at any level.

"Not possible."

"You know, for someone who readily accepted being in a Goblin Kingdom, you like the words 'can't', 'don't', and 'not possible'."

Eve's head whipped around, plait stinging her in the eye as she cast around for who had spoken. No one stood near her, she couldn't even see anyone further along the corridor, looking up she saw that her only companion was the purple bird from earlier.

Suspicion rose within her as she looked the bird up and down. She had never seen its like before, certainly no bird she knew of came in such a bright shade of purple. Its legs were longer than seemed proportionate for its body, scaled in a darker purple, large black talons gripping the wall it perched on. The beak was in the same dark colouring as the legs, but curved upwards instead of down like a normal bird's, almost as if someone had stuck it on the wrong way when making it.

It seemed to study her too, head cocked slightly to the left, turning to view her first with one golden eye, and then the other.

"Did… did you just talk?" The question felt silly, but there was no one else.

"Depends, does that sound possible to you?"

Eve's mouth and eyes widened in unison as the bird not only spoke, but used sarcasm, and chuckled at her reaction.

A series of sounds along the lines of 'huh' and 'wha' emerged from her mouth, but she was still too startled to articulate them properly.

"No, no, let me guess; birds don't talk, they can't." The bird chuckled again at its own joke, even the chuckle sounding all too human.

"But, how?" Eve was desperately trying to reconcile how the birds beak could open and have human words coming out.

"Still trying to figure out how things work?" The bird hopped off the wall, using its wings to sail gently down. "No wonder you've walked over so many doorways."

"Walked over?"

The bird rolled its eyes, rolled its eyes.

"You never used to be this stupid, dumb humans." The bird stepped closer, coming up beside Eve, and standing as tall as her hip. "And stop looking at me like that!"

"Sorry." Eve dropped her gaze. "But you're not exactly...normal."

"Says you." The bird scoffed. "Do you accept where you are, or don't you? Are you in a magical land with talking birds, or are you still at home playing dress up? Which is it?"

Maybe this was a dream? Eve pinched at the skin on her arm, feeling the string of pain that it brought her, and then another sharper one from her leg.

"Ow!" She shot an accusatory glance at the bird, who now had a drop of her blood on its beak.

"Just thought I'd help."

"Thanks." She replied, employing the sarcasm it had used earlier while wiping the blood off her leg.

"Anytime."

The eyeing up that the bird was giving her leg made Eve take a step away from it, requiring her to hop over a puddle that she swore hadn't been to her right a moment ago.

"See! You did it again!"

"Did what?"

The bird gave her a flat stare with its golden eyes, shifting that stare down to the puddle between them, and back up to Eve. Dots slowly connected in her head, she spoke slowly as they joined up.

"The puddles.. are the... entrances?"

"Well done!" The bird opened and shut its beak in rapid succession, the sound resembling human clapping.

"But I just stuck my hand in one, and it is just a normal puddle."

"You won't get through like that."

"Using your hands is exactly how you open doors."

"But you don't walk down stairs on your hands."

"You said they were doors!"

"No I didn't."

Eve rubbed her temples and took a few calming breaths so that she didn't further lose her cool in this argument with a bird. She tracked back their conversation, back to what it had said about going over...doorways.

"They are doorways!"

The look the bird levelled her halted her excitement somewhat, she had seen that kind of disapproval in the eyes of teachers at school before. She ran over the rest of what it had said, putting another piece together.

"So, they are staircases?"

"Whatever gave you that idea?"

"You said they were!"

"No, I said you don't walk down stairs on your hands. Which is true, that would be weird." The bird seemed to not realise the irony of a talking avian calling acrobatics 'weird'.

"So what are they?"

"Doorways, like you said."

"But not stairs?"

"Jump in and find out."

Something about the tone of the bird's voice made Eve disinclined to take it up on the dare until further investigation.

Holding onto one of the vines stuck to the wall, she cautiously put her foot into the water, expecting to feel like a fool when it went no deeper than her hand. Only to get a shock when it kept on going, she let the water reach her mid-calf before she pulled her leg back.

The bird watched her silently as she then crouched beside the puddle, and put her hand to the water again. Still not deep enough to cover her hand.

She sat beside it, and dangled a leg in as if it were a paddling pool in summer, watching to see where it went. The puddle looked no deeper, her eye still saw it as shallow, but her leg was in there up to her knee in the water. She put her hand in next to her leg, it still didn't go any deeper.

"Where does it go?" She asked the bird, who had been silently observing her.

"Somewhere." It cocked its head to the side briefly, almost like a nervous twitch.

"That's not very helpful."

"Somewhere is better than nowhere, which is where staying here will get you."

Eve eyed the puddle up, twisted to view it side-on.

"It won't work if I try to stick my head down to see where it leads, will it?"

"I don't know, why don't you try it?"

Eve narrowed her eyes at the bird, trying to gauge how serious it was, hard to tell when she couldn't read its features like she could a human's. The glint in its eyes made her wary though, so she looked around and grabbed the trailing end of a vine. She gathered it enough to see that it was quite long, and tugged hard to make sure it was firmly secured to the wall.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to check it out, and if it isn't somewhere that will get me where I need to go, I'll pull myself up."

"Do you have any idea the kind of place you are in? What makes you think you'll know where one spot will lead you from a glance?"

"I don't want to get stuck in a dungeon somewhere, alright?" Eve had considered the fact that she didn't really know how to get where she was going, but jumping in with no escape route could be a disaster.

So, she swung her other leg in so that she was sitting on the lip of the puddle, gripped the vine firmly, and pushed off. Falling into a puddle felt all kinds of wrong to her body, but that didn't change the fact that that was exactly what she was doing.

Things started to darken around her as she went in deeper, casting one last look upwards, the last thing she saw was the purple bird pecking the vine free from the wall.