Seymour managed to slide back a few steps before the monstrous tongue tightened around his middle and began to drag him into the churning abyss which passed for his assailant’s mouth. He was now more grateful than ever to be wearing the body of Thornton’s nana, whose mass and girth was easily double his own. She was like a mossy hill. If he’d been in his Seymour-shaped body, the hedge mimic might have already bitten him in half the way it had done to Handsome Gentry.

  The ropy, slimy tendril was more like an eel than an ordinary tongue, seemingly operating with a mind of its own. The mouth from which it had emerged was little more than a hollow in the hedge wall, filled with a gnashing vortex of thorn-like fangs. The wind blowing out of it smelled like damp soil and old, musty leaves.

  This must have been exactly the same way the creature had killed Gentry. It had been lurking, perfectly camouflaged with the hedge wall, and when the team passed by without detecting its presence they had given it all the opening it needed. Out shot a slimy tongue like this one and the zombie bard never had a chance.

  The end of the eel-like tongue slithered up Seymour’s back, thinning as it climbed, reconfiguring its shape and stretching itself to become much longer before violently whipping twice around his chest and pinning his arms at his sides. He was at first relieved that he’d managed to maintain his grip on Jerome’s pot—the chilling sensation he’d experienced when Jerome fell into the snow a moment earlier had been terrible—but then the tongue began to constrict like a python and the way Seymour was holding the cactus meant that its spines were now being forced closer and closer to Seymour’s face. The way this situation was suddenly playing out, with Jerome’s spines slowly inching toward his unprotected eyes, Seymour couldn’t help but think it was all like something the big bad in a Bond film would set up.

  The struggle quickly sapped him of hope. The mimic’s prehensile tongue suddenly manifested barbs which bit into Seymour’s skin and he shouted out in pained surprise. He turned his face away from Jerome’s ever-nearer spines but this forced his gaze to fix on the meatgrinder he was being dragged into—the gnashing, grinding cyclone of barbed thorn-teeth—and just then his Sanguine Sight activated:

  Malleable blood? Seymour wondered, and in the next moment he felt the tongue relent just a bit in its constriction.

  He twisted his shoulders and found the mimic suddenly lacked the strength to continue restricting his movements. The gnashing fang-vortex was now frozen as if it had been paralyzed, too, and nasty strands of brown-tinged saliva oozed out.

  Three things happened all at once:

  First, the topiary mimic’s tongue went completely limp and sloughed awkwardly off Seymour’s body.

  Second, regenerative power surged through Seymour. The rash of injuries inflicted by the topiary monster sealed up all at once. Every puncture-wound inflicted by the thorny barbs which had sprouted from the mimic’s tongue disappeared as if they’d never even existed.

  And then third and finally, the bottom of Jerome’s pot cracked and fell to the floor as a tiny pair of green, spine-covered legs punched through the clay bottom.

  Seymour yipped in surprise as the entire pot crumbled and the soil dropped out and then Jerome landed softly on a pair of newly formed feet. He stood to his full height, which was still only about mid-shin on Seymour.

  Using the exotic blood he’d harvested from the mimic, Jerome had reshaped himself into a humanoid-like body with five protrusions—arms, legs, and head—but more intricate features seemed to elude him. The thumb-like head wore no eyes nor nose but only the furry stripe Seymour had always thought of as Jerome’s mouth, and he could have sworn it turned up in a grin as it slurped its own blood-engorged tongue-spine back inside.

  “Hot damn, Bud!” Seymour exclaimed in Nana Gring’s voice, forgetting the mimic for a moment. “You’re a goddamned cactuar now if I’ve ever seen one.”

  Kissy kiss-kiss-kiss, Jerome emoted happily.

  The topiary mimic wasn’t quite dead, but Jerome had drained two-thirds of its blood volume and now it wanted only to escape. It began to seep into the hedgewall and Seymour leapt forward to stop it. He seized it by the dry and withered tongue which had moments earlier been dragging him to his death and attempted to return the favor, leveraging his body—Thornton’s nana’s body—to pull it out of the hedge wall, but the entire tongue-length snapped off like a lizard’s tail. Seymour fell down hard in the snow on Nana Gring’s broad rump and could only watch as the mimic fled, disappearing into the hedge.

  Before he could push himself up from his seated position, Jerome appeared in front of him. The tiny cactus man was undeniably adorable, hugging himself and shivering.

  “Here,” Seymour said, extending his hand, palm-up, “climb aboard.”

  Jerome walked forward with the uncanny quality of a claymation figure. As he stepped up onto Seymour’s palm, he altered his form to retract all of his spines, sparing Seymour from suffering any accidental pricks. The malleable blood stolen from the topiary had given him incredible control over the shape of his body.

  For a moment, Seymour cradled him in his lap. Then he lifted Jerome and set him to ride on his shoulder. His little green passenger’s skin was soft and warm as he formed a primitive, vine-like tail which wrapped down and around Seymour’s flabby upper-bicep, securing himself in place.

  “Alright then.” Seymour climbed to his feet and brushed off the snow. “Let’s go find Penny and Thorn.”

  Jerome replied with a pair of squeaky little kissy sounds, right up close to Seymour’s ear.

  Thornton pleaded with Penny to understand.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “I only wanted to help him. I don’t know why I did it like that. I didn’t think he had time to eat the pod, I guess. So I attempted to implant it directly into his stomach.” He grabbed her by the arm like he was drowning in the ocean and someone had thrown him a lifeline. “I’m sorry!”

  “It’s alright, Thornton.” She carefully, gently, pried her arm free of his grip. “You were in shock and not thinking clearly, but I know you meant well.”

  “Do you think he might have lived if I hadn’t…. done what I did?”

  “Not a chance,” Penny assured him. “I’m certain your act did nothing to so much as hasten his demise. Poor Gentry’s fate was sealed the moment we passed through that corridor without taking notice of the monster which lurked there.”

  Thornton had been going on miserably ever since Rathbone Killmaim abandoned them and Penny wasn’t sure how much more she could stand. Not that she had much of a choice. Something must have gone wrong with the escape array and she knew that attempting to make her way out of the hedge maze on her own would have been impossible. Fortunately, Thornton was well-equipped to fend off the topiary creatures which had so far been the only intelligent obstacles they’d faced since Rathbone had quit the expedition. She prayed they wouldn’t encounter another creature like the one that had bitten Handsome Gentry in half.

  Against a barrel-chested gorilla which appeared to have been sculpted from a brambly blackberry bush, Thornton proved downright dominant. The monster had been ludicrously oversized, standing double her companion’s height, but his power of Aggressive Reforestation proved shockingly effective. Roots burst up from the dirt and vines fired out from the hedge walls on either side of the gorilla. Same as the tiger which Seymour had fought, this topiary monster came in the shape of a too-large gorilla but lacked the corresponding mass and strength which an authentic simian would normally possess. Thornton’s vines quickly swarmed over it before the creature could even complete its uncanny chest-pounding, the performance of which emitted a mighty rustling of leaves where there ought to be thumps.

  The gorilla was so thoroughly entwined by Thornton's spell that it became completely obscured from their sight. Thornton had then tried hitting it with a Lacerating Arrow but reported receiving a message which informed him that the target was immune to bleed effects. He then stepped forward and shoved his hand inside the knot of roots and vines and activated his Compost spell, instead.

  The unique class which Symour had helped him evolve, the Apocalyptic Gardener, came with a class trait which empowered his abilities when used in an area designated as an Urban Area. Evidently the hedge maze met the requirements to be deemed Urban, perhaps owing to the fact it was occupying the space typically reserved for the Adventure Depot’s third floor, and the spell’s effect was devastating. The entire mass of vegetation—the massive gorilla and the web entangling it—rapidly shriveled down to something like a gourd the size of a large pumpkin. This was another of Thornton’s healing pods.

  That pod had later come in handy when a topiary boar surprised them by charging out of the hedge and gored Thornton in the ribs. The thing had struck a direct hit and his side was ripped open by the cracked, jagged tip of a tightly-twisted root-tusk. The ambush caught Thornton flat-footed and despite his size advantage he was bowled over by the boar’s momentum. He curled up and covered his head for a moment while the monster thrashed its tusked snout back-and-forth, deepening the gash in Thornton’s side.

  Penny had frozen – but only for a moment. The terrible vision of Thornton’s rib-bone flashing white for a moment in the bloody gush forced her into action. Almost against her will she seized upon the boar from behind, thrusting her hands into its less-than-solid torso. She clutched at the living twigs inside and was surprised at how easily she was able to lift and fling the boar off Thornton.

  She had been carrying the gourd—a task which required both hands—but dropped it in the snow the moment before making her attack on the boar, and now she pivoted back in its direction. She and Thornton had been trudging along in the maze for some time now since the gourd’s creation and the rind had become noticeably more wrinkled than it had started out. Penny bent to pick it up but in the corner of her eye she saw the boar charging back at Thornton, looking to finish him off. She judged that there wasn’t time to pick the pod up, spin back around, and hand it off to her gored teammate. The boar would get there first, and Thornton might not survive another round of its tusk attacks.

  So instead, she employed a tactic which if Seymour had been there he would have recognized as the work of an all-pro long-snapper. She chucked the pumpkin-like pod backward through the wickets of her legs and her aim proved true. The pod thudded into Thornton’s gut an instant before the boar, shielding him from the attack.

  The boar slammed into the pod, squeezing it against Thornton until it burst open, sliming him with a gush of bright green, stringy gourd-guts. The guts persisted for only a moment though before festering directly into Thornton’s body, repairing the wound in his side almost instantly, as if the gourd itself had transformed into new, unblemished flesh.

  Fully healed, he was then able to lay his hands upon the boar, using his Compost spell to defeat it by causing it to wither almost instantly. The topiary creature emitted a series of shrieking squeals as its body shrunk in on itself, belching out puffs of musty-smelling dust. When it was all over, a fresh healing pod sat there in the snow surrounded by the ruins of its body, replenishing their supply.

  “Nice toss there.” Thornton nodded at Penny as he stood and brushed the snow from his tunic. A huge tear in its side revealed that the skin beneath showed not so much as a bruise from the goring. “I wish I would have known the pods didn’t actually need to be eaten or absorbed through the digestive tract, before I….”

  He trailed off, but Penny understood he was back to expressing remorse about the way he’d butchered Gentry’s body. She internally scolded herself for being so annoyed with his whimpering.

  “I think we’re lost,” was all she said back to him.

  It was simple to mistake the topiary creatures and mimics for the only intelligent enemies in the hedge maze, but Seymour reckoned that meant ignoring the biggest threat of all:

  “This maze has got it out for us,” he explained to Jerome, who was still riding on Seymour’s shoulder with his prehensile appendage looped under his armpit. “I think it's running us in circles.”

  Jerome performed his signature pair of squeaky kissies, signaling his agreement with Seymour’s deduction, who stood with his hands on his hips, frowning at a curio cabinet which had half-emerged from an otherwise innocuous stretch of hedge wall.

  The cabinet protruded at an angle, held in place by the hedge, like a sliver slowly festering its way out of a thumb. Notably, the glass-front was still entombed within the shrubbery and Seymour could only see the plain, wooden backside, making it impossible to tell what was inside.

  Or at least it would have been impossible for most people, but most people weren’t employees of Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot. Most people didn’t own a pair of Gnomish Catalogoggles.

  Seymour’s goggles hung from the neckline of Nana Gring’s gown. He slid them on to view the curio’s details:

  “I knew it.” Seymour slipped the goggles back onto his collar and used both hands to massage his throbbing temples. Still in the body of Thorn’s Nana, the gesture looked very different than if he’d done it in his own. “I knew it – it's the same damn case.”

  He had come upon this exact cabinet three times now while traveling in a perfectly straight line. The maze was screwing with him, sabotaging his attempt to rescue Penny and Thornton.

  There appeared to be nothing special about the case. It was a simple, triangular corner-cabinet. It stood about as tall as Seymour.

  But it wasn’t at all lost on him that the teacup he’d originally found Jerome sitting inside may have come from this case. Probably had, even. Had it been swallowed by the maze sometime in the distant past? He recalled that the Blank Slate Tea Service in which he’d discovered Jerome had last been inventoried by a manager whose name he was starting to get sick of recognizing:

  “Oscar freaking Rusk,” he muttered in Nana’s Gring’s voice.

  Oscar Rusk – the same mysterious stranger who had sent a raven to deliver the letter which had ultimately led Seymour to this moment. The same Oscar Rusk who was apparently commanding the topiary army as his personal minions. Seymour resigned to finally bring the subject of Rusk up with Dragon Dan – if and when he ever got out of this maze. Chills ran up his spine then, whether from the winter-like cold or the eerie feeling he was caught up in something larger than he realized, he couldn’t be sure.

  He stood, hands still on his wide Nana hips, mind working to come up with his best course of action.

  And that was when he heard Penny scream Thornton’s name.