And he was all that remained.

Here, trudging onward through an underground tunnel with his last ounces of strength.

And then, after nine hours of walking up that long tunnel, he turned a final corner and suddenly the tunnel ended at an ornate greystone archway with Thoth markings etched into it.

Beyond the archway, the path became a ledge that overlooked a wide and very long rectangular cavern.

As he took in the view and the shockingly complex maze that lay in the cavern before him, Jack said, ‘Oh, fuck me.’

JACK’S VIEW

The cavern that spread out in front of Jack was exceedingly long—many kilometres at least—and the maze inside it was of a size, complexity and difficulty that he had not encountered before.

It was a four-sided maze.

And it was mind-bogglingly complex.

Its floor, walls and ceiling were all covered with countless slender trenches—hundreds of them, all zigzagging at right angles down the length of the superlong space, cutting across each other or stopping at dead ends.

Each trench was wide enough for a single person to walk through but also deep enough to stop that person from peering up over the walls.

Jack’s eyes darted this way and that as he took it all in.

He had survived a diabolical wall-maze during the Great Games, but this, this was something else.

‘Four sides,’ he breathed. ‘Goddamn.’

That said, he had to admit it was eerily beautiful.

Hundreds of red orbs were mounted on its ceiling, floor and walls, bathing the colossal maze in a low maroon glow.

They ran away into the distant darkness like a constellation of crimson stars.

Cube-shaped structures made of white stone dotted the otherwise grey maze, rising up at irregular intervals from the trenches.

Each white cube had little slit-windows, making them look like World War II pillboxes or blockhouses, stout and solid.

That’s not a good sign, Jack thought. It meant this maze had a secret that was not likely to be pleasant.

At several places along the cavern, long stone bridges could be seen, only they didn’t span it. Instead, they crossed the space diagonally, connecting some of the white blockhouses with each other.

Waterfalls poured in beautiful streams from wide stone spouts up on the side walls. The water plummeted into the maze, no doubt providing some other deadly hazard.

Jack gazed up at the ceiling-trenches and suddenly he frowned.

Something was not right about them.

There was something he expected to see in them that wasn’t there, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He exhaled wearily.

The dizzyingly complex maze stretched away from him, vast and long, like train tracks converging on a horizon.

It would require all his mental energy to figure it out—