This place was cold and evil, like Sauron’s tower in The Lord of the Rings. I had that same feeling of being watched, the feeling that some sort of universal eye could see what I was seeing, could sense the innermost terrors of my heart and exploit them.

As I stepped away from the Gates, tall walls loomed on either side of me. They extended toward an overlook, where I could see the greater part of a city. It was as if I was looking into a valley from a high mountaintop. Beneath me, the city extended toward the horizon in a great recess of structures. As I looked more closely, I realized it didn’t resemble a regular city.

It was a labyrinth, a massive, interlocking puzzle of paths carved from cut hedges. It threaded through the whole of the city between me and the golden building that rose steeply toward the horizon ahead.

The building I needed to reach.

“Have you come here to face the labyrinth? Are you here for the games?” I heard a voice behind me, and I turned to see an unnaturally pale man, like the Keepers who had appeared in the Gatlin Library before Marian’s trial. He had the opaque eyes and prismatic glasses I had come to associate with the Far Keep.

Over his thin frame hung a black robe like the ones the Council members had worn when they sentenced Marian—or whatever they had planned to do, before Macon, John, and Liv stopped them.

Those were the bravest people I knew. I couldn’t let them down now.

Not Lena. Not any of them.

“I’m here for the library,” I answered. “Can you show me the way?”

“That’s what I said. The games?” He pointed to a braid of gold rope around his shoulder. “I’m an officer. I’m here to make sure all who enter the Keep find their way.”

“Huh?”

“You want to gain entrance to the Great Keep. Is that your desire?”

“That’s right.”

“Then you’re here for the games.” The pale man pointed at the overgrown green maze below us. “If you survive the labyrinth, you’ll end up there.” He moved his finger until he was pointing at the gold towers. “The Great Keep.”

I didn’t want to find my way through a labyrinth. Everything about the Otherworld felt like one gigantic maze, and all I wanted to do was find my way out.

“I don’t think you understand. Isn’t there some kind of door? A place where I can walk inside without having to play any games?” I didn’t have time for this. I needed to find The Caster Chronicles and get out. Get home.

Come on.

He slapped his hand against my arm, and I struggled to stay standing. The man was incredibly strong—Link and John strong. “It would be too easy if you could walk into the Great Keep. What would be the point of that?”

I tried to hide my frustration. “I don’t know? How about to get inside?”

He frowned. “Where have you come from?”

“The Otherworld.”

“Dead man, listen well. The Great Keep is not like the Otherworld. The Great Keep has many names. To the Norse it is Valhalla, Hall of the Lords. To the Greeks it is Olympus. There are as many names as there are men who would speak them.”

“Okay. I’m down with all that. I just want to find my way inside this one library. If I could just find someone to talk to—”

“There is but one way into the Great Keep,” he said. “The Warrior’s Way.”

I sighed. “So there’s no other way? Like, a doorway? Maybe even a Warrior’s Doorway?”

He shook his head. “There are no doors to the Great Keep.”

Of course there weren’t.

“Yeah? What about a stairway?” I asked. The pale man shook his head again. “Or maybe an alley?”

He was finished with this conversation. “There is only one way in, an honorable death. And there is only one way out.”

“You mean I can be more dead than this?”

He smiled politely.

I tried again. “What’s that, exactly? An honorable death?”

“You face the labyrinth. It does what it will with you. You accept your fate.”

“And? What’s the one way out?”

He shrugged. “No one leaves unless we choose to let them leave.”

Great.

“Thanks, I guess.” What else was there to say?

“Good luck, dead man. May you fight in peace.”

I nodded. “Yeah, sure. I hope so.”

The strange Keeper, if that’s what he was, went back to guarding his post.

I stared down at the massive labyrinth, wondering once again what I’d gotten myself into and how I could possibly get myself out.

They shouldn’t call death passing on. They should call it leveling up.

Because the game only got harder once I lost. And I was more than a little worried it had only just begun.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. The only way to get through this whole labyrinth thing, like most other crappy things, was to just get through it.

I would have to find a path the hard way.

The Warrior’s Way, or whatever.

And fight in peace? What was that about?

My guard was up as I stumbled my way down a staircase cut out of rock. I moved deeper into the valley below, and the stairs widened into layers of steep cliffs, where green moss grew between the rocks, and ivy clung to the walls. When I reached the base of the walled stairwell, I found myself in an immense garden.

Not just a garden like the ones folks in Gatlin grew their tomatoes in, out behind their swamp coolers. A garden in the sense of the Garden of Eden—and not Gardens of Eden, the florist over on Main Street.