#lortez

Series: Five Ways the Cardhouse Never Touched Avinlor - Masterpost Characters:

Cobweb - Maitos (one of mine - Avinlor’s apprentice)

Mustard Seed - Tsefida (also one of mine, although not a part of Avinlor’s story)

Moth - Alice (as herself - the/a central character of Cardhouse and the Cage)

Peaseblossom Flower - Anemone (the bitchiest star)

Yrgenzol - Avinlor (a denizen)

Logus, Jezebel, the Cardmaster (referenced); Oskyod (referenced); two unnamed stars

Notes: see this post for a lot more than you probably want to know about gender and the perception thereof in this fic

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Maitos, known as the Cobweb to the rest of his coterie, turned left as the corridor took yet another corner, and promptly spun up the wall and settled into the fork of one of the lower branches of a leafless tree. He was not altogether certain where the roof had gone, but he was willing to hypothesize that it was at least partly responsible for the floor's decision to forego being a useful structure and relocate to the bottom of a pit—assuming the pits here had bottoms. The rattling of a few last pebbles gave way to a series of small splashes, so the Cobweb supposed there was some kind of liquid not too far down the pit. Yrgenzol had said the labyrinth was old, but when asked to elaborate, he had not said 'ruinously-crumbling old', but merely 'old as balls'. The Cobweb supposed he should have made the logical assumption.

Yrgenzol had also indicated that their task required some degree of haste (though all the more care for that), but had the Cobweb's team all entered the labyrinth at the same point? No, they had not. Now he had to waste precious time finding the rest of his cohort and, apparently, dodging disagreeable pieces of maze. The tree seemed sturdy enough—more dormant than dead—so the Cobweb climbed higher for a better view.

From his new vantage, the Cobweb could see that the stone corridors were mostly subterranean, only appearing here and there, where either the dirt of ages had not yet buried them, or where the ground had partially eroded from them. In one direction lay something like a hedge maze—if the hedges were predominately briars and weeds—and some curious earthworks that overlapped partially with the stone tunnels. Off in another direction stood a grove of trees, gnarled and twisted, but decidedly unspooky. The Cobweb distrusted his instinctive trust of it. Climbing down, the Cobweb set off toward the bramble maze: something in that direction caused his fingertips to tingle in a familiar way that always made him want to sneeze.

He was just skirting the earthworks when the ground gave way beneath him again. He dangled, swinging, from the jutting edge, and then scurried across the ceiling to nest comfortably in a corner of roof and wall. Beneath him, a dense fog drifted about on the floor of the tunnel. Maitos had heard of bad air that sank to the bottom of hollows, but such things were supposed to be invisible. This fog was a sickening orange-black and would probably do something much nastier than merely suffocate him if he got caught in it. As he watched, it stopped billowing to and fro, and began streaming into the shadows down one arm of the corridor. At the same time, something poked the Cobweb in the side, and he looked back to the hole in the tunnel's roof to see the Mustard Seed peering over the rim of the hole, holding a stick in one hand and waving at him with the other.

'You look like you could use a hand up,' the Mustard Seed said, and poked at him again. The Cobweb took the hint and clung onto the stick. With a tug and flick, he was standing once more on solid ground and beside one of his fellow Stars.

'Thanks,' he said, and, 'do you know where the rest of our team are?'

The Mustard Seed shrugged. 'Knowing's not my concern: they'll come to me. You did, after all.'

'I wish them better luck than me. That's the second collapse I've triggered.' He nodded toward the hole, where the vile haze had entirely vanished. 'I wouldn't have thought I was that heavy-footed.'

The Mustard Seed frowned down into the open tunnel. 'I suppose I could have left you after all. Where'd it all go?' A girl stepped into view below them: a girl with feathered antennae, powdery wings, and a grin full of sharp teeth—several of which still had shreds of orange-black mist caught in them. 'Oh, of course.'

'Jezebel's,' the Cobweb muttered.

'Easy enough to see why Yrgenzol took you, Cobweb,' the Moth said. 'They say she was Fall once.'

'Fly up here, Moth, and take that back!'

'I am rubber, you are glue: whatever bounces off of me sticks to you!' the Moth sang back at him. 'You're not catching me today, Cobweb!'

'Stop dawdling, Moth,' came a new voice, and a Flower emerged from the corridor. She looked up at the Cobweb and the Mustard Seed and said, 'Boys,' with such venomous disdain that everyone present could hear the ugh, even though the Flower did not demean herself by uttering it.

Maitos was pretty sure the remark strictly applied only to him, since his teammate seemed to be a girl today as far as he could tell. The Mustard Seed simply flicked a finger at the two stars beneath them and the Moth and the Flower were engulfed in another cloud—dull yellow this time. In a moment, though, that too had disappeared, and the Moth was licking her lips. 'Delicious,' she smirked.

'Vermin,' the Mustard Seed grumbled.

The Flower sniffed. 'Yrgenzol clearly takes any riffraff she happens upon. I wonder what the Cardmaster will say when he hears her team is stealing our assignment?'

'Who's going to tell him, Flower? You?' The Mustard Seed laughed. 'You know better than that. You'll tell Jezebel, we'll tell Yrgenzol, and whoever's team doesn't complete the task will slink around the corners of the Cardhouse, scrounging for scraps of glory until they actually do something right. Come on, Cobweb. Jezebel's flutterbunch can keep their nasty tunnels. Give them a sense of purpose, maybe.' The Mustard Seed led the way toward the meeting of the bramble maze and the earthworks.

'Yrgenzol wouldn't actually steal an assignment though, would he?' the Cobweb asked his companion. 'Not generally, at least, and not from Jezebel since they're . . . well, since they have a loose rapport, I suppose.'

'Not generally, no, but I think she might—yes, alright, he might—if it were important to him. Personally, that is; not necessarily within the Cardhouse. Unless you're suggesting Jezebel stole from Yrgenzol?'

'Actually, I was thinking we'd been double-assigned. Possibly even more so, if a lot of teams really have failed at this before.'

'Hmmmm. I don't like the sound of that. Well, we knew we couldn't go directly (or we should have known), but we'd better pay extra attention to being devious now. We'll come up with something.'

Something turned out to be a sort of tunnel-bridge between the earthworks and the hedge maze that took them over an eerily clear, blue pond and into the grove of gnarled trees. At this point, the team had a very important debate over whether to call the territory the Non-, Un-, or Post- Haunted Forest. The Cobweb's suggestion—Familiarless Familiar Forest—had been eliminated early on. The trees had neither leaves nor needles on them, nor any at their feet, and the ground was bare packed dirt with not a sign of leaf mould or indeed that anything ever had decayed there. For all its unnaturalness, however, it kept reminding the Cobweb of something, though he was sure he had never seen a stand of trees anything like it. Once only did the Cobweb find any kind of foliage as he explored beneath the bare branches: a single leaf of a shape he had never seen—lobed and toothed—rich green in hue, with veins just faintly shading towards teal or turquoise. He watched it for a long moment, and when it seemed to be no more than just a leaf, he picked it up, and placed it gently in a safe pocket. Intellectually, he still did not trust the forest, or anything in it, but he was done with fighting the intuition that assured him there was nothing to fear.

Once the Post-Haunted Forest was appropriately named, the Cobweb and his fellow stars set about coercing its past into existence. This turned out to be a shrine, which made the Mustard Seed pout. 'Shrines in strange forests are just so cliché,' she complained. On further inspection, however, the shrine turned out to be a tomb, and the Mustard Seed brightened up again.

'What? Tombs aren't cliché?' the Cobweb asked.

'They are a logical extension, of course,' she retorted. 'Even so, elaborately crafted burial sites do not actually figure into literature and folklore to remotely the same degree.'

'"Fetch a rock,"' one of their companions grumbled. 'The entire thing is made of rock. There's a dozen fancy rocks inside of it. How do we even begin to test which one's right, if even the Cardmaster hasn't decided how he's going to use it?'

'If you recall, Yrgenzol said we were to fetch a stone,' the Mustard Seed corrected.

'Stone, rock, what difference does it make what he said?'

'Honestly, am I the only person who knows the difference between a stone and a rock? Stone designates a function or a purpose; rock is simply a state of being!'

'Yes, yes,' interrupted the Cobweb, who had learned the distinction from Yrgenzol some time ago, though he suspected that the Mustard Seed had been given the type of education that just taught people those obscure sorts of things. 'But even if we did somehow name-test everything, we still need to know what we're testing for. Even the structural stuff will answer 'stone' if we ask it about building.'

'No good arguing about it until we have a look,' the fourth Star said, which turned out to be the best plan possible. After a thorough investigation, the entire team unanimously agreed that the green disk, with rings like a tree slice and a jagged hole in its center, was the stone they had been sent to find.

'It's odd, though,' the Cobweb remarked. 'I would have thought we'd have run into Jezebel's team again.'

'Flutterbunch,' the Mustard Seed said, and shrugged.

In due course, they presented their stone to Yrgenzol, who congratulated them on having all survived the labyrinth and went to deliver it to the Cardmaster, leaving them to argue over how serious their patron was about their survival. Meanwhile, word filtered through the Cardhouse that Jezebel's team had also returned with a stone, as had Logus' and Oskyod's and—

'Enough already!' the Mustard Seed snapped. 'You were right, Cobweb. We were clearly all sent out, one against another.' The Mustard Seed managed to accept the eventual verdict that their stone was not the right one with minimal bitterness—probably, the Cobweb thought, because Jezebel's had already been declared false as well. Logus began to look more and more smug as time went on and one stone after another was rejected, until, quite suddenly, he was not to be seen around at all.

The Cobweb went in search of the Mustard Seed, and found him lying, belly-down, in the dirt of an unweeded garden. 'I don't think we'll see much of Logus or those stars around for a while,' the Cobweb said. 'Word is, their stone—discovered by the most systematic and precise techniques—blew up at the Cardmaster.'

The Mustard Seed laughed. 'Put a bunch of twigs in the dish of noodles, and what do you expect?' he said. The Cobweb laughed as well, and sat down beside his friend.

It was sometime after that (or, perhaps, not yet so late as Logus' disgrace) that Yrgenzol came to see the Cobweb where the latter hovered amongst the rafters. 'I believe that there is one other thing you found in the labyrinth,' Yrgenzol said.

Maitos started, but nodded, and carefully took out the leaf he had picked up in the Post-Haunted Forest—lobed and toothed, rich green in hue, with veins just faintly shading towards teal or turquoise. Yrgenzol stared at it, tilted his head, and stared at it some more. 'May I?' he asked, and Maitos nodded again.

Yrgenzol picked up the leaf and, holding it in the palm of one hand, traced the veins with the fingers of the other, and smiled at it.

Though wary of interrupting the denizen, Maitos presently gathered the courage to ask, 'This . . . this isn't what the Cardmaster was looking for, is it?'

'Does it look like a stone?'

Maitos knew a stone from a rock. 'It has a function.'

'If everything that had a function were a stone, then everything would be a stone.'

Maitos tried to piece that one out, but gave up and set it aside as a logic puzzle for later.