Last time on Solars, Yushuv wanders around on the road, gaining super archery skills and not understanding how fire works.

Now, back to the semibyssal.

Ratcatcher is making his way through the Labyrinth when a wild ghost appears! She’s pretty faded, but says she has news.

Ratcatcher looked around. The cavern he was in was relatively sedate, as far as the Labyrinth went. Twitching corpses dangled soundlessly from nooses hanging from the arched ceiling high above, but the floor was nothing more than cobblestones, and the walls were made of smooth marble.

I’m going to be picky here.

The Labyrinth is supposed to be a place of creepy horror, so this is decent, but…mundane. Let me quote the Abyssals book on the matter.

Most tunnels are composed of the same featureless heavy black rock, a granite-like stone that seems almost to absorb light, but some are carved or grown out of basalt, obsidian or other stones. In some sections of the Labyrinth, the tunnels are not composed of stone at all: Ancient bone, petrified tree stumps, tanned human skins and rusting steel have all been discovered, and a few sections seem to pulse with a life of their own, resembling arteries or other bodily organs. Some are dangerous: mile long tunnels with walls made of razor-sharp blades that spin on hidden pivots at the slightest touch or chimneys whose walls are composed of human arms. Others are merely odd: weird phantasms of iridescent scales or gently waving palm fronds.

So like I said, a very Silent Hill aestetic. And I’d argue that straight up corpses don’t belong in it. This place is supposed to be warped. A hallway of hanged men would be a nice touch for a deathlord’s own palace, but the Labyrinth is built out of the spasming twitches of the neverborn’s rotting minds. At least make them hanging from ropes made of their own braided skin or  something.

It’s not strictly bad…just uninspired.

Anyway. Ratcatcher figures that the twitching horrorshow isn’t that bad for the Labyrinth, so it’s as good a place to talk as any. What does the ghost want? And don’t call him master. It’s a dangerous thing to say here. …not sure why, since you know, Abyssal, servant of the neverborn. There’s very little in the Labyrinth that isn’t – any normal ghost that tries to travel around runs the risk of getting hit by the neverborn’s whispers and turning into one of their insane servants, and the other things populating the place are the ghosts of behemoths, which, if they’re intelligent enough to obey anyone generally obey the neverborn, and the nightmare phantoms of the neverborn’s dreams, which either act out their will or are just insane and murderous regardless of what title ghosts call you.

I mean, the neverborn are hardly a unified group, and conflict between their various servants is common, but no one’s going to object to a regular ghost being respectful toward one of the neverborn’s servants.

“You called me to service in the tomb beneath Qut Toloc. You called others to service, but they did not heed you, or deceived you. They knew of what you spoke, but lied to you. They serve another power now. I do not. I am loyal.”

This doesn’t make sense either on an internal level or connected to the larger setting.

Internally, if he summoned her, why didn’t she tell him what he wanted then? Did he not believe her because the others disagreed? Because from his irritated skull smashing it seems he could guess the other ghosts were yanking him around, and from the fact he’s an Abyssal he should be able to tell people are lying.

Settingwise…loyal? Really? “Loyal” ghosts are batshit insane. The neverborn are five thousand years dead by this point and even before then, humans were never particularly fond of the primordials the way some of the other, now extinct races were. There are a very few ancient behemoths and such that might say something about being loyal unlike the others who shifted allegiances from another power, but no human should be acting like the neverborn are what we owe our first loyalty to.

Few humans would be loyal at all. Not only we were never one of the primordial’s favored servants, but the neverborn now are an even worse proposition than their mutilated brethren – at least the yozi are capable of something resembling sanity, even if they’re alien and at least half mad from pain. They have a goal that’s more conductive to human life than killing everything forever and destroying all existance, and they’re bright enough to lie and make that goal sound even rosier when trying to get converts. The neverborn are just screaming threats and hate from their grave. Their recruitment pitch is killing you and everything you care about. Ghosts only serve them when they’re maddened by whispers or suffered so much that they convert to the idea the solution is to end existence – and those ones generally are going to go insane in short order because being around the neverborn is not conductive to long term mental stability.

Those ghosts spend most of their time running around in the Labyrinth being random encounters for travelers, fighting each other or pursing various goals that may be completely meaningless because they and the neverborn are both insane. That insanity is really all that’s keeping Creation halfway intact, really – the neverborn are amazingly powerful. That’s why the Abyssals appearing is the point at which everything is fucked – sure, they can act more easily in Creation than ghosts, but mostly, they’re sane enough to make actual plans.

And on both levels, what the fuck is she doing here and what was she doing there? The Labyrinth is an ever shifting maze, it’s not like you can easily track someone down in it, and if she’s an insane Labyrinth ghost she shouldn’t have been up in the tomb to start.

She says she’s there to tell him about the sword and the fact the boy was shown it, though she doesn’t know where it is because the others keep her out – this would imply she’s been a neverborn loyalist her whole unlife, converting to their cause the moment she died. That only happens to especially messed up people, and their resulting ghosts are further warped by the process. They aren’t even particularly human looking. To again quote the book – Mortwights lose much of their living form and usually devolve into long-limbed, sharp-taloned, skeletal figures that look to be made of glossy black jade. Not just a regular ghost who looks more faded.

Ratcatcher, for the record, shows absolutely no interest in the fact they were showing the boy things and that presumably this means the kid’s still alive. Instead, he bitches about how annoying it is that she could find him, because hell if I know.

The laughter of the hanged men drifted down from above.

…but we were told they’re “soundless”. Come on, book. It’s okay to change your mind but for god’s sake, is it so much to ask you go back and edit when you do?

Still, he figures that it sounds promising. It’s hard to follow this, in large part because we’re never actually told what the fuck he was doing down there besides getting lost. It seems here he had no idea there was a tomb at all, but as she doesn’t explain that it’s an awesome +1 sword, he shouldn’t know it matters now.

Anyway, he says to go back and wait for him there, and try to find out where the room with the sword actually is because he’s just a semibyssal and he can’t handle a few reluctant ghosts with just his ridiculously powerful magic powers, many of which are specifically designed to enslave ghosts, so he’s got to rely on the one helpful ghost leading him there.

Then it’s time to move on.

Memory told him that he should choose the one on the left, as the one in the center led to the realm of Rabark the Blossoming Contagion, and the one on the right led to pits of green flame that burned endlessly.

The pits are suitable. The other one, less so – the Labyrinth ghosts who rule patches feed their names to Oblivion as well, so they have the same sorts of titles, abet less ridiculously lengthy, not a name and a title.

The third path is the right way according to Ratcatcher’s memory, but the book makes it clear either he’s made a mistake.

Behind him the hanged men tittered and laughed until their nooses tightened and they choked in silence. Ratcatcher, had he known, would not have smiled.

Really, really clear. It’s a shame the book wouldn’t be more subtle here – had it only been a matter of the corpses giggling instead of this after going on about how his memory this and little did he know that, it’d have been hinted well enough without smacking you over the head with it. But then, if the book was competent at all it’d have edited out the bit at the beginning about the corpses being silent once it started going on about this.

It’s not clear why the book is so painfully obvious. I’ve mentioned that YA books can be less than subtle for understandable reasons, but this goes so far beyond a lack of subtlety into questions of who the hell the author is aiming at. He knows his book’s audiance is limited to people capable of reading, right? There’s a certain minimum intelligence involved. And he’s got violence enough it’s inappropriate for any precicious kindergarten reader.