Prologue: Joanna (Part 9)

Joanna was in a dream, a nightmare that had been her prison for several years.

In her dream, she woke up in a giant maze. The walls were several meters high and bore cracks which glowed a scorching red, with streaks of black smokey mists.

The obsidian rock that made the maze floor, was hot and rough and hurt as she ran barefoot on it. It had small pores that acted like geyser vents, hissing loudly before spraying jets of sulphurous scalding water.

She always woke up with one kind of weapon, or another, in her hand. Sometimes a cold weapon: a staff, a sword, a spear, a shield, a dagger; sometimes a hot weapon: a gun, a rifle, a cannon, and even an exosuit.

She was always running, running away from that thing. She'd met it many times, a giant upright bull, with a greatsword in one hand and a shield in the other. Sometimes it had armour, sometimes it didn't, but always it's skin was always made of rock, broken by lines that revealed hot molten lava underneath, emitting a choking smell of sulphur. It emitted an intense soul-crushing pressure and its whole body produced thick smoke and embers.

The twisted minotaur golem, would hunt her down and sadistically wound her before killing her.

With each death, she would wake up at a different location, but each resurrection split her soul in half as she'd resurrect in two different bodies. When an avatar died, two more took its place as that fragment of her soul was split in half once more. Very quickly she was spread thin.

It felt horrible to be divided so many times, and she could feel each and every part of her being tortured and killed again and again; she was certain there were more than a thousand different instances of her soul in the labyrinth, and each had its own demonic lava minotaur hunting her. Because with each death she would recovering memories from the fragment that died. And that happened many many times, like a constant waterfall of death and painful memories flowing through her consciousness.

Time was endless here and over the years she'd gotten really good at fighting, she'd had hundreds of opportunities to try and put up a fight against the monster. Eventually, she'd discovered she could wound it. She was getting stronger and faster, slowly but surely even at the cost of each gut-wrenching split of her soul.

Yet, she could feel a cold dark undercurrent behind the waterfall of death, something sinister was growing inside.