“Is this for real?” Seymour stuck out his tongue to intercept an outrageously huge snowflake fluttering down from above. “Well I’ll be damned. It sure is.”

  He quickly stowed the Hand Mirror of Automatic Grooming which he’d just finished inventorying back inside its display case. While reaching inside its hollow, his knuckles brushed against a thick, soft, carpet of moss. The interior of the display case had evidently grown an inner-skin of moss and tiny red mushrooms like the hollow of an old tree stump from an Oregon forest.

  He cocked his head. “That definitely wasn’t like that just a minute ago. What the hell’s going on here?”

  A blast of chill wind suddenly blew Seymour’s hair back and set his teeth chattering. The moisture in his eyes threatened to flash-freeze. He squinted down into narrow slits in order to shield them from turning into ice-globes. Still on his knees, he hurried with a fresh sense of urgency to collect the various hand mirrors he’d spread out on the floor – but they wouldn't budge.

  And he realized that the wooden planks he’d been kneeling on only moments earlier were now completely and inexplicably gone because the floor beneath him no longer existed and had somehow morphed into dirt or something like it—quicksand, maybe—and the mirrors were being swallowed. And then the case he’d been in the process of inventorying listed to the side like a sinking ship because the entire damned thing was also getting sucked into the ground now – and that was the exact moment when dread seized upon Seymour’s heart with a grasp colder even than the icy gale which had struck his face seconds ago.

  He scrambled to get himself standing upright, abandoning his work. There would have been little sense in trying to continue. Not only because the next handful of items he intended to scan with his goggles had just fallen into a quicksand trap, but also because the basket he’d been gathering faulty merch in for Ridley to repair was suddenly wrapped in dark green vines. The vines dragged the basket against the nearby wall – but it wasn’t a wall, not anymore. It had become a hedge of some sort, and the basket disappeared within its brambly vines. The entire area had come alive and—

  “Attention esteemed guests.” Euesbio was nowhere to be seen but his voice sounded to Seymour’s ears like he was standing right beside him. “Due to an impending extradimensional incident, the entirety of the third floor of the depot will close immediately and until further notice.”

  Eusebio’s disembodied voice droned on with further instructions, but Seymour found himself stuck on one phrase:

  “‘An impending extra-dimensional event’?” He couldn’t help but let slip a nervous little laugh. “Yeah, I better get back downstairs.”

  He turned to head out but reality was shattering all around him and the pace only quickened. Watching the heaps and stacks of miscellaneous merchandise disappear into the floor and the walls set him off-balance with a bout of sickening funhouse vertigo. He suddenly found himself standing in a long corridor, trapped between towering walls made from the brambly hedges. All along the corridor he saw curios and trunks and other assorted crap either sinking into the floor or being dragged into the hedge walls by vines which had come to life.

  He shot a quick glance toward the ceiling and swooned again upon realizing it had somehow opened up and above him now there existed only clouds in a night sky, swirling with more and more of those oversized snowflakes. A break in the clouds forced his gaze to follow, drawn there by the orange glow of a moon he didn’t quite recognize.

  “It’s too big. Too close, or something. And shit man, it can’t be later than three or four in the afternoon.” Seymour blinked and shook his head. “What the fu—”

  Movement in his peripheral vision caused his breath to catch in his lungs. Something had just flashed across the corridor, ten or fifteen feet off to his left; a shadow sprinting past. Whatever that thing had been, it moved too fast to be a customer. It could only be something terrible and hungry like one of those creepy-ass fast zombies in the movies. Seymour pivoted in the opposite direction and ran for his life. Stunned and scared as he found himself just then, he had no other choice.

  At first, terror blanked his mind, erasing his ability to think. But as he ran further and further and nothing caught him from behind, he regained his powers of reasoning and then his thoughts turned darker still. Was he caught in some kind of trap? Did it have something to do with the conversation he’d had with Ridley just a few hours earlier? He’d pressed too far and Ridley had seen through his pretense. But could the artificer actually do something like this? Rearrange the whole damn floor?

  His imagination spiraled out of control. Maybe he’d been caught inside some sort of illusion, instead. It could all be nothing more than a hallucination. He might actually be laying on the floor in front of that case of mirrors he’d just been inventorying, drooling and spasming and probably pissing his pants. That seemed more reasonable than Ridley possessing power enough to be the one responsible.

  “I mean, why would a dude with this kind of power be working as a glorified repairman in the back of a big box magic shop?”

  The sound of his own voice made Seymour feel better. More real. But it also made the hedge maze he’d become trapped within feel more real, too.

  “I’ve already run further than I should have been able to. So the floor has not only shapeshifted on me, it’s also grown – and there’s no telling how much bigger it is now.” He shook his head. “Freaking magic, man.”

  Having slowed to walk, Seymour glanced back over his shoulder, down the impossibly long hedge corridor. He felt relieved that whatever that shadowy thing he’d briefly seen had been, it didn’t seem to be after him. As his heartbeat slowed, his brain-function continued to improve:

  “If the third floor of the depot has somehow turned into some kind of labyrinth, they’ll come looking for me, right? They’ll have to. Eusebio will round up a team of adventurers from downstairs and they’ll come rescue me. And there have to be other customers stuck in here with me. The change happened so fast. They can’t just leave everyone trapped here. They can’t.”

  Those first few snowflakes had caught Seymour off guard and distracted him. By the time he realized that his workspace was rearranging into something else it was already too late. The experience had been so sudden and weird and traumatic that even though it had occurred only a minute or two earlier, the memory of it was quickly fading, thin and ghostly as a dream.

  When he suddenly spotted the entrance to some kind of shelter it felt too good to be true. Worse than anything, right then he wanted to find a place to hide out, to hunker down out of the snow while he waited for someone to come rescue him. And up ahead, where the corridor hit a T-junction and split off to the left and right, the man-sized rabbit-hole thing he saw on the hedgewall fit the bill perfectly.

  He crouched down and peered inside. It was a weird ass, low-ceilinged, grotto-like cavern that seemed to have been built from segments of display cases and shelves. The space within was no more than forty or fifty square feet and he could make out a stone archway on the far end of the space. It appeared to lead back out into more hedge maze. The blizzard was seriously raging, and Seymour couldn’t help but picture Jack Nicholson all frozen like a goddamned icecube at the end of The Shining, so he climbed through the hole and into the grotto.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Snowflakes swirled in through the archway set into the opposite wall, with some even beginning to stick to the stone floor within the weird cavern-like space. But aside from that, this area felt largely protected from the elements, and Seymour began to breathe a bit easier. In the center of the floor he could make out a depression—only a foot or two deep—that looked like it should have been a small pool. Maybe stocked with some koi fish or the like.

  But the water that should have been there had all evaporated or something, and there at the bottom of the shallow depression, he saw something bizarre. It was a small plant of some sort, sitting inside what appeared to be a teacup. It didn't belong here, obviously – the apothecary was one floor down and he’d been told by Eusebio that all things botany-related were Feshka’s business. During the hours he’d spent working on the third floor he hadn’t seen even one other plant – so what was it doing here?

  It might have simply been another piece of vegetation born during the floor’s transformation, but the way it was presented inside a teacup felt more intentional, somehow. Less organically random and more staged.

  The thing looked like some sort of alien fruit; leafless, smooth, and pale green. As Seymour crawled over to have a closer look, he quickly realized it was actually a small cactus with two distinct halves separated by vibrant streaks of red and yellow. All along those colorful streaks he could see thick rows of white spines which were so short and fine they almost appeared to be soft fur.

  “What are you doing here all by yourself?” he asked the cactus. It didn't answer. Seymour stooped and lifted the teacup, holding it at eye-level with its strange, succulent passenger just barely protruding above the rim, like dough rising in a bread pan. As he examined the teacup, his pinky finger extended out of reflex.

  The cup itself wasn't anything spectacular to look at. The surface was egg-shell white with a simple crest on the side, painted in pale green and yellow. The crest showed a wolf with its eyes closed, howling at the moon, framed within a border of leafy vines. But the simple cup which Seymour now held possessed a potentially scary effect, one which he was able to glean by capturing its schematic:

  He wondered for a moment if what little moisture had been present inside the body of the mysterious cactus had already been alchemized into a serving of Remember-Me-Not Potion. But he wasn’t going to eat it to find out.

  It felt safe for Seymour to assume that under normal circumstances, shop procedures would dictate he immediately take this thing down to the apothecary. That weird pink goblin-girl, Feshka, was certainly better equipped to identify this weird, alien cactus than he was. All he knew was that it seemed out of place, both on the former third floor as well as the new version – the blizzard-struck, impossible hedge maze that had somehow snuck up on him.

  Wind gusted into the grotto, bringing with it a squall of snow which plastered itself all over the skin of the cactus, collecting especially thickly atop the furry spine-strip which bisected its surface.

  Feeling oddly protective, Seymour wiped the snow away from the cactus’s skin. Except for a few wart-like nodules, its surface felt smooth as a melon and likewise cool to the touch. As he brushed the snow away he became increasingly fascinated, and in that moment it briefly occurred to him that he might be under the influence of some sort of magic charm and that this might be some sort of magical cactus – but his curiosity was too piqued to pay that concern too much heed. Carefully, he attempted to clean the snow away from the strip of spines – but not carefully enough.

  It wasn't that the fine, fur-like spines were so sharp that he accidentally pricked himself. No, something previously unseen had stabbed out to intentionally jab his fingertip; a thicker, fiercer spine which seemed to work like a switchblade.

  Seymour cursed and sucked his finger. Blood seeped inside his mouth.

  And then he saw bright red blood on the cactus quill, too – the secret one which had knifed out to attack him. He watched as it slowly retracted, sliding back down into the furry stripe where it had been hiding. As the blood came into contact with the fur-like bristles, they began to wriggle like an excited caterpillar.

  And the cactus—the entire thing—began to emit a subtle, red glow. As Seymour watched, the glow crawled up his arm and then melted straight through his shirt and into his skin. His heart thumped and his eyes tingled. When he turned his attention back to the cactus in the teacup, a sort of tooltip appeared – similar to when he used his schematic-gathering ability or the Gnomish Catalogoggles to analyze an item’s properties. It presented differently than either of those, though, in that this tooltip was written upon his mind’s eye in blood-red letters:

  “A blood pact?” Seymour wondered, and in response to his curious utetrance the blood-lettered tooltip melted into crimson ooze and rearranged itself to form an explanation:

  “What in the fu—”

  But before Seymour could finish his thought or ponder this blood-related weirdness any further, once more a sudden movement in the corner of his eye seized his attention. He snapped his gaze upward with the teacup in hand, pinky still fully extended, just in time to interrupt an ambush. On the other side of the grotto, not more than ten feet away in the stone arch which led back out into the hedge maze, a tiger crouched, ready to pounce.

  “A tiger,” Seymour cocked his head to the side and surmised, “but also not a tiger.”