The Maze of the Netherworld pt1

The Maze of the Netherworld pt.1

When I was around 8 years old my father, a warlock, was in the study reading out of his cursed tome. He was an arrogant man who thought he had everything under control, but summoning requires precision and patience. He would have my oldest brother George help him with his castings and alchemy.

I remember the day vividly that they made their gravest mistake and sent us all to a special kind of hell. My father tried to summon and bind a powerful demon, but he didn’t take the necessary precautions to protect the home. When the demon Mantus was summoned, he laughed, and spoke to my father. “You lowly warlock dared to summon me? You thought you could enslave me to your will? I will show you the true power of the netherworld”.

In a flash he teleported us into a new realm, and cut off my father's head. My brother George screamed “Get out as quickly as possible, before the portal takes hold of us all”. Me and my other siblings ran as fast as we could to the front door. We had managed to escape in time thanks to my brothers' quick wits, but we looked back and we were alone. Our mother had not made it out in time and had become trapped in that netherworld.

As we stepped out of the door, we were surprised to see our home was gone, and we were in a brand-new city. There was just a door to a warehouse staring back at us and we swore to never return there again. George raised me and my siblings, Danny and Layla, the best he could.

When I turned 18, George went off to live his own life. We didn’t hear from him for years and then I got an unexpected call. “Hello”, I answered, “Mathias, its George, I'm dying from cancer and I need your help”. I asked him where he was and he gave me the address to the hospital. I called up my siblings and had them meet me there.

What I saw was not my brother, but a mere shadow of his former self. He was sickly, pale and paranoid. He called us into his room and spoke softly, “I know we promised to never go back there, but I have a confession”. “I've been going back inside all these years to find mom, but the netherworld changes you, it corrupts your body and mind”. That damn fool had tried to pick up where my father had left with his magic, and had paid the price.

With his dying breath he told us this “Mom is still alive in there, I don’t know how but I saw her for a moment, you can still save her”. He passed shortly after that and we were struck with anger and confusion. “Why would he keep going inside knowing it was killing him” I asked, and my brother Danny responded “He was just like dad, always obsessed with the arcane and occult”.

We had a choice to make in that room and I asked what was on everyone's mind. “Do we believe him that Mom is still alive, and if we do what are we going to do about it?” My siblings agreed that he wouldn’t have made up such a story and we agreed to go back for 1 hour and explore, nothing more and nothing less.

We stood there at the door, there was no going back, and we had to be all in. Danny opened the door first and went inside. We followed shortly after, and we were back in that netherworld. It felt eerie and made my skin scrawl. Things were floating all around us and we weren't inside our home, but a giant warehouse with rooms.

As we walked through each room we were teleported to different parts of our house, books flying past us and weird eyeballs staring at us. It was just one giant maze and we had no idea where we were. My brother went off to do his own searching leaving me and my sister to stay together.

We walked form room through room always changing and shifting into something else. Eventually we made it into our father's study and there stood what looked like my mother. I cried and asked “Mom is that really you?” She replied with “Yes dear it's me, and I'm so happy you came back for me”. As I went to hug her, I noticed she smelled strange; she smelled rancid and rotten.

The closer I got the more powerful the smell was and I stopped in my tracks. “You aren't my mother at all I can smell you form here demon”. The demon laughed and transformed “I thought you were stupider than that but I guess I was wrong, now I'm going to have to kill you, painfully”.

I remembered what my father had taught me about binding a demon and asked my sister for help. Together we use our powers to bind the demon to us and to assist us. “What is your name demon”, “Bune”, he replied. “You are going to help us find our mother Bune, any information you have you will tell us”. Bune explained to us there about the netherworld we currently resided, the other demons higher on the chain than him and where he believed our mother was. Having now been bonded to us, he would die if we did.

He warned us of the time limit in the netherworld before our bodies started changing. Time flowed differently there, what felt like an hour was days and the slow poison of the arcane creeped into our bodies. We had Bune teleport us to the door and left with a plan to return someday when we had figured things out together.

When we exited, we found our brother Danny waiting for us and we told him of what we knew. We agreed to talk about this at a later point and went home, having been exhausted. What we didn’t know was Danny had decided to sneak back in, but left the door open before he left. Such a careless mistake he made and he knew better than that. Out of that sliver of an opening walked a changeling wearing the skin of Danny whom it had copied. He had let evil from the netherworld into our world and we were none the wiser.