Most gardens are recognizable by their array of flowers and other plantings, but whoever or whatever had named the Garden of Uncompleted Mazes obviously hadn’t set foot in it. What passed for sky was blackness, void. The ground was as smooth as some never-seen-before gemstone and resembled the surface of a petrified sea. Eleven crystal cubes, identical to the key to Alyss’ Looking Glass Maze in everything except size, were rooted in the curious ground, each at a single point so that they seemed to be balancing precariously. Even the smallest of the cubes was taller than Redd. Her Imperial Viciousness approached the one nearest her, reached toward its glossy surfaces and— Plink! Her fingers came up against its cold solidity. She punched and knocked at the cube’s six sides. Nothing. It would not let her in. At the next four cubes, she did the same—pressed and knocked on their sides, explored every sparkling cranny, every luminescent crevice in search of the lever or button that would provide access to her maze.
Then she realized: Her impatience had made her dim. Her key would be the smallest of the eleven, the one that had had the least time to grow. It was several spirit-dane-lengths in front of her. She started to run. Not knowing why or what she planned to do, she ran directly toward the cube. Fssst!
She was standing in her maze, her own face sneering back at her from the countless, dust-filmed looking glasses that surrounded her.
“I’ve come!” she yelled, the words ricocheting off the cloudy glasses without cease or loss of volume. Consonants jarred, vowels overlapped. The noise pained her ears, but what did she care? She would endure anything. She had made it this far. She would not leave until she had found what she’d come for. In every direction, mirrored corridors branched off into the maze’s dusky reaches. She tried to locate the scepter in her imagination’s eye, but her powers were useless. She would have to find it the old-fashioned way, by scouring every gwormmy-length of every corridor. “Not much of a maze, are you?” she muttered, because she had discovered that she could step through the looking glasses without consequence. It was as if she were in a giant room, the mirrored halls the ghostly residue of the intricacy it had once contained. “How dare you, when I’m smarter and more imaginative than you!” a girlish incarnation of herself hissed. The night she’d murdered her mother played out in a glass. But mostly, phantasms of the past kept to the edge of her senses, half heard, half seen. Then she spotted it, lying up ahead as if it were nothing but a useless stick someone had dropped in her hurry to leave. A once brightly colored staff, it had rotted black with age. The heart at its top was