Within the demon city there is a clinking machine, an unfurling dungeon that spreads through whole layers with insidious cancerous tendrils of stone and darkness. This maze is a den of deadly traps, bristling inwardly with poisoned needles, scything blades, and worse. From its many dozens of maws this maze traps the demons of Malfeas in its never-ending, shuffling hallways.
This maze is the curse of Ayamra, whose strength is sufficient to break every curse but her own.
Adventurous demonologists write of the Maiden in the Maze with romantic flourish. They describe her as a demure and courtly beauty in belted linen gown of a barbarian princess from the Northern Threshold, with the head and thin tail of a white-furred cow, horns and ears decorated with fine jewelry of blue and white metal. Her dress is decorated in cream-colored embroidery that creeps across her skirts as herds of domesticated animals, some recognizable to humans and others strange and uncanny; extinct beasts once brought to heel by long-dead races.Â
She dwells in luxurious chambers at the center of her labyrinth, sometimes venturing forth to wander her maze in a futile hope to stave off her boredom, and an even more futile hope to escape. Ayamra cannot - her maze grows ahead of her, sprouting new chambers and worming deeper through the demon city. She is proof to its tricks and traps, and its treacherous obstacles do not hinder her. It is for this reason as well that she wanders, such that she might find those unfortunate souls who have fallen into her labyrinth and guide them to its center where they might stay with her for a while. She so desperately desires company, companionship, guests to entertain and friends to make.
None stay with Ayamra for long. Her maze is only inescapable to her, and those she entreats at its center will at some point desire to leave her company. Many who do promise to come back, and some even manage it, but Ayamraâs curse strengthens each time its boundary is trespassed. Eventually her friends will die on the blades and spikes of her maze, or else they will fail to reach her and grow discouraged, abandoning their quest entirely. It all amounts to naught. Ayamra is always left behind.
So it is a special thing, indeed, when Ayamra is summoned into Creation. Sorcerers call upon the Maiden in the Maze for the gift of her strength. With the weight of a world collapsed into a single point the Maiden of the Maze may test her might against the curses, ablations, prophesies, and oaths that constrain others. She has not yet met her match. The cost of her strength, for the sorcerers who wish to slip free of what constrains them, is a prison of a different sort. Her curse follows her, and upon her appearance takes root into whatever structure she is summoned. In Creation her curse alters space, turning summoning chambers and altar-rooms into the centers of new mazes of wicked, vicious traps. Creation is dotted with the former abodes of such sorcerers. Temples, towers, oubliettes, and fortresses of conjured stone now abandoned and grown cold, their hallways and chambers twisted into hostile networks of befuddling puzzles and deathtraps.
Ayamra cannot escape Malfeas herself, but her curse sometimes worms its way into forgotten ruins and lonely abodes. When a stone chamber has gone unentered by humans for a century or more, it may lengthen uncannily, pressure plates studding its floor like pox. A single misstep might open a concealed pit-trap, plunging a new arrival into the depths of Ayamraâs curse.
