Yttain was deep in the maze. He wouldn't ever give up until he found his way out or went mad trying. Through the sweat and the prickly haze and the ragged determination, he thought and planned and drank deeply from a plain white basin.
Water-stops had been placed in strategic spots throughout the maze, just to keep you alive long enough to see how thoroughly twisted it all was. You'd go for days without seeing one, through vast red angular rooms with walls made of cannons, over seas of brisk, acrid water on a boat of ice (trying not to look into the depths, for there's maze there too, and eventually you'll come to it), up scalding ladders in the heat of a wanton boiler, and there you'd collapse, there you'd fall in a plain brown cave adorned with stained glass and sickly perfume, at last ready to die.
And as your final breath approaches and you concede to the maze a game well played, you see the twinkling of a shaft of light on a pristine white sink of water, and you realise with a dull thud that the game isn't over yet.
Yttain knew he must be close, because he'd seen so much of the maze, and how much could there really be? It was like something from a dream, as big as your attention wanted to make it. But it wasn't a dream, and the glistening red rocks he touched with his fingers, the mouldy, sweaty, electric taste in the air, the mechanical hum from a nearby room kept him from forgetting the sheer reality of it all. The maze was here, on Earth. The maze was on Earth. This maze is here, on Earth, and I am inside it. The maze is here, it exists, and I will never wake up from it.
“Yttain?”
Yttain woke with a start.
“Morning,” he said, after a while.

Shoeman, the lead, disembarked playfully from his wild, strong, imaginary horse and addressed the sherriff at a sling: “Gimme yem taxes!”
His dialect brought smiles and chuckles, to which he and the sherriff remained all but unaware. The latter winked at someone who wasn't there.
Shoeman demanded thusly! “Ere wit' us the Hive Stomach!”
He withdrew his map and flourished it to a plane. Flecks and specks! An aide had had it bodged together earlier, from some stackpile of wrinkled oddments.
It wasn't, in reality, Shoeman's Map of legends, but they knew it was if they made it it, and making it it they were. The sherriff nodded at the proxy Map. “Me s'”, he said.
Nearly fell over backwards did the sherriff, his eyes agog with mock astonishment, his brain asplode with busted preconceptions. “My eyes and face!” he went, a tad hammily.
And that was the end of Act One, because what you've just seen was in fact a play, by the Eyes of the World, the Cinema Company. Joey Dustcastle and Mitt Fletchers, the epoch of cool, the epitome of winning smiles. But they were decent folk, both of them, so all the audience liked them, not just most of them.

It had been a stormy year, full of moist leaves and angry skies. It was a time for fresh growth in the valleys, for rich soil and young thoughts. On a long peak, furrowed and sewn with starplants, the soaked wooden awning of a roundhouse dripped rainwater into the earth.
The city was far away, down past the gentle slope of the brink where the starplants flourished, past where the incline steepened and became clotted with glistening boulders and soggy bindweed, past the growing thickets and jungular canopes which ensued. The city was down in the valley, wet and wooden like all civilization here; light and low and of pine and oak; stream-powered, steam-powered and asleep.
It had been much too long since the lights in the sky last flashed; maybe worryingly so. Always there was a figure on a roof, in a street, maybe out in the crop, lying, watching the sky. Now that there was enough land for everybody, it seemed, it was all too easy to get lost.
A family congealed in a red woolen room with cushions in a corner and toastwood on the fire. Were the children excited to be here on the frontier? They were four and six. The children were excited to be alive.
The mother saw her fears shining on her children from her eyes, and the grandfather saw the stars. The open window and its rainy breeze continued to bring no news.
“I'm sure we'll hear from them soon,” he said, lying, watching the sky.
Who didn't long to see the lights again? They had all been so afraid to leave the others behind, they hadn't thought about getting left out here in front, alone with the forests and the rivers and the stars.

“Forests? Rivers? STARS?” said Papermate, peering down at his opponent's section of the board. These were valuable resources! The old warped playing board made the Joshlet an emperor of hills and valleys. Tantalizing star-squares nestled by a forest, impossible little patches of darkness encasing a spattering of shining points, dancing and winking in the safety of their master's territory.
Papermate nudged his intrepid bracketsman warily forward into no-man's land. His comrades looked on from their six-inch loggen watchtowers, ducking and peering beneath rigid cloth hats and soggy flags. Where were the Joshlet's little men? They had been around here, because there were patches of starplants in some of the squares, footprints in others.
Papermate's men were getting tired, though. “Okay, your turn,” he said.
The Joshlet had managed to amass a lot of techy little items, as usual. He'd had his men grind shovels from the rocks and dig them up non-stop, and he sprawled them in front of him, on the table near the board, in all their carefully sculptured tininess. A double-ended trumpet, a stack of yellowing scrolls, the obligatory generic green orb. He had about eighty of them in total, all tiny, all different.
“What does that one do?” said Papermate, pointing at what looked like part of a complicated scentific instrument.
“You'll find out when I use it on you,” said the Joshlet, not looking up, signing something for one of his men.
“But as for now, I shall be needing . . . this one!” He picked out a little red horn and passed it to one of his woodsmen who Papermate now saw had been watching him from inside a burberry bush for the past three turns.
The little man put his lips to the end and blew on it, and it gave a fierce note, albeit one scaled to his size.
The Joshlet's other woodsmen unfurled themselves from various greenery in front, behind and around Papermate's watchtowers, pointing gunspears and bow launchers up at their occupants. Papermate narrowed his eyes.
“You know, I don't think the real natives of Earthwood had gunspears,” he said, signalling to his men that the game was over. “Or the red horn of hiding, for that matter.”
“Sure they did!” said the Joshlet, smiling. His little men were walking off the board arm in arm with Papermate's blue uniformed invaders in what was coincidentally the direction of Papermate's wine cellar.

“A SEVERANCE” screamed a sign, and Mouldy Mildred had a stick! The line of workers went way back, down a gangway and up a geyser. Some had spanners and some had pens, but just this once they were in this together.
“So what company are you all from?” said the reporter, lounging for the cameras in her open-topped red roundfont, engine idling, heavy hatted butler at the wheel and pedals, sipping the news.
“We said!” said one in yellow with a streak, “we're not from a company. It's a general strike!”
“Just, you know, in general!” added a fat bloke with eyebrows. The tower block stood six hundred feet tall on self-righteous stepped supports, reaching in its corporate blueness up above whence it rained. Less stable were its many reflections, breaking and rippling in the drizzle. Half an hour later and the reporter was gone, off to chase bigger fish, and she was the last of them. But no news was good news, right?