To the Valiant Heart, no labyrinth is impossible. I believed in that motto, the motto of the Labyrinth Artificers. It was engraved throughout our guildhall, carved in stone above every alcove. How could my sister forget? When someone bought one of our labyrinths, when they emptied cubes out of a pouch and watched them expand into a portal, they trusted they would find the center and accomplish the quest if they tried hard enough. Our labyrinths taught people confidence. I wanted to remind Waven of that, jolt her out of her apathy, but I didn’t have the courage.

 

The guildhall echoed around us. Apprentices called for help, journeymen exchanged techniques, and masters murmured advice. Cubes clattered somewhere, followed by a chorus of delight. Only our alcove lay silent except for Waven humming softly, a wandering melody, each note a burst of fading sound, no tune I recognized. We used to sing together as we worked, all those years since I was an apprentice and my sister a new journeyman.

 

She was putting the last touches on a Grail Quest labyrinth while I sewed a pouch to hold the portal. Waven didn’t notice me helping, didn’t look up from her workbench cluttered with pots of glue, wild cucumber slurry, dozens of molds, and the labyrinth model, covered so I couldn’t see it. She caught the edge of the dust cover and flicked it, a fluid gesture. The linen billowed and fell again to give her access to a new section, while a curving fold hid what she was doing from me.

 

I pretended I didn’t care and focused on the pouch, stitching gut thread through the leather, making sure the inside was perfectly smooth. I worried that this labyrinth of hers would struggle, so I pulled the gut taut, like a string on a harp.

 

When the pouch was finished, I took a breath to tell her, then hesitated. Waven looked the same as before, graceful where I was stolid, her back straight, her arms and legs angular, her hair a wild tangle. I loved everything about her, or I had. She had an incomplete quality now, like an unfinished labyrinth, her gray eyes blank, her expression open, as if she were waiting for an answer she knew would never come.

 

“I’m making a Grail Quest, too,” I said, longing for the praise she used to lavish on my work.

 

She kept working. “Don’t tell me. There will be three choices.”

 

“Well, yes, but not three grails.” I leaned forward, eager for her to share my delight. “This grail is on a magnetic island, and you have to choose one of three boats to take you there.”

 

“And?”

 

“One is a sailboat with a compass, one is a vast ship, and one is a dugout canoe.”

 

“You choose the canoe,” she said. “The magnetic island confuses the compass on the sailboat and pulls all the nails out of the ship.”

 

I hunched over the pouch, stung by how easily she’d ruined my creation. “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” I asked. I’d been afraid to say it for a year. “Because you were my mentor and I failed you.”

 

“You’re not to blame. You asked me a question, and it crystallized something in me.”

 

“What question?” Tingling heat vibrated through me. A few words had ruined everything between us, and I didn’t know which words.

 

Waven fidgeted with the labyrinth cover. “You asked, What if I make a labyrinth that’s too difficult? You made me realize we’re hoodwinking people. We’re a sham, the whole Guild of Artificers.”

 

I tugged on the drawstring of the pouch, furious with myself. “If I’d known, I never would have asked.”

 

“This isn’t about you,” she said.

 

“Then why are you like this? We’re not a sham.”

 

Waven glided around the workbench to face me. She leaned her forehead against mine, her hair slightly sticky with sweat. “I’m sorry, Sheldelyn,” she said. “I can’t go back to how I was.” She crouched down and drew a scribble in the film of labyrinth dust. When she stood up, the moment of connection with me was gone. “I’m ready to invoke my Grail Quest,” she said. “This labyrinth will show you what’s wrong with our guild.”

 

I reached to pull the linen off her project, but she stopped me. “I want it to be a surprise.”

 

At least she still cared about me that much. “Here’s the pouch,” I said.

 

She looked at me with those gray eyes. “I’ve worked on this labyrinth for a year and I don’t want to lose it. A portal will crumble if there’s any roughness in the pouch.”

 

“You don’t need to tell me.” I struggled not to shout. “I learned that my first year as an apprentice. And if a portal is destroyed, you can never get back into the labyrinth.”

 

She nodded and slipped my pouch under the dust cover so it could harmonize with her Grail Quest. We faced each other across the workbench, and together we chanted the secret words that expand a labyrinth and settle it in the Wundra Realm.

 

A wrought-iron melody clanged between us. The labyrinth juddered, and the cloth fell limp to the table. She swept it away, and there was my pouch, bulging with the new portal. Waven snatched it up, loosened the drawstrings, and emptied it.

 

Glossy cubes, white streaked with gray, clacked to the floor. Two cubes bulged and expanded into columns, while the third stretched into a lintel. I stepped through the portal, through that weightless moment between our world and the realm of labyrinths.

 

I emerged into a marble palace. Airy chambers led into one another, and doorways opened onto tangled jasmine and honeysuckle, the scents drifting and mingling. “It’s beautiful,” I breathed.

 

Waven interlaced her fingers and stretched them open above her head. “Can you find the grail?”

 

“Of course.” I quoted our motto, hoping to remind her. “To the Valiant Heart, no labyrinth is impossible.”

 

“I wish that were true,” she said.

 

I pretended not to notice how our paths had diverged. Visiting her new labyrinth would give me a chance to find my way back to her. I set out through the cool palace, through moments of enervating scent and wedges of sunlight.

 

At first I moved eagerly, enjoying my route to the center, but as I took in what she’d done, I slowed. Goblets of wine sparkled on tables; vases adorned mantles; urns filled storerooms; sealed flasks lined shelves in the treasury; ewers and washbasins and chamber pots of golden liquid furnished every bedchamber; and bowls of soup steamed in the kitchen, where a cauldron seethed over the fire and dozens of pots and mixing bowls stood filled.

 

I stopped when I got to the storage pantry, stocked with containers of vinegar, milk, oil, and every imaginable liquid ingredient. She’d violated the rule for Grail Quest labyrinths. There had to be a destination, a place where the grail could be recognized and chosen. “Where is the center?” I asked.

 

“There is no center.” She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows, inviting me to solve the labyrinth.

 

The palace that had delighted me now seemed made of slippery floors, glaring surfaces, sickly perfumes. “You’ve got containers everywhere,” I whispered. “How can I tell which is the grail?”

 

“I made a thousand vessels; not one of them is the grail.”

 

“No,” I pleaded. “You’ve got to put in a real grail.”

 

“You know I can’t do that,” Waven said. “You can’t add a feature to a labyrinth once it is launched in the Wundra Realm.”

 

“You aren’t supposed to make a labyrinth with no solution. There’s always a solution.”

 

Waven quoted the motto back to me. “To the Valiant Heart, no labyrinth is impossible. That’s bunk. It’s easy to make an impossible labyrinth.”

 

It broke my heart, and a broken heart is not valiant. I stumbled back through the palace and out into our alcove. Before Waven came through, I scooped up the pouch and roughened the inside with my fingernail. Even as I did it, I wondered if I were destroying something more than the portal to a labyrinth.

 

My sister picked up the pouch and touched it to the portal. The labyrinth disappeared, and the portal shrank back into cubes. She dropped the cubes into the pouch, held it for a moment like a reliquary, and laid it on the workbench.

 

~ * ~

 

The next morning, I was working on my new labyrinth when Waven breezed into our sunny alcove. “I’m going in to make some last adjustments,” she said.

 

“Mmm,” I said, leaning over my new model. I poured in blackberry juice and stirred it into a roiling ocean, a snarl of interlacing currents.

 

Waven loosened the drawstring of the pouch I’d made for her and turned it upside down. Luminous dust hung in the air, drifted through sunlight, and winked out of existence.

 

“No,” she breathed. “You did this, didn’t you, Sheldelyn.”

 

I nodded. I didn’t regret what I’d done, but I couldn’t look at her. I’d never heard her so angry, and I longed for the easy companionship we used to share. “You’ve got to understand, Waven,” I said. “The guild promises labyrinths that will benefit people.”

 

“My Grail Quest would have done that. There is no grail in real life, and people need to know that. I believed in that labyrinth, traitor. Now no one can reach it.”

 

That word traitor struck home. I had betrayed the sister I loved, the one who’d mentored me in the guild. I tried to explain, quoting the Rules of the Artificers Guild. “Our labyrinths nurture fresh approaches, equip people to solve the problems they face. We provide impossible quests, but always a way to achieve them.”

 

“Then they’re not impossible, are they?” she shot back. “I’m finished here. I’m leaving the guild.”

 

I was so shocked I couldn’t speak. I’d done this, driven away my sister. Too late, I regretted what I’d done. “Don’t go,” I squeaked. “I’m sorry.”

 

“Sheldelyn, it’s not you,” she said, taking my hand. “You belong here. Someday, you’ll be a master artificer.” She twisted away. “I can’t stand it any longer, all the rules, the motto carved in stone over every alcove. My Grail Quest was impossible, but it wasn’t any more meaningful than the others. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I can’t stay here.”

 

I didn’t want to hear the despair in her voice. “What do you want, Waven? What would satisfy you? What labyrinth would bring you joy?”

 

Waven looked at me, really looked at me. “A labyrinth is always branching paths we’ve constructed inside a container we’ve made. I want transcendent vision beyond the labyrinth itself.”

 

“Those are just words. They don’t mean anything.” I pushed my model so hard the blackberry juice sloshed onto the workbench. “What exactly do you want?”

 

“I want more than a set of choices, possible or impossible. I want a window that looks beyond the labyrinth. Think about it, Shel. The Wundra Realm brings our labyrinths to life, but what is that place like? I want a window so I can see the Wundra Realm.”

 

“Alright,” I said, refusing to think about what she’d asked for. “I’ll find you a labyrinth that does that. And if I do, will you stay?”

 

“Yes, but you’ll never find one.”

 

~ * ~

 

I didn’t have time to make a labyrinth. That would take months, and Waven wouldn’t stay that long. There were hundreds of labyrinths in the storeroom, but only the guild masters were allowed in. I’d have to sneak in and hope I could find one that would work.

 

The six masters all dozed in their workshops after lunch. They laid soft rugs on the floor to be comfortable, and they always left their doors open so desperate apprentices or journeymen could wake them. The oldest master was hard of hearing. I knew she slept soundly from the days when I was an apprentice full of questions. I waited until she was snoring to creep in. If she woke up, I could pretend I had a question. Her key ring jangled as I removed the storeroom key, but she slept on. I lapped the key in my skirt and scampered away. I’d have to return it before she woke up.

 

I took a lit torch from a sconce outside the storeroom, then squealed open the heavy door and shut it behind me, panting in the stale air. I put the torch in a sconce and looked around me. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, shelves filled with labyrinths that had never sold. I imagined all the work, years and years, that members of the guild had spent making treasures no one wanted.

 

Then I saw my first labyrinth, shoved between two awkward pouches. It was a dollhouse for a child, and I’d made it when I was twelve. I’d imagined a child wandering through all the rooms to find the basket of candy. And all this time, there was no child. My dollhouse had sat here in the storeroom until the label blurred with dust. I wished I hadn’t seen it.

 

I read all the labels, trying not to touch them, but sometimes I had to wipe them off to read them, and the dust stamped grime into the whorls of my fingers. It was frustrating work, because I could tell from the titles that they didn’t offer vision beyond what they claimed: Gold-in-the-Creek, Camel Desert, Time Maze, Wizard’s Citadel. I looked at them all. No hint of a window.

 

I gave up. Somehow, I’d have to make my own labyrinth for Waven, because I couldn’t bear to think of life without her. I grabbed the torch, and as I lifted it out, I heard a clunk, something loose in the sconce. I reached in and pulled out a pouch, heavy with portal cubes, swinging on its drawstring. I turned it so I could read the label: Create-a-Window.

 

I gasped, then coughed because of the dust. This labyrinth was already launched in the Wundra Realm, and that made it immutable. An artificer could make adjustments but not add new features, and a window was definitely a feature. This labyrinth was impossible to achieve, and if Waven couldn’t achieve it, she couldn’t say with certainty it didn’t offer vision into the Wundra Realm. To keep her word, she’d have to stay in the guild.

 

I rushed back to the master’s workroom, and none too soon. The master was already snorting as she always did when she was waking up. I clipped the key back on her ring and hurried away with the pouch hidden in my skirt.

 

I dashed back to our alcove, ready to give the labyrinth to Waven, but by the time I got there, I’d changed my mind. I couldn’t bear to send the sister I loved into a labyrinth I knew nothing about.

 

~ * ~

 

I waited until Waven was asleep in the chamber we shared, her arms angled every which way, her hair tangled on her pillow, her breath humming in and out. I snuck out and tiptoed to our alcove.

 

By moonlight, I upended the Create-a-Window pouch. Two cubes thunked to the floor, dark green with crisscross patterns of silvery gray. The portal took shape, two fir trees, so close together their boughs combined into a screen like a wall. There was no way in.

 

The solution came to me: fir branches are flexible. I pushed through the boughs, my arms raised to protect my face, and found myself in a deep forest, where only a few scraggly huckleberry bushes grew under the canopy. It was early morning. A creek gurgled through moss nearby, and when I stepped across the creek, a deer bounded out of a thicket and ran away. I noticed a snag with a jutting branch, a good landmark so I could find my way back to the portal.

 

I followed deer trails, which always took the easiest route through difficult terrain. The trails formed a labyrinth, sometimes fading away and sometimes linking with other paths. It was hard going. Mosquitos bit before I could swat them, and I had to carry a stick to whack away cobwebs. I headed uphill because the center of a labyrinth is always the most difficult to access. I caught glimpses of a ridge above, but every time I tried to go uphill, a thicket blocked my way.

 

Finally, a path led into dense underbrush and disappeared. If a deer could break through the brush, so could I. I took a deep breath, clutched my sleeves in my fingers to protect my hands and arms, and forged through. Dry sticks scraped and snapped around me. I couldn’t see so I pressed on blindly.

 

When I stumbled free and opened my eyes, I was in a small clearing. A light mist hung in the air, and the path led through a break in the trees to a rocky slope. I scrambled up the boulders to a ridge, where I sat on a log to rest. I was hot and frustrated, and now all I wanted was to go back home and let Waven sort out her own problems. Maybe my heart wasn’t so valiant after all.

 

I was about to head back, when I saw a cinder peak rising red and bare farther along the ridge. That had to be the center. I was already tired, but I trudged toward it, then up the steep slope through scree. Porous burgundy rocks rolled beneath my feet so I slid back with every step up. I was panting and covered in sweat when I got to the top of the cone.

 

I stood on a circular landing, where I could see all around me, lakes and soft forests, glittering hints of streams, and distant mountains. Why would you make a window where there was already a view in all directions? That was the challenge, though. Waven couldn’t create a feature, but maybe she could build a window out of features already there. I stooped over and stacked one fist-sized cinder on another. It rolled off. She could bring pitch from the forest below to serve as glue. What she would have, though, would be a door, not a window. Even if she could build a structure with fallen sticks and bits of wood, it would never be a window. A window was a feature, so she could only make something in the rough shape of a window, not an actual window.

 

I felt guilty at the thought of sending Waven to face this tantalizing impossibility, but I steeled myself. This was exactly what it would take to make her stay in the guild. She would have to acknowledge that if she had been able to accomplish the task and create a window, this labyrinth might have offered a view into the Wundra Realm.

 

I felt queasy and told myself it was because I’d hiked up so far in the heat, not because I guessed Waven could never go back to how she was before, whatever vow she may have made to me.

 

I ran back down the cinder cone, giant steps that took me sliding ankle deep through bruising rocks while dust sucked moisture from my breath. I rushed on, stepping from one tippy boulder to the next down the talus slope, then squeezed through the thicket and wound down through the forest to the creek crossing and the snag that marked the portal.

 

I pushed through the fir boughs, wondering how long I’d been gone. Morning sun shone through the alcove window, and Waven stood looking at the portal, her eyes narrowed, curious.

 

“I found your window labyrinth,” I said. “You have to create a window at the top of a cinder cone. I can show you the way.”

 

“No,” she said. “I’ll go alone. I need my mind clear.”

 

I tried not to feel hurt. She saw me as a distraction, an opponent, not the partner I had been before. I wasn’t surprised she resented me. I just hoped we could go back to being how we were. “Alright,” I said, looking down at the limp pouch for her Grail Quest.

 

She took my chin and raised my head to look at her, her eyes warm. “Sheldelyn, if I don’t come back by sunset, come in and find me.” She hugged me, and tears blinded me. I heard the swish of fir boughs and she was gone.

 

I swept away the fir needles from the floor around the portal, trying to sweep away my guilt, and I tinkered with my new labyrinth. In the afternoon, I fell asleep on the cold tiles, exhausted from being up all night and my complicated worry for Waven.

 

~* ~

 

When I woke, the sun was setting and the fir tree portal still stood open.

 

I pushed through the boughs into a foggy morning. Was it always morning here? I picked up a stick for spiderwebs, and rushed along the deer trails, desperate to find my sister. Nothing went right. The paths seemed to have shifted, the fog was thicker than before, and I stepped on deer pellets and they smeared on my soles. There seemed to be more spiderwebs or maybe I saw them more clearly in the fog. I paused to admire one, perfect radiating lines with even bars between them. The web blocked my path, so I swished it away with my stick and moved on.

 

As I wandered, I grew more and more worried about Waven. She was skilled at labyrinths. She would have found the cinder cone hours ago, and it wouldn’t have taken her long to realize the futility of trying to make a window there. She should have come back.

 

It was midmorning by the time I found the right path, and I was scratched and sweaty from struggling through underbrush that led nowhere. I pushed through the dead twigs, and came out in the clearing, dark trees around a space of dead grass, soggy in the mist. I knew I was in the right place because I could see misty boulders in a gap between trees on the other side. The clearing felt peaceful, but I was eager to move on.

 

A spiderweb stretched across the path from a fir tree to a spruce, and from the ground to high above my reach, though I didn’t see the spider that had made it. It was utterly beautiful, lit by silvery droplets of mist, and it had a different structure from any web I’d seen. Instead of radiating strands linked by regular crossbars, these gossamer threads turned and twisted among each other like a labyrinth.

 

I didn’t want to destroy it, but the thicket was too dense for me to go around, and I had to find my sister. Waven must have passed here before the web was made, hours ago, and she hadn’t come back. She could be stubborn. Maybe she would keep trying to build a window out of cinder stones until her fingers were raw. I had to persuade her to give it up.

 

I raised my stick to slash away the spiderweb. Before I could strike, the web undulated like wavering fabric, from the center outward, though there was no wind. The center was an octagon.

 

The landscape seemed to shift around me as I realized the true structure of the Create-a-Window labyrinth. This hushed clearing was not a passageway. This was the true center, not the cinder cone, and somehow this web was a part of it. Whatever this was, no spider had made it.

 

I threw aside my stick, frightened at how close I’d come to destroying this labyrinth within a labyrinth. The web hadn’t been there before, and right in the center was an octagon window. Waven might have made it, but how? She couldn’t have added it the way you add a feature to a model.

 

Waven was nowhere in sight, but I felt she must be near. If I looked through the window, I’d see her, because a window allows you to see from one quality of space to another. I leaned close and peered through the octagon with one eye. Nothing changed. I still saw the misty rocks. I turned my head to see better, and my nose touched a sticky thread. I jerked away, and a sound like a harp resonated through the clearing, one round note, fading rapidly.

 

It reminded me of my sister’s humming, and I wished I’d noticed how beautiful that humming was when she was with me. All at once, I longed for Waven, longed for her just as she was, with all her violations of my order. I longed to tell her she could leave if she needed to, to tell her I finally understood. I stepped back a few steps and my eyes softened. In that softened state, I looked through all the interstices of the spiderweb, all at the same time.

 

The misty rocks faded. I stood among pools in an alpine meadow lit by sunshine. Greenery surrounded the pools, and wildflowers, indigo, gold, and vermillion. I took off my shoes, tied my skirt around my waist, and waded into a pool.

 

Waven stood beside me in the pool. Delight thrilled through the passages of my being, and I didn’t question where she came from. She splashed water up into the sunshine, and we both laughed as it fell sparkling around us. We waded from pool to pool, and the pools were soft and so were the grass and flowers between. We moved in and out of water with a rhythm like breathing.

 

For a time, the companionship was enough. Then I remembered what had brought me there. “Did you make the web window?” I asked.

 

Waven scooped up a handful of water and watched it slip between her fingers. “Yes.”

 

My technical training as an artificer came back to me. “It’s a portal then, not a window, since it brought me here.”

 

“It’s not a portal,” she said, reaching for me, holding my hand.

 

I saw blue sky through her. She was fading, almost gone. “Come back with me," I pleaded, clutching her hand.

 

The alpine meadow faded, the sunshine melted away, and her hand dissolved into mist. I stood again in the foggy clearing. I had never passed through the web, only looked from this side.

 

I touched a strand gently, and it resonated as I pulled away. My sister’s voice sounded in that chord. “Thank you, Sheldelyn.”

 

There was no room in my chest to breathe. “Let me pass through to where you are,” I pleaded. “Let me stay with you.” I rested my palm on the octagon to find connection with Waven through the window. A warm breeze brushed my palm, but no sense of my sister in the air from that other realm, though I knew she was near.

 

When I pulled my hand away, a cascade of melody flowed from the web, and her voice rang in a glissando. “Sheldelyn, you showed me how to get here. You can guide others, too, those who need this window into the Wundra Realm and have the capacity to see.”

 

In that moment, I understood what Waven had done. She couldn’t create a window, so she became one, a way to gaze through impossibility and find wonder. I let my tears flow, grief for what we had lost, but also joy. Waven herself was the visionary window she had always yearned for.

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