Architects
The Architects are the masters of the Flux Maze: rare and powerful beings who have learned to bend its geometry to their will, opening shortcuts for some and building traps for others. Two sorts are named, the Path-Weavers, who open and close corridors, and the Door-Keepers, who guard its exits.
Appearance
No two Architects look alike, and travellers who have met one describe it more by its effect than its shape: a tall figure of dust and shadow at the end of a corridor that was not there a moment ago, a voice from the stone, hands seen pressing a wall into a new angle. Most accounts agree on a stillness about them in a place where nothing else is still, and on the smell of crushed rock and hot metal when the Maze moves at their bidding. The grinding of the stone falls quiet around them, as if the Maze were listening.
Habitat and Range
They keep to the deeper, more unstable parts of the Maze, near its heart, where the corridors shift fastest. They are rare; a Maze may hold one or none.
Behaviour and Temperament
An Architect’s purposes are its own. Some help, opening a way for travellers who please them; some amuse themselves with traps; many do both by turns. They treat the Maze as a craft they have mastered, and visitors as material to try it on. Where the Stone-Walkers test a traveller’s fitness, an Architect is more likely to set a puzzle for its own satisfaction.
Abilities
They bend the Maze: moving walls, turning floors into stairs, opening doors in solid rock, and closing them behind. What the Maze does by itself, anticipating a traveller and blocking the logical way, an Architect does on purpose.
Life Cycle
Whether Architects are born to the Maze or are beings who came to it and learned its law is not known. The canny believe both: that some were Stone-Walkers, and some were visitors who stayed long enough to stop being lost.
Uses and Dangers
A traveller an Architect favours can be out of the Maze within the hour. One it does not can wander for years. Treasure-seekers after the hidden chambers, and the Stone-Heart said to lie at the Maze’s centre, deal with Architects if they can find one.
Lore and Belief
Masons tell of Architects as the first of their trade, who learned their craft in the Maze and carried a little of its secret out; the tale flatters builders more than it informs them.
Treasure-seekers fear them above anything in the Maze: their worst tale is of a delver band that an Architect walled into a treasure room, gold to the ceiling, with no door, and of the knocking heard in that part of the Maze for a year after.