I stared out the school window daydreaming when I was interrupted by the loud fwak of my teacher's ruler hitting my desk. "Dallas," She muttered as she ripped apart my drawings lying there, "Did you hear what I just asked?"
"Um... No?" The sound of laughter resonated through the classroom, and I knew I was screwed. "Probably nothing important." The laughter erupts again as I get slapped across the face. "Well," she said as she regained her composure, "Then why bother coming into class at all?"
Gathering my books and shoving them into my backpack, I flung it around and put it on my back, hitting Mrs. Grinngard with it in the process. "I guess you're right. Bye."
She tried to stop me, but I just pushed her out of the way. "What in blazes do you mean?!"

"Bye!" I closed the door behind me and strolled out to my car after slowly navigating the halls to avoid other teachers wandering around. Grinngard was always too much of a spineless wimp to report me. Pushing the key into the ignition and turning it, the car sputtered a few seconds before turning silent again. "Damn! No!" I tried again, but with no luck, and fifteen minutes later, I was still sitting there trying to make it start. One attempt later, I finally decided to just take the half hour walk home in the October cold.

Looking over at the old bowling alley as I passed, I noticed a pair of high end sneakers lying in its parking lot, and going up closer, I picked decided to pick them up. "Hmmm... do they fit..?" Other than the strange symbols and graffiti covering their surfaces, they're in great condition.
I took off my own shoes, and to my surprise, they fit perfectly. "Agh! Ow! What the hell?!" A strange tingling sensation went up and down my body, and they tightened around my feet like vice grips, pushing down on my feet. Everything around me started turning to thick black clouds, shots of red lightning shooting at me in the darkness. I felt strange pains going all over my body, and a terrible migraine made my head feel like it was going to split in half as two streams of blood began running down my face, and I clenched my eyes shut as I faded into unconsciousness.
"Wake up! What are you doing on the ground like that?!" Somebody was picking me up by the arms, and my eyes slowly opened up as I scratched the caked up blood off of my face. Wait, why was I even bleeding? Feeling up my head, I started panicking as I realized that a long pair of goat's horns had grown out of my forehead. "Wh-what is going on?!" Looking behind me, the man behind me also had horns, but he didn't seem so panicked. "What do you mean, 'what's going on?' I was hoping you'd know why you passed out on the street."
I picked myself up the rest of the way, and looked around. Where the hell am I?! The streets are all made of some kind of dark brick, and all these horned... people ride around in horse drawn carriages... but without a horse? "Are you alright?" he dusted off my denim vest, getting off all of the pebbles and dirt for me. "You sure are dressed strangely... Well, have a nice day sir." He tipped his hat to me and went on his way.

Everything around me is totally bizzare. Weird buildings that look like off they came off the set of Harry Potter, and horned strangers all around me in formal attire, minding their own business, as if a torchlit, stone sky was totally normal. Instead of being next to an abandoned bowling alley, I was standing next to a towering cathedral of some sort. The church bell rang and echoed out through the dark sky, startling crows as they flew away in frightened groups. "To your posts! To your posts!"

What I assume to be a priest's voice rang out from inside and hundreds of gargoyles poured out of its windows, swirling around the air in droves before finding their way to the edges of the cathedral's balconies, corners, and edges. It wasn't until one of them pointed a bony finger in my direction and shrieked that I realized that I hadn't even made a single step yet. "The boy! The boy!" Now they all had their attention on me, and not a single one seemed the least bit friendly. "Grab the boy!"
"Bring him to the priest!"
It was when I tried to run that I noticed a metallic clink, clink, clink coming from my shoes with every step and I realized that my shoes had somehow been replaced with knight's boots! Thankfully, the heavy metal plates that made them up didn't slow me down as I ran for my life, and they nearly felt as light as air, uncomfortable as they were.
But even with my new footwear I wasn't quick enough to escape and one of them picked me up by the wrist, lifting me up into the air with its vice grip. "The human-child has returned!" I tried fighting back as it carried me into the cathedral, but only succeeded in hurting myself because of its tough stone hide. "Let me go, freak!" Soon it dropped me in through a window, and my back hit the stone brick floor, nearly knocking the wind out of me.
As I struggled to my feet, an elderly man in a white robe helped me up. "It seems my gargoyles have brought you here..."

"No, really? I just wanna know what's going on! One second I'm putting on a pair of shoes, and the other I wake up in some kind of gothic fantasy garbage dump and I'm getting picked up against my will! So why is all of this happening?! And what was that thing talking about, 'The human-child has returned'?!"

The priests eyes went wide and he grabbed me by the shoulders. "You- You're from earth?!"
"Yeah?"
The old man took me by the hand and pulled me into a room separate from the empty sanctuary. "You- you need to come with me right now! We need to go somewhere that no one else can hear us..." Once inside, he pulled on one of the books on his bookshelf and pulled open a hidden door, revealing a dimly lit staircase made up of dusty planks of brittle looking wood. "Are those stairs safe-"
"No time to hesitate! Now follow me!"
He pulled me down them nearly too quickly, and one of the steps even collapsed under my foot. "Watch your step!" At the bottom of the staircase, there was a final steel bolted door, and he retrieved a key from his robe, letting me before closing it behind me. "How did you get here?!" I went to scratch my head, but the new horns got in the way. "The last thing I remember was putting on a pair of weird shoes and..." I pointed down. "Now I'm wearing these weird things."

"Wait. Those... those boots! They belong to our Mayor!" His voice had a panicked tone. "What's so scary about a mayor?" Now, he started pacing around the room, rooting around the clutter on the scattered desks as if searching for something. "This is bad. This is really bad! If somehow the Mayor has figured out a way of crossing into the earthly realm, then that could mean of whole number of-"

"What's the deal with this mayor?!"
"He's the one in charge of this whole town... but he's also its creator. We weren't always demidemons."
"Demi-what?" He picked up a satchel from under an enormous stack of drawings and diagrams, and put it on his shoulder. "There's no time to explain! Somehow those shoes are attached to his plan, but I'm much less concerned with understanding his plans than I am with stopping them!" Leading me to another part of the room, he opened up a door as he took a lit torch from the wall.
"In the church so far, there has only been one demidemon to cross the Threshold between our realms, but he's been resting in the lower levels of the catacombs for centuries..." He descended down the next flight of stairs behind the door. "We'll have to navigate the sprawling Labyrinth of the Church and awaken the Horned God so that he may help us return you to your home! He's the only other one who has ever donned such a suit of armor!"
Upon reaching the bottom of the staircase, we found the first hall, lined with occasional cells with barred windows, some containing shambling corpses whose bony fingers poked out between them, groaning out for a taste of rotting human flesh. "What are those things?!"
"We call them the guard dogs," he said quietly as he led the way through. "because they can always sense the presence of one who doesn't belong here." As we passed one of the cells, one of them stuck their face between the bars of its window, biting a piece of my shirt off. "Ah! Shit!" 

A few minutes later, we finally came to a dead end, and with a wave of his arm, a new door appeared. "The reason we call the catacombs a labyrinth," he said as he opened the door for me, "is because it's not just a part of our structure. It's its own living entity; shifting and changing constantly, shedding rooms and corridors like dead skin. If you want to stay alive, we MUST'NT be separated!"

For countless hours, I followed my strange and twisted new mentor through an endless maze of traps and dangerous rooms full of enticing illusions, going down deeper, deeper, and even deeper into the darkness, until we finally reached the lowest levels of the catacombs.
"This," he said, is where we must rest ourselves. Beyond these levels are dangers worse than those before. Our minds must be as sharp and well rested as possible."
My body shook with a start, and my eyes opened as I awoke, though now I found I was no longer in the dark halls of the Labyrinth of the church, but standing in a vast open graveyard. In the distance, I saw a small crowd of people gathered around the twisted trunk of a dead tree. "Hey! What are you doing?!" Walking towards them, I soon realized that hanging from one of the tree's few branches was an armored corpse, suspended in the air by the neck with a thick length of barbed wire, a burlap sack obscuring his head, with two holes for his horns to peak out. "Hey who is-" My vision blurred as I felt a strange force grabbing my body, like freakishly huge hand attempting to pick me up. Now my movements were completely restricted, and I felt myself being dragged into the middle of the crowd and in front of the hanging body as it swayed in the incredibly strong wind.

"Beware the priest!"Suddenly the wind picked up, whipping at my body and his like a series of angry punches, ripping the sack from his head. Somehow my mind has blocked out most of the memory of what exactly I saw, but the shifting forms, shapes, and bloody stitches were beyond the understanding of my human perception. The sight of them filled my chest with deep feelings of dread for some unknown fate, and they filled me with a terror that ate away at my sanity.

"Dallas! Wake up!" Another strange wind began pulling me away from the hanging figure, and by some strange instinct, I grabbed his horns, its small spikes digging into my skin. "Remember," I heard, "That priest is not to be trusted!"
He shook my body, waking me up as I found myself back in the reaching confines of the Labyrinth, streams of cold sweat running over me. "Are you alright, Dallas?"
I shook my head. "Dallas? I don't remember telling you my name..? And yeah, it was just a dream..."
"Never mind that! If we wait too much longer, the Mayor might catch up with us! I would have allowed to rest longer, but I was suddenly startled when out of nowhere, I felt his aura!" Pulling me up to my feet, he rushed me to a dead end of a hall, where a twist of his fingers and a flick of his wrists conjured a new door, which opened up to reveal a stairwell. "Just one more level and we'll have made it to the Horned God! He'll give us the help we need!"
The following mass of twists and turns were safe at first glance, but every step we made towards this supposed god, the more I felt the same mind-melting fear I felt in my nightmare. Could they be connected? As we fought our way through ravenous insects and he disarmed more traps, my dread for meeting what I should have considered as my savior from this hell increased, until we finally stood before an ornate sarcophagus resting against a wall, surrounded by ornate, yet unlit candlesticks.

"Here," he said as he handed me the torch, "Light the candles." As I went along lighting the candles, I watched the old priest over my shoulder as he began to open the sarcophagus, chanting in an ancient language I had never heard but easily comprehended. "Awake, Horned God! I seek your counsel!" a sudden gust of wind rushed through the room, blowing out the candles and even my torch. The familiar grip of an enormous hand wrapped around me, dragging me towards the clinking sounds of a suit of armor, and a pair of leathery bare feet sweeping against the floor. "It is I, the God of Horns. You have a awoken me from my slumber. What is the nature of your need?"

I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out, as if one of the strange hand's fingers were covering my mouth. In the darkness of the room, the old priest was completely unaware that something was wrong with the god. "Horned God! Somehow the Mayor has found a way of crossing the Threshold!"
A howl of laughter rang through the room. 

"You old fool! You brought me straight to him! I AM THE MAYOR! I COULD CROSS THE THRESHOLD BECAUSE MY NECROMANTIC ARTS HAVE TAKEN OVER YOUR BELOVED SAINT'S CORPSE!"