Marx slowly settled into his new life in the nightmare that was the Rift. Each morning, he would wake up cold because he had removed the skinblanket from his bed the very first night of his stay. He would get dressed in the clothes placed at the foot of his bed every morning and make himself look somewhat presentable. After that came breakfast in the grand Dining Room with the Creature and a motley and ever changing assortment of monsters and corpses.

Breakfast usually consisted of horrible and bizarre foods, like giant, slightly-moving mushrooms and mystery meat that glowed green. There were usually some fried basilisk eggs, and things like batwing bacon and maggot roast. The maggot roast was a giant, foot-long maggot, twelve inches thick, still sort of alive, baked until its skin began to split, and served with the guts and face left on it. 

Marx avoided the maggot roast for obvious reasons.

After breakfast always came training. The Creature would leave the dining hall and order Marx to follow, leading him through the maze-like passageways of the castle until they either came to the huge, mostly empty cave the Creature called the Archaic Chamber, or the outskirts of the huge city surrounding the castle. It said the Archaic Chamber was the original cave that eventually was expanded and became the Rift.

If he was taken to the Archaic Chamber, Marx was forced to do a series of seemingly impossible tasks; such as stacking pebbles without touching them, travelling from one point to another without moving his muscles, escaping manacles and jail cells without any tools, or dimming the room when he didn't even know where the light source came from. The Creature would stand silently behind him or in front of him, offering no help or suggestions, just watching him struggle with a cold, empty stare. Eventually, Marx would get frustrated and accidentally complete the task, to a degree. With the transporting task, he would suddenly find himself way off from his target with no idea how he got there. With the escaping tasks, he would black out for a moment and find himself lying on the floor a few feet from where he was trapped.

If he was taken to the outskirts of the city, the Creature would make him run around the entire city before making him do a series of exhausting exercises. It was twenty nine miles around the city, and a nearly three hundred around the perimeter of the huge cavern that was the Rift. He never managed to run the whole thing without walking. After the exhausting run, he got a ten-minute break to rest and drink water. Then, he had to climb the rock walls of the cave, as high as he could go, until his limbs could climb no more and the Creature would transport him down. If he fell, the Creature would transport him three feet from the ground so he wouldn't break his neck, but he would hurt enough to learn that the Creature allowed no mistakes.

After hours of grueling exercises, when Marx could take no more and collapsed on the ground, the Creature transported him to his room to rest for a few hours. Lunch was always delivered precisely half an hour after Marx arrived in his room, and was transported away precisely one hour later. During his lunch hours he was locked, all alone, in his room.

Two hours after he was transported into his room, he would be fetched by the skeleton that called him Master Marx the day he arrived. It turned out his name was Thomas and that he was the first person to die after the Creature was locked away, therefore making him the Rift's first inhabitant other than the Creature itself. Marx called him Tom, and insisted that Tom call him Marx, but Tom always called him Master Marx despite his constant telling him otherwise. Tom would bring Marx to the Study, a tiny, cramped, very dim room full of ancient and evil books. There, he would find a list of things to look up and study for the next few hours; ancient spells, evil magic, terrible curses, and all manner of evil and corruptive things.

Then came dinner, again in the dining hall with the Creature and monsters, and occasionally the Creature would make a speech in its slithery, echoey voice, and Marx would have to stand at its side and occasionally even speak in front of the more important monsters and corpses.

He hated every minute of it, but then again, he didn't feel much of anything anymore.

Once dinner ceased, his free time came and he would always go to the city limits to just get away from it all before curfew forced him to return. There was a small cave a few hundred feet from the ground that he would climb to and spend his alone time in. It was there that he found a tiny bat two months after he arrived with a foxlike face and a thick ruff of fur around its neck. She had ruby eyes too big for her head and giant ears soft white fur in them. Her fur was a pale, rosy pink with tiny speckles of black around her eyes and on her wingtips, and her tongue glowed green and shot out like an iguana's tongue.

Marx befriended her by giving her some mushrooms and named her Hazelmere, after a bat in a book his mom had read him when he was little. She came with him wherever he went and kept him company, and when he was feeling sick from all the horrible things happening to him and around him, she would make him feel just that little bit better, just enough to keep him sane.