No bright swords,
One bright crown,
To guide you through this endless night.
An involuntary shiver went through me. I stared into the forking passageways, but each glittered, urgent. There wasn’t even a suggestion of night, other than the scrap of darkness I’d left three turns back. I didn’t know what the riddle meant.
Unease weakened my muscles. I didn’t have time to linger. For all I knew, Gavin was speeding through the maze, drawing ever closer to the kembric Relic and with it, the throne. I read through the riddle once more, committing it to memory in case I needed it later. I tossed another scrap of shadow toward the floor and kept moving.
The labyrinth was littered with more puzzles and riddles—some so simple I doubted my own instincts, some so challenging they took longer than I could afford. And at each new puzzle and riddle and twist and turn, I scraped shadow from my heart to remind myself where I’d come from.
A room floored with the same tiles as the entrance to the maze—tiles etched with the Relic symbols. When I stepped on the first tile—a crown—it fell away into a molten heart of a distant sun, and I nearly fell with it. Then I remembered the order of those first tiles I’d stepped on—circle, sword, crown, sun. I followed those symbols precisely across the vast floor and made it to the far side.
A wall studded with pairs of colored lights. Each light brightened when a line was drawn to its pair, but if the line was broken or crossed, the light dimmed once more. I unraveled a tapestry of colored lines across the wall. The wall split in half to let me through.
Andriddles. Riddles on doors. Riddles to reveal passageways. Riddles to reveal more riddles. Every riddle felt personal—as though the Oubliettes had stared into my heart and stolen my secrets.
I am a warning you wish to shun,
I touch you and you come undone.
Ghostly fingers gloved in suede brushed my cheek, and I scented frost and pine on the air. The answer waspain.
I am nothing but a thief,
My price is joy; you pay in grief.
A voice I thought I’d forgotten spoke the answer to that riddle; a once mirthful voice made bitter with sorrow.We are all thieves here.And I felt what Thibo had felt when he’d lost Mender, what we’d all felt when we lost Thibo—loss.
You seek me though I weigh you down,
My burden lies upon your crown.
The answer was a hole in my chest long before I had the courage to answer it.Power.
I stepped through the door, exhaustion pulling at my footsteps. I stared at yet another identical wall of shimmering kembric before I saw the flaw, the shred ofwrongnesssouring my stomach.
A sliver of night. A scrap of shadow.
My glitter-numb mind caught up.No.
I squeezed my eyes shut, as though I might wish away the nightmare. But I knew that shadow like I knew my own mind—it was one of the illusions I’d left behind to mark my way.
Anger boiled up inside me. I’d been trying to solve this maze for what felt likehours.I loosed a strangled scream of frustration, lashing out to punch the living wall. The slab punched back. The impact jolted my arm and flung me backward. I landed in a heap a stone’s throw away, the wind knocking out of my lungs in awhoosh.For a long moment, I lay on the floor and gasped for air. And when I finally levered myself onto my hands, I was staring at a plaque set into the floor. A riddle—theriddle, the one I hadn’t been able to solve.
The Sun must now darken,
The Moon must not shine her light,
No bright swords,
One bright crown,
To guide you through this endless night.
Scion help me—what if I’d strolled right past the key to the entire maze? I rolled the words over my mind, but they made no more sense than before.Endless night—how could there be any kind of night in this incessant shine? There was nothing butlighthere.
I sat up. Maybe that was it. Maybe I was supposed to create my own night.
