I wrapped my arms around my knees, noticing how thin they’d become over the past few weeks working with Seer Goddard. I didn’t feel strong enough for this, and it was only the first task. Mereminutesinto the first task.
I don’t know how long I stayed paralyzed in one spot, struggling to breathe, wrapped in a ball. The only sound was pounding silence. I’d never witnessed darkness like this, especially not in New York where light gleamed off every surface at every hour. This place felt like somewhere the Darkest Lord would reside, not me.
What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t move tons of earth to reach the surface. Brute force was not the answer. I’d fallen down a hole, or so I thought, but even that wasn’t certain. It could have been a magical portal to another planet for all I knew.
Light. I needed light to understand my surroundings.
I focused first on my breathing, recalling Seer Goddard’s words:just breathe. For days, I’d sat doing nothing but breathing. Hearing his words cemented into my brain now made sense, like he’d been preparing me for this very moment when even breathing felt impossible.
Once I stabilized my breathing, I began to hum. The sound came out of me softly, the tune familiar, though it was one I hadn’t thought about in years—not until I’d heard it again in The Glade. The lullaby from my ancestors. It had helped me feel less alone even as a child, and it helped me feel less alone now. Humming the tune on repeat helped me to get my mind off the sheer and utter darkness of the cave, to the point where I felt like, maybe, I could begin to move my body and find a way out.
Painfully, I peeled my arms off my legs and forced myself to sit in a more relaxed, cross-legged position on the soft, earthy floor. I ran my hands through the dirt, soft as sand, and focused on my breathing until it became a normal activity again, until every breath wasn’t a monumental effort.
The lullaby became a faint hum in the back of my skull; I wasn’t sure if it was me still thinking about it or if, like in the past, it was a little love note from my ancestors that they would always be there for me.
I let my hands sink deeper into the dirt, allowed my mind to reach out with tendrils of magic. I couldn’t isolate individual rocks like I had in my familiar stone circle. Down here, the earth was fluffy and loose, and I needed to move it like I moved water.
As I sat and focused on calming breaths, my hunting lessons with Silas floated into my mind. That was one of the only times I’d really accessed my magic without being in dire peril. I breathed deeply again, focusing on the sensations I’d experienced while hunting.
In doing so, I searched for those tendrils of magic I’d accessed when the kraken had attacked. As I focused, my hands began to glow. Holding my glowing hands in front of me, I rose to my feet and took a tentative step forward.
The feeling of hunting was helping me access my magic—the concentration, the sense of life or death—even if it wasn’tmylife at stake, necessarily. I used the glow of my hands to take in the underground labyrinth. That’s what I was realizing it was, a labyrinth of knotted tree roots and compact dirt. I needed to find my way out.
Moving tentatively at first, then more confidently, I searched for an exit. I told myself over and over again that even though I was surrounded by darkness and isolation, I wasn’t alone. My ancestors were pulling for me to get through this trial.
I recalled my training with Seer Goddard, which had supposedly prepared me for this very moment. As I moved deeper into the maze, skirting one dead end after another, a grounding energy flowed from the dirt through my body and out of my hands. For the first time, my magic came from calmness, not fear.
Using earth magic, I began hitting fewer dead ends, sensing the cold, hard walls of dirt before I traveled down those paths. I navigated by feel, not even needing the glow of my hands, for what felt like hours. Until finally, I glimpsed a pinprick of light ahead.
Relief surged through me, and I stumbled, then ran toward the exit. Growing more confident with each step that I’d made it. Hungry, tired, thirsty, and proud, I burst through a swinging wall of vines into sunlight and collapsed onto the grass.
Eventually, Liza found me. She collapsed next to me, put her hand on my shoulder. “You did it!”
“You knew about the trial,” I rasped. “You led me there.”
“No, that wasn’t me. I mean technically it was me, but I didn’t know where I was taking you.” Liza handed me a canteen of fresh, cold water, and I drank gratefully. “It was my mom. She told me to lead you through the vines.”
“Can I speak with your mom?” I asked. “It seems like she has a lot of information that could be useful to me.”
“No. I’m sorry, but you can’t.”
I hesitated. “Why not?”
“Because.” Liza shrugged in answer. “She’s dead.”
After some water and bread that Liza had packed for me, I was feeling a lot better. We made our way to the edge of The Forest together, and I reveled in the way the sunlight landed on my face. Never had I been so thrilled to be touched by daylight after those hours spent in a pitch-black maze.
“Your mom…” I said to Liza. “I didn’t know—do you have other family?”
“Yes.” Liza looked up at me with a placating stare. “You don’t have to start worrying about me now. My mom’s been dead since we met; nothing has changed. She’s been dead for a while.”
“Do you talk to her often?”
“I talk to her all the time. Mostly in my head. She doesn’t always respond. But lately, I feel like she’s been trying to get messages through to me.”
“Like the one about the trial?”
“Exactly.”
