I turned a corner and stepped into what looked like a room, circular and empty except for a shallow bowl at its center. I hesitated, creeping closer to see that the bowl held water clear enough to see the stonebeneath it. Words crawled across the surface, letters made from light.
Choose what to keep. Choose what to lose.Fear crept up my spine. Choose what to lose? I didn’t want to lose anything. What did it mean?
A stone creaked behind me, and I spun to see that the entrance I had come through was now sealed. Two new doorways bloomed on the far side, identical except for the symbols burned above them. On the left, a wolf’s eye. On the right, a blade pointed downward.
What in the Hades? It was a test… or a trick.
‘What do I do?’I asked Valkaryn.
Before she could answer, movement in the bowl’s reflection caught my attention. The letters shifted; images replaced them. My mother’s hands, cracked and dry, kneading dough that did not exist. Sable’s curls, singed from fire. Tyrus, with a cut split across his knuckle, looking up at me with empty eyes. The Dregs under early light, tin roofs and clotheslines, and raining ash. My chest ached.
Then the images changed: Kaelric kissing me under the moonlight, dancing together as my family cheered behind us, hoisting their fists in the air; Mira running over to me to show me a new blanket she knitted; plates filled high with food.
Then it all dissolved, and the words were back.
Choose what to keep. Choose what to lose.
I was so confused. One barrage of images had been scary, full of all my worst fears. The others were happy, filled with hope.
I placed my hand on Valkaryn’s hilt. She thrummed under my skin as if she had a heartbeat of her own.
‘Say it,’she urged.‘Say what you already know.’
“I keep my people, love, food, health, and all good things,” I said out loud to the door with the wolf eye over it, “but I choose to lose my fear,” I told the door with the blade symbol hanging over head.
Upon my declaration, the wolf door opened like a held breath released, and the sword door turned to flat stone, impassable—just as the clock ticked off another fifteen-minute mark and Kaelric’s scream rent the air.
I burst out through the threshold of the open door and through a corridor. Wind came whipping at my face, cold and fast, tasting faintly of iron and snow.
‘I’m okay, keep going,’ Kaelric urged.
The labyrinth wall on my left rose high. To my right, a sheer drop fell away to a black void that seeped from the Earth’s throat.
‘Closer,’Kaelric said to my right, from the void.
‘What?’I inched that way.
‘Catch me, Brynn!’Kaelric screamed as I peered up frantically, my feet teetering on the edge.
‘Stop!’Valkaryn screamed, a pulse of purple light shooting out from my hip.
I froze, shaking my head as confusion washed over me.
‘It’s not him, child. It’s an illusion,’Val told me.
I swallowed hard just as I heard my mother weeping from the darkness below:‘Brynn, save me. They ambushed our train. We never made it. I need you to save me.’
“Mom!” I kneeled on my hands and knees, peering over the ledge and into the void.
‘Brynnie!’Sable’s sob came from the blackness, and I had the strangest urge to jump.
The clock above chimed again, and Kaelric’s scream was the only thing that brought me out of my trance. Another fifteen minutes had passed? How?
I peered up to see him still hanging on the stone pillar. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear anything.
‘It’s a trap. You need to run. It’s sucking you in,’Val told me.
Why couldn’t I hear Kaelric?
