“Stone walls.” His tone is flat. As if I’ve asked the world’s most idiotic question.
“Keep being unhelpful, and I might just let—” I halt.A new question forms. “Wait. Who would try to kill you?”
As if in response, the air trembles with an eerie crackling sound, swelling into a roar.
I turn, my pulse hammering. The sound grows, hissing and snapping.
Then, from around the corner, a wall of fire surges into view. Flames, molten and furious, devour one of the stone paths, their light casting shadows against the ivy-covered walls. The heat slams into me, stealing my breath, curling around me like a living thing hungry for flesh. It moves unnaturally, deliberate in its hunger.
“Run,” Kaelzar orders.
And I do. I gather my skirts, still damp and clinging, and sprint toward the path on my right, vaguely aware that the hand I sliced against the stone doesn’t hurt at all. But there’s no time to check why.
Left. Right. Right—another turn.
The fire chases, licking at my heels. I run faster. I race along the stone walls, the fire hunting me, relentless, its ravenous glow painting the path ahead in shifting gold and crimson. My skin prickles, sweat slicking my back as exhaustion and fear twist like strangling vines in my chest.
Every breath sears my throat.
“There has to be water somewhere,” Kaelzar’s voice carves through the haze in my mind, as if he’s been speaking and I only now hear him. “Keep running.”
I am a fool to believe I could do this. An utter fool.
I should have taken Ryker’s offer. Even Rust Hollow would have been preferable to this race against death itself.
The fire snarls behind me, closing in. The heat licks at my back, blistering the air. I lunge around another sharp turn?—
—and barrel into something solid. Someone.
The impact is sudden, violent. A crushing force yanks at my entire body, as if the world itself has collapsed inward.
A breathless, suffocating void swallows me whole. There is no gravity, no direction, only a horrible sensation of being stretched, compressed, then flung forward.
And then—pain.
My back slams against the ground, the breath knocked from my lungs. My mind struggles to make sense of the wrongness in my body, the way my skin prickles as if I have just stepped through something I was never meant to.
The sky looms above, startling in its clarity.
The fire—gone.
The heat—vanished.
The suffocating scent of burning ivy—replaced by damp stone and fresh air.
For a moment, I can’t move. My limbs are sluggish, disconnected from my will. The world around me is too sharp, too real, as if I have been spilled into a reality I wasn’t prepared for.
My ears ring and my heart slams against my ribs.
I inhale, but the air feels thin, weightless, as if the atmosphere itself has yet to settle around me. What just happened?
I roll onto my side, fingers clawing at the stone beneath me, desperate for something solid, familiar. My stomach twists, my head pounding. The fire. The maze. The Challenge.
Where am I?
Someone is beside me. Crouched. Panting. My body tenses instinctively, and I try to push up, but my arms tremble under my weight. I blink rapidly, forcing my vision to clear.
Seraphina.
