“Ray, get out!” Eva’s scream rips the air, yanking me from the frozen stupor.
My eyes dart to the left, where the voice came from, where Eva is now leaning away from a guard, who dutifully holds my friend back to prevent her from charging forward. She looks like she might tear free, terror has burned through her features.
I glance down at the slurry around me, the slick mass already knitting itself back into hard earth, and something cold and fierce uncoils inside me. Zyrel isn’t allowed to win. Not as long as I’m alive.
I stop thinking and start moving. I scrabble at the surface with both hands, clawing for purchase. Mud slips through my grip, but I claw anyway. I kick my heels, shove my hips against the hard edge that isn’t yet moving, and use every ounce of stubbornness and pain to heave upward.
But it's no use, each side is closing in on me, threatening to entomb me so fast, I can barely form a question in mymind.
Is the Spectra Judicium considered part of the Trial? Could he actually kill me now without consequence?
Just inches away, the paved stone is spreading, closing in on me.
I brace for one last push, one last attempt to climb free, when the stone slams into my back and wraps around my chest.
I am too slow, and now I’m being swallowed by the earth in the middle of the plaza. Even my magic lets out a powerful shiver through my bones, unable to get through the stone swallowing me.
And even if it could, I know I’d never release it, not with so many people in such close proximity, not with Eva and Ryker so close.
“You have no right!” I scream, my voice raw, my ribs straining against the crushing stone.
Zyrel chuckles, but I’m not looking at him. I can’t. My vision tunnels, locking onto the nearest Sibyl, the figure standing motionless just feet away. Her head tilts slightly, but she does nothing to stop him.
“You have no right to allow him to end me here! I am Calista’s Champion, and you said it yourself, I no longer belong to this realm. I belong to Calista!” My voice wavers, the weight of the stone constricting my chest.
“It is my duty to participate in the Trial, not to be buried in the ground by a cowardly fellow Champion,” I shift my glare back to Zyrel, forcing venom into my words, “who’s doing his best to rid himself of the competition even though I refuse to use magic out of civility.”
A murmur ripples through the crowd. Someone laughs, but it’s hollow. More watch in stiff silence, the thrill of spectacle fading as the realization settles in: this might not end in the epic demise they’d all been expecting.
Zyrel steps closer, placing a boot on the solid stone near my face.
“I am not scared,” he drawls.
“Of course you’re not scared,” I bite back. “It’s easy to be brave when you’re standing on the backs of the desperate. Let’s see how fearless you are when you fight someone who can fight back.”
“I am not scared of anyone,” Zyrel declares louder, “least of all you.”
The remaining sunlight dims too quickly as a slow, unnatural shiftspreads through the plaza. The lit flames in the torches waver, guttering, their glow paling as something unseen slithers through the air.
The whispers come first. Faint. Indistinct. Like a breath against the back of the neck.
Then the shadows tremor.
The change is so subtle that it takes the crowd a moment to notice something massive hovering over all our heads, blocking the light like an ancient behemoth.
But when they do, the reaction is visceral. Gasps break the hush. Someone stumbles backward. The faint scrape of hurried steps, boots shifting uneasily against stone. The plaza itself seems to exhale.
A gargantuan maw of living shadow yawns open above our heads—an abyss of fangs and spikes, each thick as the Bluewater River, writhing from its formless, dark mass. It blots out the sky entirely, as if a monstrous night had uncoiled itself over Calcatra.
A voice that is neither fully sound nor echo drifts ominously through the plaza.
“Oh, but you should be.”
Then the maw stretches wider, wide enough that, for a heartbeat, I almost expect fire, the way it’s told in stories of the wild dragons of the past. But what spews forth isn’t flame.
It’s thick, mucous-black and glistening, a gelatinous shadow that bursts from its throat and rains down in heavy globs. It slams into the ground with bone-rattling force, cracking the paved streets beneath us like dried clay under a hammer.
The fallen shadows continue to move like sentient things along the cracked stone, stretching toward the pit. Toward me.
