I wanted to ask how they’d found their way again. How they’d made it back to this point at all. But something in the way Erindor stood, stiff and distant, told me the answers wouldn’t come easily.
Instead, I whispered, “I’m glad you did.”
And though he didn’t respond, I saw his hand curl into a fist at his side, a small, silent motion that told me more than any words could.
Erindor stepped forward at last. His voice was low. “What happened to you in there?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. What could I say? I gave the fire my fear, and it offered me truth? I confessed I was broken, and the confession revealed a path.
Instead, I said, “They didn’t make the maze to trap anyone.” They built it to test.
He stared at me, his eyes difficult to read.
Jasira was the one who finally broke the silence.
“You’re glowing,” she said softly. “You were glowing when you stepped through. Not just a flicker. Like the sun came to see you off.”
Gideon gave a nervous laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. “So, we’re pretending this is normal now? God’s trials and golden skin?”
“No one’s pretending,” Alaric said, his tone tight. “We’re trying to understand.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, more harshly than I meant to. My hands trembled. “I don’t know what it is. Or what it wants from me. I followed what felt right.”
Erindor was still watching me.
His eyes flicked to my hands, then to my face.
“You heard something, didn’t you?” he asked quietly.
I nodded. “Voices. One of them sounded like mine. It said, ‘You must give it freely.’ One must believe it. I heard the same thing at the canyon. The Singing Stones.”
The silence returned, heavier this time, not with judgment, but with reckoning.
Erindor looked away, jaw tightening.
Alaric stepped beside me and gently brushed a piece of vine from my hair. His voice when it came was quieter than I’d ever heard it.
“Whatever this is, Wyn, we’ll face it with you.”
His words settled something deep inside me.
But when I looked at Erindor, he was steadily shrinking in the distance.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Erindor
We emerged from the thorn maze bleeding, silent, and splintered.
The air had changed, as it always does in this cursed forest. Gone was the thick green canopy, replaced now by an eerie stillness, sharp like the breath before a scream. The sky above us boiled with gray-blue clouds laced with pale lightning, yet no thunder followed. Only a sickly silence.
The trail led us to the edge of a jagged ridge veined with crystal. The stone beneath our boots shimmered faintly, catching every flicker of cloud light like polished glass. Pale quartz and fractured obsidian glinted from the cliff sides, their edges jagged as broken dreams. This was Stormglass Ridge; I remembered the name now. A cursed place, according to campfire tales. A place where the land didn’t echo your footsteps, but your fears.
Wyn stumbled once, catching herself on a nearby rock outcropping. Her fingers glowed faintly, as if the magic in her blood responded to something. She didn’t speak. None of us did.
Even Bran, Alaric’s hound, pressed close to the group.
A freezing wind howled between the stone fangs. When it blew across the crystal seams in the rock, the sound changed—faint whispers, scattered syllables. I couldn’t tell whether they came from outside or inside.
