Page 101 of Seasonal Fears

“She’s not going to kill me,” blusters Trevor.

“Dude,” says Harry, flatly. “I can barely hold her, she’s so cold, and I’m incarnate. You’re just ascendant. If she touches you, you’ll shatter like a snowball against a wall. I don’t want to put that on her.”

Melanie pulls away again, and this time he lets her go. She stops after she’s gone a foot or so, looking at her hands with wide eyes. They’re still steaming cold, fingertips blackened and bruised with frost. She looks back up, at Harry. “Really?”

“Really,” says Harry. “I mean, maybe not. I wasn’t there when you killed that other dude. But I think probably yeah. It seems like the sort of thing this screwed-up system would do.”

Melanie looks beyond him to her sister, still crumpled motionless on the ground. A trickle of blood has run from the cut the rock made on Aven’s forehead, thick and dark and drying on her pale, pale skin.

“Is she dead?” she asks, voice hushed.

“I mean, technically, we all are,” says Harry, and has to bite back a gale of laughter that would definitely come across as inappropriate under the circumstances. “But she’s breathing, and I think she’ll be okay.”

He hit his head hard enough that he should be vomiting and seeing little green men from Mars by now, but he feels fine. Better than fine. He feels like he just woke up from a good night’s sleep, like he could run a marathon and finish an exam and play a solid game of football before dinner. He thinks it’s being this close to the Impossible City. He’s been feeling better than he should since all this started; why shouldn’t that feeling be magnified when they’re this close to the place that apparently powers and belongs to them all?

“Thank you,” says Melanie, and touches his cheek with her blackened fingertips. He shivers a little but doesn’t pull away, and her touch doesn’t burn. They balance each other. That’s not a way that she can hurt him. “I know neither of us knows her, not really, and she was trying to hurt you, but … thank you.” Her smile is quick and fleeting, there and gone in a moment. “She’s still my sister.”

“For now,” he agrees. “I’m not giving up my claim to the crown for her sake.”

It’s a cruel thing, to put it so baldly and out in the open like that. He feels it needs to be done as quickly as possible, because eventually, once they’ve claimed their crowns and taken up their places, she’s going to realize what his survival means. She’s going to realize that it was him or Aven, and he chose himself.

Telling your girlfriend you’re sorry you’re going to have to kill her sister should probably be harder than this, but given everything else that’s happened, Harry feels like this was precisely hard enough.

“I know,” says Melanie, and leans in, and kisses him.

Harry kisses her back, and for a moment, it feels like the whole world lights up in answer. Then he realizes the light is real, it’s coming from outside his body, it’s coming from outside his closed eyelids. He opens his eyes and turns.

The wall around the labyrinth is lit up like the Vegas strip, burning bright white and lambent against the darkness. The other candidates are rushing the still-closed gates, all save for the motionless Aven, who remains where she fell. Melanie pulls away from him, sliding her hand into his. “I think it’s almost time,” she says.

“I think so too,” he agrees.

The gates begin to unravel, the branches receding one by one, like the unweaving of a lover’s knot. It’s a slow, deliberate process, and it hasn’t stopped by the time the two of them finish strolling over to join the crowd, leaving the speechless Trevor behind.

Then the last briar retracts, and the gates are gone, and the labyrinth is open, and the candidates pour inside.

In the Dark

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 28TH, 2017: ONE MONTH TO SPRING, NEW MOON BETWEEN THE WORM MOON AND THE SPROUTING GRASS MOON.

Harry loses hold of Melanie’s hand as they cross the threshold into the labyrinth, and in an instant, he’s alone. Not apart from her; alone, completely and utterly alone, standing in a long hall formed from shaped topiary, with none of the other candidates anywhere in view. He turns. The gate is gone. The wall is gone with it, leaving only unbroken green behind.

Well, they told him it was a maze. Harry begins to run, until he comes to a juncture. In two directions, more halls of glowing green, waiting for him to charge headlong down them. In the third, utter and absolute blackness. He remembers something about the rule of lefts applying in labyrinths—always turn left and you’ll find the center, or maybe the way out. He’s not sure which, but he doesn’t have a better plan, and so he turns left and keeps running.

The next two junctures are more of the same, two green and open options, one square of void. He turns left each time, not slowing, scanning his surroundings for any sign of the others. The fourth juncture is the first to present a problem.

There, the left turn is the void.

Harry hesitates, shrugs, and runs into the black.

He emerges in a frozen forest, snow on the ground and skeletal, leafless trees in all directions. He doesn’t let the transition throw or disorient him. He just starts walking through the snow, eyes fixed on the horizon, already beginning to shiver.

He wonders if he’ll reach the forest’s edge before he freezes. If this is the forest Melanie talks about visiting in her dreams. If she’s here for him to find.

And just as that thought finishes forming, someone else—something else—moves in the trees.

It steps from shadow to shadow, indistinct and hard to focus on, like a being made of smoke or ashes. He stops walking and squints at it, watching as it comes closer, until proximity alone forces his brain to organize it into a shape he can understand.

It’s bipedal, vaguely humanoid, but long and skeletal and almost insectoid in its lanky, stretched-out alienness. It looks like something out of Star Trek. It doesn’t appear to have substance, but to be made from vapor and from glittering particles of snow suspended in the air. He knows it on sight. He’s been holding hands and sharing kisses with it, in another form, for the greater part of his life. It may not look anything like Melanie, but it feels like Melanie, and he knows this for the secret test at the center of the labyrinth, the one the attendants couldn’t warn him about or prepare him for, but that he really should have expected.