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Thea stood at its edge, her heart trapped in her throat, her body and mind at the precipice of all they could endure. And yet the final trial awaited her, here on the frost-kissed shores, across the unfathomable sheet of ice before her. It groaned under the weight of an eternal frozen wilderness, and beneath it, blue hues shimmered like the spirits of broken souls.
‘A game of fate? Or a game of choice?’ came a quiet voice beside her.
Thea startled, spinning on her heel to see a familiar figure.
Anya, as a child, exactly as she had been on the night darkness had descended upon Thezmarr. A shiver raked down Thea’s spine.
‘What…?’ she murmured, dazed to find the girl not in some strange ethereal form, but living and breathing beside her, solid beneath her touch as she gripped Anya’s small shoulder.
‘A game of fate, or a game of choice,’ Anya replied, the foreboding words eerie in her child’s voice. ‘That is the trial at play. Will you decide your own hand?’
It was a strange turn of phrase, but not so strange as the scene unfolding before Thea.
‘So many choices,’ Anya continued, in almost a singsong voice. ‘Or have you already made them? Alchemist. Althea Nine Lives. Althea Zoltaire. Althea Embervale. Wraith Slayer. Guardian of Thezmarr. Shadow of Death.’
‘What is this place?’ Thea breathed as thick mist roiled on the perimeter of the lake and figures on the other side began to take form. She squinted, trying to make out their shapes – their faces – amid the fog, beyond the glare of the ice beneath the rising sun.
A garbled sound escaped her when she saw who stood there.
‘No,’ she whispered.
‘The Furies will it so,’ Anya told her, following her gaze across the glassy surface. ‘And so it is.’
Kipp. Cal. Malik. Wren. Wilder…
‘How the fuck did we get here?’ Cal stammered, squirming against the shadows binding him. ‘What the fuck is happening?’
He twisted in the otherworldly restraints, imploring the others.
But they were all equally shocked.
And all of them in the clutches ofrheguld reapers.
A reaper for each person Thea loved, the monsters’ talons poised over each of their hearts, shadows swirling around them, dancing at their mouths as though they meant to invade.
Even from a distance, Thea could see the fear etched on each of their faces. Fear and defiance and love. As though they had already seen the horrors about to happen come to pass. As though they had seen themselves, and her, lying broken on the ice; as though their fate was to join the souls beneath it.
Five reapers. An endless expanse of frozen lake before her.
‘I can’t save them all,’ she murmured, her gaze flitting from one loved one to the next, panic, like the cold, latching deep into her bones.
‘No,’ Anya agreed, her voice so mild it was cruel. ‘The real question is… Can you saveanyof them?’
Thea gaped, her heart stuttering, her knees buckling as she opened her mouth to protest, to scream, to curse the Furies themselves. ‘How —’
But younger Anya raised a small finger, pointing to three chasms of darkness that spanned the width of the great lake, punctuating the path to Thea’s family. ‘Those craters there are portals.’
Thea shifted from foot to foot as the mist seemed to encroach onto the lake’s would-be shallows. Across the sheet of ice, the shadows around her friends, her family, her everything, were multiplying. ‘Portals to what?’
Little Anya shrugged. ‘They’re created for those who oppose the Great Rite, so that they might enter whenever they wish and challenge warriors who seek their Warsword totems and Naarvian steel.’
‘They let monsters in?’
‘And others out,’ Anya told her. ‘They can take you elsewhere. Out of the Great Rite. To Death’s doorstep, to another plane, to nowhere. Only one way to find out.’
‘I don’t want to find out.’
‘So don’t cross the threshold.’
