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Faint lines in the swirling mist curled from the doorway to the center of the skeletal abbey, as if tracing the steps Ash had taken. He’d just been here. Other than that one aberration in the mist, the faintly sparkling water droplets hovered like sediment in a cup, moving as if being gently swirled by an unseen hand. Dizziness washed down my spine, and I forced myself not to panic.
A chill crept up my arms. My senses leaped into full alert, searching the shadows for men-stealing monsters. This place was a trap, designed to drive me mad.
The Labyrinth tests us.
It wanted to drive me beyond reason, to place me in a state so unrecoverable that I forgot my own name. The mages who had built this place, imbuing it with this incisive magic, were truly dreadful souls.
“You took him,” I said aloud, filling the too-quiet space with my voice. Talking to the Labyrinth didn’t feel strange, the way talking to my house would. In fact, talking to the Labyrinth as if it could hear me flooded my mind with an unexpected sense of superiority.
Mad people talk to walls, my reason told me.
“I’m not going mad,” I countered, though no one had actually spoken. “I am mad. I’m angry. You think you will break me.” For some reason, I knew the Labyrinth could hear me. If it had a sentience, a way of knowing my thoughts, I could decrease my fear of it by talking to it like it was no more than a tangible enemy—not some magical mentality that had swallowed me whole.
The mist danced and wobbled, unconcerned with my declarations. The pattern of its ramblings became apparent the longer I stood there. Nothing about this place was accidental. Every step of it was blanketed with magic.
“You think taking him will keep me from learning how to fight back.”
This thought buoyed me, and my shoulders lifted. Of course, this was why Ash had vanished. He couldn’t have just died in a breath as quiet as the wind. He’d go down blazing, arrows flying or blade thrashing.
I paused, cutting short a long exhale. I didn’t know anything about his family or what had caused him to start a war with the king or how he’d managed to live eighty long years as a prisoner in the maze he’d built, but I knew he wouldn't die without a fight, and that felt like far more intimate knowledge.
My parents’ faces flashed through my mind as the name Vera Rivers ran in my head. My last name, who my parents were, everything I’d believed about myself—none of that mattered in here. What mattered here was survival. Ash had helped me survive. And he knew I was a mage—not a quarter mage with spotty magic, but a powerful mind mage capable of slaying beasts.
In the span of a few short days, this place had upended the definition of Vera Rivers.
My brow knotted, and I glared at the finger-like mist and the leafless vines on the burned stone walls. I sensed the cadence shifting in the dance of the whirling mist before I heard the sound of wingbeats.
My hands went up a split second before a crow dove for my hair. Its tiny talons nicked my upraised arm. A thousand more poured down from the trees above, their black wings blotting out the afternoon sky.
Shrieking, I dropped into a crouched sprint, using my arms to defend my neck and head, and bolted for the exit. But the door wasn’t where I’d left it. I spun around, swatting and shouting at the birds—so many birds!—and searched desperately for a way out. Drops of blood streaked my forearms.
Through the encircling tangle of angry crows, the cracked altar drew my eye. It was the only thing in the ruined abbey not covered in vines. Beneath the crack in the altar was an open grate.
I yelped and darted forward, waving my hands like twin whips. How had I missed this before? My heart thumped madly in my chest. Ash hadn’t vanished, he’d gone down through the grate.
Spinning, I dropped to my knees. A crow’s body hit the side of my face and another slammed into my back. I hurried down the ladder into the dark.
Not a single crow crossed the threshold to the darkness below.
The chill that hugged my ankles and aching feet crept quickly up to my thundering heart and flushed face. By the time my eyes adjusted, I was shivering and gripping my outer arms with clammy hands.
Soft, damp dirt squished beneath my boots. Sticky thin spiderwebs clung to my arms, and as I stepped forward, one traced across my mouth. I swatted in a violent little circle, more scared of the unseen spiders lurking somewhere in the dark than I’d been of a murder of crows.
But if Ash had come down here, the spiderwebs would already be broken.
“Ash?”
My voice croaked, hoarse from screaming at the birds, but the sound traveled in front of me, indicating a tunnel.
I couldn’t see any fog in the tunnel, although it fell in heavy sheets from the opening above, coating me in a fine layer of moisture. How odd that the mist wasn’t real, yet it dampened my skin. I touched my forearm and examined the cuts from the crows’ claws. My finger traced a line in the water clinging to the hairs on my arm. And it wasn’t even real. Briefly, I shuddered to think that maybe I really was going mad. But Ash had said mind mages sensed magic in various ways. Maybe I could see and feel it. The air smelled damp as well, and it had since the moment I’d entered this awful place. Did that mean I could see, feel, and smell magic?
“Ash?” I called again, a little louder.
In the black tunnel ahead, only darkness waited. The darkness breathed out a frozen wind touched with the faint stench of rot.
I turned to grip the ladder once more, suddenly worried I’d made a terrible mistake.
The grate above me clanged back into place with a vibrating finality that rattled my bones. I hurled myself up the ladder, but as I’d feared, the grate wouldn’t budge.
