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“What is that?” Ferrier asked, pointing at the door.
So it was real to her too.
Or the Labyrinth was lying to us both.
“I, er, shut my fear behind a door in my head, and now that door just sort of showed up to block the way.”
She slowed her sprint by slamming her palms into the very real, very sturdy door.
“This door is in your head? Then why am I seeing it and feeling it?” She pounded on it, as if my fear might open the door and welcome us both. Then she turned curious eyes on me. “Make it go away!”
“I…can’t.”
Ferrier’s odd grayish light, dim but brilliant in comparison to the pitch darkness, lit the heavy wooden door and cast a melancholy hue over the cobwebbed walls and mud-dampened tunnel floor.
“They’ll be here any moment,” she shouted. “Vera, you’ve got to remove this door!”
“What’s coming?” My voice was measured and unconcerned, clearly frightening Ferrier even more.
Footsteps, in the tell-tale thump-thump-thump-thump of cantering hooves, rounded the corner at the far end of the tunnel.
“The wraiths.”
I swallowed. Reason had little to offer this pronouncement, other than the utterly unhelpful advice to promptly find a way out.
I shoved my hands helplessly against the door. “I’m so sorry. I can’t open it. I don’t know enough magic!”
Ferrier stomped her booted foot and jabbed her finger at the door. “Yes, you do. I’ve never seen anyone manifest from their thoughts like this.”
In history class, we’d learned that mind mages of old, before and during the war, could make things appear—manifest things—simply by thinking them into existence. It was what nearly caused the king’s troops to lose, battling an army that could bend reality to their whims.
Ferrier whimpered. The charging sounds thundered closer.
“If you really did make this door, that is,” she grumbled.
There it was, the doubt. Maybe this door had been here all along, another test of the Labyrinth, not a manifestation of my thoughts.
Dark shapes draped in fluttering cloaks now clogged the tunnel where Ferrier had first appeared. They cowered against the ceiling, bent low over the necks of near-skeletal horses.
I should have feared the galloping wraiths. The locked door. My imminent death. But instead, I imagined that the door was simply on the other side of us, between me and the monsters.
Ferrier yelped and I inhaled in shock as the door blinked from one side to the other. Two breaths later, the wraiths slammed against the door.
The freestanding door in the center of the dark tunnel hadn’t left enough room for a human to squeeze past it, but the bone-thin arms of the wraiths reached around the wood with ease, and my jaw clenched at the notion that these creatures might have no trouble slipping past the door. But silver mist, illuminated by Ferrier’s magical light, rushed from around us and pushed violently against the fluttering cloaks of the wraiths, preventing them from reaching us.
Ferrier’s screams turned manic. She began to shake, her arms jerking as her eyes widened and she stared at the rattling door. She couldn’t see the mist holding them back.
Slavering sounds and hard thunks filled the small space as the wraiths—whatever they were—fought to shatter the barrier between us.
Even though I was now on the opposite side of the door—the door I’d assumed was the one holding my fears—no fear returned to my mind. I merely stared at the door, then at Ferrier. I sensed that everything was wrong, but there was a dullness in my limbs and in my mind as I tried to process our situation.
“We should go.”
That was the logical response.
It was odd not to be afraid of the sounds, so otherworldly, that curled around the edges of the door. Dark fingers tipped with fragmented black claws, reached through the mist toward us on either side of the frameless door. Ferrier’s breaths turned to ragged, lurching things.
She was losing herself to her fears.
