Chapter 31 The Echo #3
“You think you’re more deserving than I?” Lilara shouted, all composure now lost. “You think you’re more deserving, after what your magic did?” She spat the last part, startling Sage with its venom. She recoiled from Lilara. “It could not be so for me. Why should it be for you?”
The gallery doors flew open with a deafening bang that made Sage yelp.
She sensed a strange motion coming from behind her, sprawling out slowly from the depths of the gallery lanes and leaking across the floor of the main space.
It was a swirl of darkness that blew in from every side room, growing and growing on its approach until it engulfed the entirety of the room around them.
The dark cloud whipped up a freezing wind as it bled out into every corner, carrying a sweep of blackened rose petals in its wake that twirled through the room in a gust. Sage shielded her face, the outside air damp and ice-kissed as it rushed in.
She squinted, trying to understand what Lilara was creating—a form that threatened to swallow them both whole as it overtook the gallery.
As it settled, turning into a roiling mist of darkness and petals around her, the force solidified into more definite, structured shapes.
A stretching long lick of corridor wound ahead and through the rest of the gallery.
“A labyrinth,” Sage breathed.
The room had plunged into pitch-black, and such a cold chill that her breath plumed out in front of her in a white cloud of pure winter.
“So be it!” Lilara’s high-pitched cry rang out in echoes.
The cloak that Sage had cherished for so long billowed out behind her like a second shadow.
“Your prize, what you love most, always waits at the centre of the labyrinth, for better or worse. So meet your magic at the end, witch, if you love it so. Face it for what it is. Lose yourself to it forever.” Lilara threw the hood of her cloak back up over her head.
“A wicked soul will always be drawn to wickedness. May it be known I tried to save yours.”
Sage’s stomach had plummeted to somewhere near her feet. “Lilara, this has to stop. I have to—”
“Follow it!” Lilara had calmed again, the sing-song voice and chiming laugh returned to her.
She took slow, deliberate steps backwards, away from the entrance to the labyrinth, until her cloaked silhouette blended into the shadows and Sage could no longer make her out in the darkness.
“Magic has been at the helm of all your nightmares and yet here you are, still celebrating it, still glugging it greedily, an unteachable fool. Perhaps you’ll see the truth when it’s spelled out before you one last time. ”
Her voice, now a whisper, trailed away into nothing.
“Lilara?” Sage called out into the darkness. “Lilara? Wait…”
The old witch of Port Sylvan had gone. Sage turned back to face the labyrinth. The tunnel ahead looked impossibly dark.
For the first time in a very long time, Sage found herself wishing.
It was a wish that ached like a tender bruise in its longing to only be noticed.
A strange dichotomy, Sage thought to herself, that something of such precious and plain magic as a wish could carry so much weight that it physically hurt to acknowledge it.
Perhaps that was a thought that required further investigation with Casimir; the incomparable power held within the heart of a wish.
They would write a good paper on that—if she ever made it out of here. If she ever saw him again.
Sage rifled through her brain to steel herself the only way she knew how—with knowledge.
Labyrinths in fairy tales…The journey to the subconscious, the truest and purest form of self.
Trials to emerge from, facing fears and desires.
Maybe even a monster to be slain. Lilara had said that nightmares lay waiting but that love did too.
Sage had to make it to the heart of the labyrinth.
While shoving up her glasses and tucking a rogue ringlet back into her scrunchie, the final charm on the chain caught her eye. The final ambiguous silver swirl that she had remained unsure of: a labyrinth.
There was only one thing for it. She supposed she might as well.
She had a lifetime of making up for a distinct lack of wishes to work on.
Perhaps she’d earned a surplus, and it was almost certainly what Laurel would advise.
Her sister was a walking wish, her brother an abundance of trust, and her best friend, with all of his charm, was the jammiest fool she had ever encountered.
With all of that magic on her side, Sage wondered if she couldn’t possibly be rather lucky too.
With closed eyes and wintery breath blooming before her, Sage shoved back her curls and wished.
She wished on every star that she had ever borne witness to across her whole lifetime. All of the ones that she had wasted by keeping her head down, staring at the floor or explaining away with sombre facts about burning out and impossible, far-off distances.
She wished for her loved ones to be okay.
More than okay. She wished it so hard—that this tangle of a fairy tale could lead to their true happiness and that she could simply be there to witness them with it.
That was all she truly wanted. She wished that all of this pain would not have been for nothing.
And for herself. Sage even kept a wish for herself. She couldn’t ignore the prospect that after everything she’d been through and despite the mistakes she had made, she deserved one too. She wished, selfishly and hungrily and childlike, proudly calling to magic and hoping it would hear her.
“I wish for a happy ending.”