Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“I don’t know if I’m strong enough,” I said, tears slipping freely now. “But I’ll try. Even if it breaks me.”
The words left me like a blade drawn too fast, sharp, and painful.
And then—
The altar lit.
Golden fire bloomed from beneath my palm, soft and alive. The flames didn’t burn me.
They held me.
Cradled me.
The vines sighed as they drew back like curtains. The thorn-covered roots curled upward as if bowing in retreat.
And the path ahead unfolded, it revealed a straight exit, lined with glimmering moss and light.
My breath came fast, ragged.
I looked down. The scratches along my arms glowed faintly in the firelight.
The glowing moths floated ahead once more.
So, I pressed my hand to my chest, feeling the warmth that lingered like a heartbeat that wasn’t my own.
The moment I stepped through the last arch of thorns, the world felt louder.
The wind exhaled, and the trees appeared to lean closer. The air tingled with the scent of crushed moss and copper, sharp and clean. I blinked against the light—soft gold clung to my skin like morning mist, fading but not gone.
They were all waiting.
Alaric stormed over, his jaw tight, his eyes blazing.
“Princess Wynessa of Elyrien, what in the gods’ names—” His voice broke off as he took a complete look at me.
Jasira covered her mouth. Gideon dropped the satchel he’d been packing.
Erindor didn’t move.
I glanced down at my arms. The scratches were still there, but something shimmered around them, faint golden traces where the fire had touched me. The light hadn’t vanished completely. It lingered beneath the surface, as if it had made a home there.
No one spoke.
I shifted awkwardly. “I…I found a way out.”
Finally, Jasira cleared her throat and stepped forward. “It closed behind us after you vanished. I tried to follow, but the path folded back on itself. I shouted until my voice cracked.”
A tight grimace etched Alaric’s face as he nodded. “I tried cutting through it. The vines bled. Then they regrew twice as fast. Bran panicked. Gideon threw rocks.”
“I threw one rock,” Gideon muttered. “Maybe two.”
Jasira ignored him. “We each ended up walking in circles. Different circles. It was like the maze split us apart, made sure none of us could reach you.”
“It wasn’t built for escape,” Erindor stated, not turning around. His voice was tight. “It wanted to break us apart first. But you made it out.”
His words dropped like stones into the quiet.
I wanted to ask how they’d found their way again. How they’d made it back to this point at all. But something in the way Erindor stood, stiff and distant, told me the answers wouldn’t come easily.
Instead, I whispered, “I’m glad you did.”
And though he didn’t respond, I saw his hand curl into a fist at his side, a small, silent motion that told me more than any words could.
Erindor stepped forward at last. His voice was low. “What happened to you in there?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. What could I say? I gave the fire my fear, and it offered me truth? I confessed I was broken, and the confession revealed a path.
Instead, I said, “They didn’t make the maze to trap anyone.” They built it to test.
He stared at me, his eyes difficult to read.
Jasira was the one who finally broke the silence.
“You’re glowing,” she said softly. “You were glowing when you stepped through. Not just a flicker. Like the sun came to see you off.”
Gideon gave a nervous laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. “So, we’re pretending this is normal now? God’s trials and golden skin?”
“No one’s pretending,” Alaric said, his tone tight. “We’re trying to understand.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, more harshly than I meant to. My hands trembled. “I don’t know what it is. Or what it wants from me. I followed what felt right.”
Erindor was still watching me.
His eyes flicked to my hands, then to my face.
“You heard something, didn’t you?” he asked quietly.
I nodded. “Voices. One of them sounded like mine. It said, ‘You must give it freely.’ One must believe it. I heard the same thing at the canyon. The Singing Stones.”
The silence returned, heavier this time, not with judgment, but with reckoning.
Erindor looked away, jaw tightening.
Alaric stepped beside me and gently brushed a piece of vine from my hair. His voice when it came was quieter than I’d ever heard it.
“Whatever this is, Wyn, we’ll face it with you.”
His words settled something deep inside me.
But when I looked at Erindor, he was steadily shrinking in the distance.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Erindor
We emerged from the thorn maze bleeding, silent, and splintered.
The air had changed, as it always does in this cursed forest. Gone was the thick green canopy, replaced now by an eerie stillness, sharp like the breath before a scream. The sky above us boiled with gray-blue clouds laced with pale lightning, yet no thunder followed. Only a sickly silence.
The trail led us to the edge of a jagged ridge veined with crystal.
The stone beneath our boots shimmered faintly, catching every flicker of cloud light like polished glass.
Pale quartz and fractured obsidian glinted from the cliff sides, their edges jagged as broken dreams. This was Stormglass Ridge; I remembered the name now.
A cursed place, according to campfire tales.
A place where the land didn’t echo your footsteps, but your fears.
Wyn stumbled once, catching herself on a nearby rock outcropping. Her fingers glowed faintly, as if the magic in her blood responded to something. She didn’t speak. None of us did.
Even Bran, Alaric’s hound, pressed close to the group.
A freezing wind howled between the stone fangs. When it blew across the crystal seams in the rock, the sound changed—faint whispers, scattered syllables. I couldn’t tell whether they came from outside or inside.
The ridge ahead constricted, a stony bottleneck forcing the path to dwindle.
“I don’t like this,” Jasira muttered, breaking the silence.
“This place watches everyone. And sometimes, it shows you what it sees,” Gideon said grimly.
We all looked at him.
“There’s a story,” he said, scanning the terrain. “During the old wars, a mage tried to trap her enemy’s nightmares in stone. Thought it would drive him mad. Instead, it bound every fear she ever had into the ridge itself. And now it leaks. Into anyone who crosses it.”
Wyn’s voice was soft. “And no one destroyed it?”
Gideon shrugged. “How do you destroy fear?”
I said nothing. My hand rested on the hilt of my blade to ground myself. Steel was real. The feel and weight of it. The sound it made as it sliced through the air. Fear couldn’t take that from me.
But as we moved forward, a chill sensation crept over me, like the feeling of stepping into a stream and finding it was far colder and deeper than anticipated.
The crystal walls rose around us like jagged glass teeth, catching the faintest light and bending it until it fractured. The narrow path twisted like a serpent’s spine, carved from a mirrored stone that reflected us too closely—every blink, every breath, echoed back at odd angles.
Each step felt like venturing deeper into the mouth of something ancient.
We moved in quietly. Boots scraped over stone. The sound echoed longer than it should have. The deeper we went, the heavier the air became—not with heat or cold, but with memory. A weight behind the eyes. A pressure in the chest.
At every turn, the reflection shifted. Sometimes they showed us as we were. Sometimes…they didn’t.
My reflection paused when I didn’t. Smiled when I wasn’t.
Gideon suddenly stopped, freezing mid-step, one hand twitching near the hilt of his blade.
I moved next to him. His face had gone pale, drawn tight around the mouth.
“Gideon?”
His lips parted. The words came like breath pulled from a wound.
“I’m back,” he whispered. “Northfield. Siege of Almarrow. The fires…” His voice cracked. “Gods. I hear them screaming again.”
He wasn’t looking at the ridge anymore. He was staring through it, into something I couldn’t see. His eyes were wide, not with fear—but with recognition. Memory. A battlefield carved into bone.
“They’re burning. I smell the oil.” His voice cracked, the words choked out as though the smoke still filled his lungs. “The barricade fell—no, no, I got them out, I did—” His hands curled into fists, shaking.
“Gideon.” Jasira grabbed his shoulder, firm. “It’s not real. You’re here. With us. Look at me.”
He blinked. Once. Twice. Then nodded—short, fast—but didn’t speak again. His jaw tightened as he forced himself to take a step forward, then another.
We kept moving.
But the ridge observed us.
And we stared right back.
The next bend in the path narrowed, barely wide enough for one at a time. Glass spires jutted from the cliff like ribs, catching the light in sharp, unnatural ways. I heard someone behind me whisper, but when I turned, no one had spoken.
And then I saw her.
Wynessa.
Standing at the far edge of the ridge, haloed in flickering firelight. Her dress torn. Blood streaked down her arms, her face, her chest—drenched in it. I couldn’t tell if it was hers. I knew it didn’t belong where it was.
Her eyes seared into mine across the mirrored stone.
Burning. Accusing.
“You didn’t help me,” she whispered.
A ragged gasp tore out of my chest, and before thoughts could catch up, my legs lunged forward, driven by instinct more than reason. Each stride pounded the stone, a relentless surge toward her.
“You were too late.”
The words shattered from the crystal, echoed across the vast sky, and reverberated through my sternum—a deep, bone-rattling tremor that hollowed me out.
I reeled back, bile surging up my throat.
She was dead. And somehow, it was because of me.
The ground tilted. My heel caught on a shard of crystal. I went down, hands scraping raw across the stone.
Pain flared, but I barely felt it.
The vision shimmered and then fractured, breaking apart like ice underfoot.
And a hand touched my shoulder.
Warm. Real. Steady.