The tunnels were seeped in the Source’s power, and the tunnels would test them, using their own fears against them. Anyone injured or lost within the tunnels would eventually be spit back out, dead or alive, sane or insane. Their memories of the tunnels would be lost as soon as they emerged.
He hadn’t said it explicitly, but she’d seen the comprehension dawning over all the competitors’ faces – no one would ever know what happened within the tunnels. If any one of them resorted to murder, they would never feel the consequences, never be brought to account. It was an invitation to their baser instincts, to bring out the very worst of themselves.
Thick and twisting tree roots had formed the shape of a door, the entrance to the tunnels. They were below the Great Hall and it was the roots of the Fever tree that created this doorway. As she’d walked up, two sentinels had materialized in front of her, similar to the ones that protected the Great Hall, but these were more militant, decked in armor and more weapons than she could count. They’d tested her blood and bowed deeply to her, allowing her to walk through.
She’d felt the Source as she walked in, ancient and powerful, pure and bright and utterly uncorrupted. In a way, the experience had been similar to crossing the Veil, though with less separation of mind and body. It’d reassured her to know that whatever she would face was rooted in the power of the Source.
As she’d emerged on the other side, a flash of light seared her eyes and drew red-hot words into her vision: Trust only the Gift.
If it was meant to be some kind of instruction, it had fallen well short of being useful. She’d failed to discern any meaning in those four vague words.
*
Time had lost all meaning, she might have been stumbling around for no more than twenty minutes, or perhaps it was closer to twenty hours. She could only hope that the others were just as lost.
It wasn’t complete darkness, she could maybe make out the detail in her own fingers if she stretched out her arm in front of her, but anything beyond that was lost to the darkness.
She was already limping – she hadn’t run into any of the other competitors, but she’d had the misfortune of meeting a sentinel. It’d had a roughly human shape, made of nothing but the brightest white light, illuminating the dark tunnel for the first time. But there’d been no mistaking the sword it held in its hand as it’d rushed forward to attack her.
The Tiger swords had come to life in her hands as she brought them up to defend herself. The sentinel’s sword crashed into hers with a metallic clang, the force of the blow had thrown her backwards, and cemented into her mind the solidness of her opponent despite its ethereal appearance.
It had been fast and its movements sure as it attacked her again and again. While her opponent had managed to deliver a couple of telling blows, all her blows fell through nothing but light, leaving behind no mark. It didn’t take her long to come to the realization that this wasn’t an opponent she could ever beat.
It had thrown her, face first into the rocky tunnel wall, with enough force that her vision had exploded with stars. Blood had run down her face, obscuring her vision. The sentinel had managed to get past her increasingly desperate defenses, its sword cutting into her thigh, scorching with fiery hotness through her flesh.
The longer she stayed in the fight, the more likely she would die in it.
Her opponent couldn’t be hurt and it didn’t tire, there would only be one outcome if she continued.
In a final burst of energy, she’d attacked it with everything she had left; using every trick Alex had ever taught her. She drove it backwards and dived past, not looking back as she’d ran down the dark tunnel in a sprint, ignoring the pain in her leg. The tunnel had gotten darker and darker and she’d realized her bright opponent wasn’t following her. Turning tentatively she’d seen that it’d stopped, no more than a few meters from where it had first appeared, watching her silently.
That had been the first of five sentinels she’d faced, each one more deadly than the last. But after the first one, she hadn’t bothered trying to beat them, working instead to force her way past them.
Nonetheless, she hadn’t emerged unscathed. Beside the deep cut in her thigh and the one bleeding over her eyes, she’d managed to accumulate a couple more. A deep, painful cut in her arm, and a shallow one in her side.
The sentinels hadn’t been the only threats lurking in the tunnels. The tunnels themselves couldn’t be trusted. They changed constantly, like a movable maze, leading her deeper and deeper underground until she lost all and any sense of direction. The tunnels moved with little warning, nothing but the sound of rock grating over itself and she’d nearly been crushed on more than one occasion.
Sometimes there’d been no choice but to go up, and she’d climbed the walls of the tunnels, fumbling to find cracks into which to force her fingers, making her way upwards through sheer force of will.
She was hanging on one of these climbs, thinking that her fingernails might never again recover when she heard it. A scream shattering through the stillness, a scream that sounded unerringly like Emma.
“Emma?” Allyra called out desperately, pulling herself upwards as quickly as she could. Another scream echoed around her and she shouted out more desperately, “Emma! Emma – where are you?”
“Don’t listen to it.”
The voice floated down to her from above. She squinted, trying to make out whom it was, and her heart thudded in her chest with the realization that she’d finally found