Except a map didn’t really make much of a difference when the purpose of the First Final was to examine a pair’s ability to survive mentally.
* * *
They hadn’t been in the forest for more than a couple of minutes when Allyra heard it—the fluttering of wings. Thousands upon thousands of wings coming together to form a single, constant sound. It filled her ears, her mind, and her body, brushing aside everything else.
She knew what was coming.
Phobias didn’t always make sense, and sometimes they might not have any logical point of origin. But more often than not, they took root in some childhood incident. And she knew exactly when her fear of wasps had taken root.
It had been a warm spring day. She was eight years old, lying beneath a massive jacaranda tree waiting for Emma and Jamie. The funny thing was, she remembered the most incongruous things about that day—the early morning sunlight filtering through the branches of the jacaranda tree. The blue, cloudless sky and the pale lilac jacaranda blooms floating down to her. Most of all, she remembered feeling happy and content, up until the moment the peace was shattered.
Unlike honeybees, wasps weren’t known to swarm. To this day, Allyra still didn’t know what made them swarm that day twelve years ago. But the why of it didn’t really matter; what mattered was that the wasps did swarm. They descended on her like a cloud of red and black and filled her ears with the sound of a thousand fluttering wings.
She’d frozen with fear and held her breath, and for a moment, it had seemed as if the wasps might just drift away like the last vestiges of a poorly remembered nightmare. But then the first sting had come. She’d run then, but there was no outrunning them. The wasps seemed to feed upon her fear, their aggression multiplying exponentially with each sting. Soon, she’d lost consciousness.
Emma and Jamie had found her, but she didn’t remember it. Her father arrived at the sound of Emma’s shouts for help, and Allyra remembered brief flashes of his drawn and anxious face as he’d carried her away. She remembered his desperate calls for her to hold on, for her to live.
The pain had been overwhelming, like red-hot iron spikes being driven deep into her flesh, sending lava searing through her veins. She’d drifted in and out of consciousness as she’d struggled to catch her breath. It had been choking, not breathing, like trying to suck air through a rapidly narrowing straw.
And later, she remembered a woman with russet-brown skin and dark curly hair, whose gentle, callused hands had soothed the swelling away. Allyra hadn’t known it at the time, but she now believed that Death had been kept at bay only through the woman’s Gifted ability.
That was the day she’d developed spheksophobia, or more simply, a lasting fear of wasps.
That was then, and this was now. The First Final was a test of mental survival. Allyra knew she’d have to face her fears within this redwood forest.
Hydrogen. Helium. Lithium. Beryllium. Boron…
The fluttering wings drew closer.
Carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen…
“I suppose I have you to thank for this,” Jason drawled.
Allyra ignored him. It was taking every shred of her concentration and willpower just to keep breathing. The need to run was overwhelming, and she was having a hard time trying to string two thoughts together.
“Are you going to do something about this?” Jason asked, his voice level and calm.
They were so close now. Soon, they would swarm her.
She couldn’t think.
Jason shook his head and heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Christ, even your fears are so tame.” A flame appeared in Jason’s hand. He formed it into a sphere, and it grew bigger and bigger until he was holding it in both hands. He flung up his arms, and the sphere of fire exploded outward, searing through the swarm of wasps.
In the resulting silence, she gasped, gulping in deep, wonderful, cool breaths.
“They’re going to come back, you know,” Jason said coolly. “And I’m not going to wear myself out burning them away. So, you need to figure out how to get rid of them.”
Allyra struggled to remember Alex’s warning to her.
“To survive the First Final, you need to understand what it is that makes you afraid.”
It didn’t seem to be particularly helpful at this point.
Wasps.
It was as simple as that. She was terrified of wasps; she understood that much. In the distance, she could hear the fluttering of wings again. Her heartbeat quickened, and she struggled to catch her breath. Jason grabbed her hand. He twisted his fingers around her wrist and dug into her flesh. He forced her to look up at him.
“Think!” he demanded. “Why are you afraid of them? Their stings? The pain? What?”
Allyra fought to reign in her fear, but the wings were drawing closer again. She needed time. She mustered her strength and closed her eyes, and the world was filled with threads of green, yellow, red, and blue, all twisted together, representing each of the four Elements. She called on the Air Element, gathering the yellow threads and binding them together tightly, creating a barrier protecting her and Jason from the coming swarm of wasps.
The swarm of wasps crashed into the invisible barrier, banging on it relentlessly. She wavered, but for the moment, her Gift was strong enough to withstand the storm. She was strong enough. She’d bought some time.
What was it about wasps that made her so afraid? Was it the stings or the pain, as Jason suggested?
No.
The pain had been awful,
