Sherlock, I’m coming, she thought. Sherlock, just hang on.
It was all she could do to keep herself from freezing in fear. Sure, she was a witch with the potential to grow into a badass witch, but the dead sleeping just below her feet would be too much for the bravest of souls.
A low rumble caused her to stop. Her head on a swivel, she scanned the surrounding area.
“That didn’t sound good,” she whispered, gripping the sword tighter. Despite the chill in the air, her palms were still sweaty.
The rumbling came again, this time worse than before; even worse than the rumbling when the land had risen to meet the cliff, inside the cave.
Then all at once, the ground exploded. Clumps of dirt shot into the air, raining down on the path and on Maria’s shoulders. She held the sword up high, in her movie-defense pose, the one she’d picked up from The Princess Bride, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings.
If Obi-Wan holds his lightsaber like this, then where could I go wrong?
She caught the first glimpse of white emerging from the earth before the last bit of dirt fell. It was bones. Skeleton fingers.
The first test.
The skeletons pulled themselves out of the graves, wearing tattered and dirty robes, ripped leather jerkins, long dresses. Their jaws were propped open by packed mud, and worms and beetles and other insects Maria thought were from Earth fell off of them, landing on the path with meaty thumps.
“All right, assholes,” Maria said, “let’s do this.”
The skeletons did not move like the dead. They had more life in them than most people on Earth did.
But that didn’t matter for Maria.
She swung the sword in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, connecting with rib, severing spinal cords, detaching arms. This gave her enough room to back up the path, but all around her, the ground was exploding; dirt was raining down on her, and more skeletons were digging themselves out of their graves.
The fear had left Maria after she’d taken down the first skeleton dressed in dark robes, still wearing its hood. Now she was running on pure adrenaline.
As she swung down on a skeleton’s skull, cracking it down the middle and leaving a lightning bolt fissure in the bone, she felt hot fire ripple through her back, down to the back of her thigh. She let out a scream, spinning around. Two skeletons had clawed her with their sharp finger bones, deep enough to rip her leather jacket and her shirt beneath it. She thought she felt blood trickle down to her waistband, but she didn’t have time to check.
“No one gets to touch my ass without my permission,” she said, grimacing. With a shout, she severed skulls from vertebrae. The heads rolled down the gentle slope of the graveyard until they clattered against a gravestone, like bowling balls collecting in a Resurfacing Machine. More came up behind her, so she didn’t have time to admire what she had done; two birds with one stone, and all that.
“You have to buy me a drink first!” she grunted, taking out three more skeletons.
Maria chopped and hacked until her chest was heaving and the sweat trickled down the back of her neck, making her hair stick to her skin.
She nearly collapsed out of exhaustion, but caught herself on one knee in the path, surrounded by piles of bones. Her head was tilted downward, absently watching a worm wiggle and squirm its way back into the lush grass when she heard the rattle of bones.
“No fucking way,” she said, breathlessly.
Looking up, she saw just one more skeleton coming toward her. It was missing most of its teeth, and she could’ve sworn there was some sort of life flickering in the blackness of its hollow eye sockets.
She stood up on shaky legs and took the sword in both of her hands. She was too beat to lift the sword up with one anymore; all the magic she had called on from Oriceran was depleted.
“I think it’s bedtime,” she wheezed as she swung the sword downward like a medieval executioner. The hit wasn’t a clean one, but it did the trick. The skeleton dropped into the large pile of bones; gone to rest for eternity—or until the next weary wanderer stumbled into the Trials of Antenele.
From behind her, in the direction she was supposed to be going, the far gates squeaked open.
She had passed the first test.
Skill, she thought.
Chapter Thirteen
Maria wanted nothing more than to fall to her knees again and rest, but she couldn’t. The gates were open, and she didn’t know for how much longer. So she sheathed her sword, only because she could not bear to carry it anymore, and headed for the opening, toward that pinprick of light.
When she cleared the gates, they slammed shut behind her. Reflexively, she wheeled around. The graveyard sank, bleeding away into a dark mist.
“Okay, Maria, one down, two more to go. Sherlock, I’m coming for you. Don’t worry; when I get there, I promise you can pee on all the Gnomes you want.”
She turned back around to find the darkness was gone, replaced with a burning light of orange and red. Maria took a step and quickly stopped, her heart plummeting, and threw herself backward.
The ground was gone.
Where the walkway should’ve been, there was just a large gap, empty space for hundreds of feet until it ended in the sweltering magma below. A chunk of rock broke off from the edge and fell. It landed in the magma with a splash, quickly followed by a sizzling. Maria, now sitting, shook her head.
“Okay, how the hell am I supposed to get across that? Killing
