Not with that attitude, my dear, Gramps’s voice answered.
“Gotta be another way.”
She looked around. Behind her was a dead end. The corridor was narrow enough for her to be able to touch the walls to either side.
She got up, walked over to the left wall, and ran her hands along it. The stone was firm, and jagged enough she could get her hands into the cracks and crevasses.
I’ll have to climb. I’ll have to shimmy over like fucking Batman; except how often does Batman have to do it over a sea of lava? Probably never.
Then, aloud, “This is ‘thrill’. Gotta be. Or it could be ‘will’. Whatever it is, I don’t fucking like it.” She stepped onto the rocky ledge and grabbed ahold of a knob of rock a little to the right of her foot. Already, the pain biting into her palm was sharp.
Three sideways steps later, she was over the orange abyss, the heat reaching up to bake her from below.
This is fucking crazy.
Sweat poured off of her. Each time she shifted her hands, she felt her grip on the rock getting looser and looser.
When she was halfway to the other side, her foot slipped out from beneath her. With a fair amount of pain driving into the flesh of her palm, she screamed.
But she held on.
Then, at three-quarters of the way—so close she could see that the pinprick of light was now bigger on the other side—she slipped and fell.
Screaming the whole way down, she stopped abruptly, the wind knocked out of her, her head rebounding off of something hard. There was no splash, no magma consuming her body; none of that.
She opened her eyes and saw the orange light still dancing on the cave’s ceiling in front of her.
“What the hell?”
She rolled over slowly on her side, and her breath froze in her lungs when she realized that she was hovering above the lava, as if she were lying on a see-through floor.
“This is impossible,” she whispered.
Magic, her grandfather answered in her head.
Even more slowly than she rolled over, she sat up. With her left hand, she knocked on what seemed like thin air. Its hard surface made a clink-clink sound when she did it.
“This is just crazy.”
Now she stood up, her arms out to her sides for balance. But she didn’t need it, which she realized as she took a cautious step forward. The air was not air at all—it was as hard as the rock bridge she had come from; harder, maybe, than the ledge she had fallen from.
As she righted herself, she saw the other side of the bridge. It was slightly above her. Nothing she couldn’t reach by jumping.
The sensation that she was walking on thin air never left her, even after taking eight or so steps.
“Thrill,” she said. “This has gotta be thrill.” Though she felt nothing close to a thrill. Each step was a test in terror, but it was one she was currently acing.
That was, until she got closer to the other side of the bridge and decided to speed up her pace. Suddenly, she heard crackling below her feet, and it caused her to stop. She looked down and saw the very air she was walking on fracture. Spiderweb-cracks branched out from beneath her soles.
“Oh, shit. Not good.”
Then the sound of breaking glass filled her ears. It started behind her and, like a flash fire, began to chase her. She moved with such speed, it was as if she were not putting any weight down at all.
The pieces of whatever she had been walking on fell to the lava below, getting swallowed up by the flames, splitting and cracking as it turned into rising smoke.
Maria realized, almost too late, that she wouldn’t make the jump to the other side of the bridge. She had to think fast, just like Gramps had taught her.
And she did.
She pulled the sword out of its sheath and planted it on a piece of un-cracked air, which looked like nothing at all; using it in much the same way a pole vaulter uses their stick, she planted the point into the surface, feeling it give as she launched herself into the air.
But it was enough.
The shattering of glass below her, the lava swallowing up the pieces—Maria grabbed onto the edge of the other side of the bridge with one arm, her sternum pressed up against the rock, digging into her. She threw the sword up and over with her right hand to free it, then she clawed at the edge, using her nails to get some purchase as she kicked her legs and tried to find a foothold.
The glass floor below her was completely gone. She was suspended over nothing but the lava and her impending doom.
“Not today,” she wheezed, and with one great pull, she scrabbled up to safety. She lay there a moment, catching her breath. Laughter rippled through the warm air, and it was quickly followed by slow clapping.
“Wonderful job, Maria. You have officially gone farther in the Trials than most of those who’ve set foot in my mountain. That is something to be proud of, in and of itself. So remember that when you fail during round three.”
“We’ll see about that,” Maria muttered. No time to rest. Must keep going. Not only for Sherlock, but for the village, and Gramps, and now Frieda. Man, the crew just keeps getting bigger and bigger. More eggs in the basket. It’s a good feeling, living for something other than myself.
Slowly, she got to her feet. This time she wasn’t surprised to see that the rocky bridge in front of her dissolved like the graveyard had done after it served its purpose. Now she stood in the village of Dominion. The King’s castle—my father’s castle—brooded in the background.
This was not the Dominion Maria had seen on the two occasions before. The first time being in Duke, the dead soldier’s,
