The stone shelter was a ruin, half-buried beneath the ash slope, but it was dry. That was enough.
Caelen sat cross-legged beside a stub of candlelight, staring at the curve of his fingers. They were stiff. Bruised. Still tinged with red no matter how many times he scrubbed them. The bone in his knuckle clicked when he bent it.
Across from him, Alaeth slept.
Sort of.
Her breath came shallow and even, but her fingers twitched in rhythm—like she was holding something that wasn't there. The wound at her ribs was bound in layers of cloth, tight and pale. Her shoulder still bled through. She hadn't let him rewrap it.
She'd barely let him help at all.
The Mirefang lay at the doorway, curled with its head up, silent. Watching the slope like it expected the city to wake up wrong.
When morning came, the sky was dull steel. Ash floated down like old snow. Caelen stepped outside to breathe.
The Mirefang was already up. Still. Staring.
At first he thought it was waiting for him.
But then he saw it: a pale glyph-bird, featherless and flickering with soft violet light, perched atop a mound of shattered stone.
It unfolded the moment he approached—its body folding outward like paper burning in reverse. In its place, a scroll landed in his palm.
The parchment was sealed with ink so dark it shimmered like oil. The glyph at its center was a perfect spiral laced with thorns.
The Shroudspire's mark.
The parchment trembled faintly in his hand.
Not from wind—there was none. Not from fear, though that sat deep in his chest like a coiled weight.
The scroll simply felt alive, like it was watching him.
He turned it over again, thumb brushing the ink-black seal etched with the spiral of thorns. The glyph shimmered in the firelight, flickering with breathless intent.
He had opened it three times already.
Each time, the words had not changed.
You are seen.
Three nights. One door. Come alone.
Behind him, Alaeth sat against the far wall of the shelter, shoulder pressed to cold stone. The wrappings across her side were fresh—he'd changed them while she pretended not to flinch.
Now she watched him in silence, face half-lit by the candle's guttering glow.
She hadn't asked to read the scroll.
She didn't need to.
"You're leaving tonight, aren't you?" she asked.
Caelen nodded.
The Mirefang stirred at the doorway, its stitched eye gleaming faintly in the dark.
He swallowed. "I thought they'd come for me."
"They don't come," Alaeth said. "They open the door. You walk through it, or you don't."
He sat beside her on the floor. The candle hissed between them.
"What happens if I don't come back?"
Alaeth's gaze didn't waver.
"Then the Mirefang chooses someone else. And I keep writing letters you'll never read."
Caelen looked down at his hands.
The bruises had started to fade, but they still ached. A faint line ran across the back of his right knuckle—a memory from the last fight.
"How long will I be gone?" he asked.
Alaeth exhaled through her nose.
"They don't count time like we do. Some are gone a season. Some, a year. Some… never return."
He didn't ask why.
He didn't want the answer.
She shifted, trying not to show pain. Her hand brushed the candle base—steadying, or slipping. He couldn't tell.
"You're sixteen winters old, Caelen," she said. "Still a boy—but the world won't care. It's already treating you like something else."
He looked at her, and for a long moment he couldn't speak.
Then: "What will you do?"
"I'll rest. Heal." A faint smirk touched her mouth. "Maybe lie. Say my son made it into the Shroudspire without tripping over his own pride."
He almost smiled.
Almost.
The Mirefang moved closer, slow and quiet. Its head lowered beside him.
He looked at the creature.
"Will it follow me?"
Alaeth shook her head. "Not yet. Not through this."
"They'll let me take it after?"
"They won't let you take anything," she said. "But if you survive, it may come anyway."
Caelen stood.
He looked once more at the scroll, then tucked it into his belt.
"I'm going."
Alaeth said nothing.
As he passed her, she caught his wrist.
He froze.
Her hand trembled just slightly in his.
"Don't die in the dark," she whispered.
The road from their shelter to the ruins was narrow and crooked. He walked without torches, the Mirefang's steps beside him near silent. Ash fell like dry snow, coating the stone in a whisper.
They reached the outer ridge where a black arch waited, half-buried in sloped ruin.
Glyphs pulsed faintly across its surface—old glyphs, not for power or pain.
For entry.
He looked back once.
Alaeth was not there.
The Mirefang stared at him for a long moment, then sat in the ash.
Waiting.
Watching.
Caelen stepped through the arch.
And the stone behind him closed.
The tunnel wasn't built—it was carved.
Uneven. Crooked. Not meant to be seen in full. The walls bowed in strange, inconsistent angles, as if the mountain hadn't wanted to give up the stone, but someone had pulled it open anyway. Glyphs traced the rock in long, looping spirals—too faint to light the way, but enough to feel their presence underfoot.
Caelen moved carefully, one hand trailing the wall for balance.
He had descended for what felt like half an hour, but the path wound without rhythm. He could no longer tell up from down—only forward.
The silence pressed in heavier with each step.
Then, suddenly, the walls opened.
The chamber wasn't vast—but it felt endless.
Hundreds of people stood inside, lit by braziers that flickered with unnatural fire. The glyphwork across the ceiling ran like veins across a skull—pulsing softly with a rhythm that didn't match any heartbeat Caelen had ever known.
Stone benches lined the outer rim, but few sat.
Most stood.
Watching.
Waiting.
There were at least a hundred initiates gathered, maybe more—of all shapes and ages. Boys and girls barely older than Caelen. Grown men with tattoos across their faces and scars old enough to have names. A woman with white hair and mirrored eyes leaned against a column, arms crossed like she'd rather be anywhere else.
A few looked terrified.
Most looked hard.
Some were already sizing each other up.
Caelen moved along the outer wall, staying close to shadow.
He didn't try to talk.
He didn't need to.
This wasn't the kind of silence that asked for words. It was the silence of knives left sheathed but ready.
Someone nearby whispered, "They're sending us in."
Another: "Not all of us'll make it."
The murmur died when one of the braziers flared high—red, then violet, then back again.
A slow hush fell over the crowd.
Caelen glanced toward a carved stone dais at the chamber's center.
No one stood on it yet.
But he knew—something would.
He felt the approach before he saw her.
A flicker of movement to his left. Familiar stride. Light steps with a faint scrape of boot on rock.
"Surprised to see me?"
He turned—and there she was.
Lira.
Same sharp eyes. Same knot of copper-tied hair at her shoulder. She'd cleaned up since Drevmor—slightly. Her cloak was patched now with reinforced leather at the elbows and collarbone, her boots wrapped in cloth to muffle sound. A knife hilt peeked from her left hip, but he could tell it wasn't her best weapon.
It was a distraction.
She leaned against the pillar beside him, arms folded. Her face was pale, but not tired—collected. Like she'd expected this moment all along.
"I thought you'd steal your way in," Caelen said.
She tilted her head, lips twitching. "I tried. They gave me an invitation anyway."
Caelen raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
She shrugged. "Same as you, I guess. Got tired of waiting for something better. Figured I'd risk dying instead."
For a few moments, they didn't speak.
Around them, the room shifted—more initiates arriving, gathering in cautious clusters. A tall man with a broken nose and no weapons glared at anyone under eighteen. Two girls stood back to back near a glyph pillar, whispering in a tongue Caelen didn't know.
"You know what they'll do to us?" he asked.
Lira exhaled slowly.
"No. But look around." She nodded at the crowd. "They're not keeping a hundred."
Caelen's mouth felt dry.
"How many do you think make it?"
Lira's eyes never left the floor.
"Enough to fill a classroom. Maybe less."
A rumble spread beneath their feet.
The glyphs on the walls flared.
Everyone turned toward the center as a robed figure emerged from a cleft in the stone—hooded, faceless, silent. It held no weapon. Its hands were bare. But as it passed, firelight bent around it like breath against glass.
It walked to the center of the dais.
Raised one hand.
The flames died.
Then the glyphs behind it shifted, burning brighter, rearranging.
The words that formed were not written—they were felt, seared across the backs of every eye in the room.
YOU ARE NOT STUDENTS.
YOU ARE APPLICANTS.
PROVE YOUR WILL. TONIGHT.
The silence after was complete.
Then, a crack.
The floor beneath the dais split wide—not like a trapdoor, but a living wound.
Stone peeled away into long spirals that reached out like arms, forming platforms beneath each initiate's feet.
Some cried out as the floor shifted beneath them.
Caelen stepped back instinctively—but his platform rose, separating from the earth.
Lira's, beside him, rose as well.
Her stance shifted—balanced, blade-ready.
She glanced at him.
"Try not to fall into anything screaming."
He managed a breath. "Same to you."
A breathless wind passed through the chamber.
The stone shook.
Then—without warning—the platforms dropped.
They didn't fall fast. Not exactly. They sank—as if being drawn into something ancient and hungering.
The stone spiraled down around him, the air thickening with heat and pressure.
Caelen couldn't tell how far he dropped. The darkness pressed too tightly.
Until it didn't.
He landed hard on a stone ledge.
Dust rose.
Light followed.
Glyphs flared along the wall—sharp, angled, blood-colored.
The air smelled of ash and oil. Far off, something screamed—a high, rattling sound like metal on wet bone.
A hallway stretched ahead of him.
Stone. Flickering glyphfire. A single path forward.
He was alone.
And the labyrinth had opened its mouth.
The air tasted like soot and iron.
Caelen opened his eyes to darkness—not true, but thick and swaying, lit only by faint red glyphs that spiraled across the floor like vines scorched into stone. The corridor stretched forward in uneven ribs of bone-colored rock, slick with humidity and something darker.
His boots were already damp.
He rose slowly, heartbeat pounding—not from fear, not yet, but from the weight of the place. The air was wrong. It moved too slow. Breathed too shallow.
Behind him, nothing. The path he came from had already sealed.
Forward.
He moved carefully, one hand trailing the wall. The glyphs shifted beneath his feet—not always, but sometimes. Like the maze was watching. Judging. Waiting to decide if it should allow him further.
He reached the first chamber without knowing it was one.
It opened from the corridor like a lung exhaling—circular, hollow, the ceiling high and cracked with ash veins. Glyph-torches lined the walls, but none were lit.
A raised dais sat at the center. Upon it: a stone slab carved with spirals and the shape of a man kneeling.
The moment Caelen stepped inside, the torches ignited.
Flame roared across the walls. Not yellow—white-hot, rimmed with black. The air shifted.
Then the floor began to heat.
He staggered back.
No trapdoor. No warning. The stone beneath him simply grew hot, rapidly—enough to sting through his boots, then scald.
There was only one way forward: the stone dais.
On its front face, five glyphs burned—unreadable, unknown. But his eyes were drawn to one in particular: a hooked spiral, like the one on his invitation scroll.
He moved closer.
The heat intensified. His skin prickled. His vision wavered.
Caelen reached for his mother's dagger.
The hilt felt cool in his hand—bone-wrapped, the leather long since worn smooth by Alaeth's grip. The blade curved, not for elegance but for cutting deep and pulling free. Etched symbols ran along its spine—faint, worn, not active glyphs but ritual marks burned in by something older.
She'd never told him what they meant.
"It's not about the blade," she'd said. "It's about what you decide it ends."
He stepped onto the dais.
Nothing happened.
But the glyphs before him began to pulse.
Each blinked in a sequence—one, two, three, four, five—then shifted, rearranged, and blinked again.
A puzzle.
He was being tested. Not just with strength. With memory. With precision.
The wrong sequence would mean fire. Or worse.
He didn't breathe.
He watched.
Then, with the tip of his dagger, he traced the correct spiral into the ash—copying the sequence from memory. The heat flared, rising to his calves-
And then vanished.
The door beyond him opened.
He passed through.
The moment he did, he staggered.
A corridor again—but narrower now. Closer. More uneven. The floor pitched left and right with every few meters, like walking across the ribs of something ancient and dying.
Far ahead, something screamed.
The scream died into a wet gurgle.
Caelen stopped moving.
The corridor ahead twisted sharply to the right. A smear of something dark stained the wall just before the turn—thick and fresh.
He gripped the dagger tighter.
Every sound was too loud now—his breath, the scrape of boot leather, the slow drag of stone shifting behind the walls. He stepped forward.
The turn opened into a shallow pit.
The floor sloped down into what looked like a den—a half-collapsed chamber with roots clawing through the ceiling and glyphs scratched into the walls by hand, not by flame.
And at the far end of the chamber, hunched over a twitching body, was the creature.
It was shaped like a wolf, but nothing like the Mirefang.
Larger. Starved. Coated in rough, dead hide stitched with black wire. Its ribs jutted like spears through thinning skin, and glyph scars wrapped its skull like branding irons. No eyes. Just sockets burned black and smoking.
It sniffed the air.
Paused.
And turned its head toward him.
Caelen didn't move.
The corpse beneath the Husk Wolf gave a final, weak twitch—then went still.
The creature rose slowly.
Its legs were long, malformed, built for speed and grip, not elegance. Its claws curled inward, scraping the stone as it paced.
It hadn't seen him. It had sensed him.
He needed to strike first.
He scanned the chamber—nothing useful. No ledges. No traps. Just loose stone and a few long roots spilling down from the ceiling.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears.
He remembered the Mirefang. How it moved. How it waited.
Caelen crouched low, tucked the dagger close to his ribs, and slid one foot back.
He threw a stone first—snapped it across the far wall.
The sound echoed sharp.
The creature snapped toward it, charging instantly, skidding through ash and bone.
Caelen didn't wait.
He sprinted low along the left side, boots scraping—closing distance fast. His fingers gripped the dagger so tight his wrist ached.
The Husk Wolf realized too late.
It turned—and he was already beneath it.
He drove the dagger up—just behind the front leg, where the ribs met soft tissue. Not deep enough. Not angled right.
The creature screamed.
Its claw slammed into him.
He hit the wall hard, shoulder first, teeth cracking together.
The dagger clattered across stone.
The wolf lunged.
Caelen rolled. It missed. Slammed into the wall, dislodging dust and roots from above.
He scrambled.
Grabbed a root. Pulled it.
The ceiling cracked.
A heavy vine snapped free—and with it, a jagged piece of ceiling stone the size of a head.
He didn't think.
He grabbed the stone and swung.
It hit the Husk Wolf across the snout—staggering it, dazing it for just a moment.
He dove for the dagger.
The creature recovered.
It howled—an awful, broken sound—and lunged again.
This time, he met it halfway.
He ducked under its claws, felt the wind of it carve past his ear.
He rose inside its arc—and drove the dagger under its jaw, angled deep into the skull.
Its legs spasmed.
Its breath hitched.
It went still.
Caelen stood over it, gasping.
The creature collapsed in a heap.
He didn't pull the dagger out immediately.
He stared at his hand—still on the hilt, fingers locked, arm trembling.
His shoulder burned. His ribs screamed. His ears rang.
But he was alive.
He wrenched the dagger free.
And for the first time since entering the labyrinth, he let himself breathe.
Caelen sat beside the corpse for what felt like minutes. He wiped the blade clean against the Husk Wolf's shoulder, then again on the wall. The etchings along the dagger's spine were barely visible beneath the blood, but they were still there. Still his.
Still hers.
His breath slowed. The shaking in his arm didn't.
He stood.
The walls hadn't moved in a while, but that didn't comfort him. If anything, the stillness made it worse—like the labyrinth was letting him think he'd won something.
He sheathed the dagger. Tightened the wrap on his belt.
And moved forward.
The next corridor opened into a wider space—arched like the ribs of a long-dead god. Glyphs spiraled upward, crawling toward the ceiling where root-tangles pulsed with a faint, organic glow.
And there, hunched against the wall, dagger in hand and a deep red gash running down her thigh—
Was Lira.
She didn't speak right away.
She glanced at him, eyes narrowing with recognition, but she didn't smile.
"Surprised to see me?"
Caelen almost smiled. Almost.
"You bleeding?" he asked.
She glanced at her leg. "Slower than I was."
She pushed herself upright. It wasn't graceful, but it was solid. Strong.
He hadn't seen her this close since Drevmor.
And now, under the strange, throbbing glyphlight, he noticed things he hadn't before:
• The way she shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, even when she was still.
• The faded blue mark on the inside of her forearm—not ink, but an old, deliberate burn.
• The tremor in her left hand—adrenaline, not fear.
She caught him staring.
"What?"
He looked away. "Nothing."
She raised an eyebrow, then limped forward. "You moving or bleeding out here?"
He fell in step beside her.
The next corridor tilted slightly—just enough to force their feet into angled placements. Neither of them spoke much. The sound of shifting stone creaked faintly below them.
Caelen said, "You've done this before?"
"No," she replied. "I don't think anyone gets to do this twice."
They reached a tight corner. She slid a torn strip of cloth from her cloak and tied it around a protruding glyph-nail, marking their path.
"You marking to keep track?"
"I'm marking so we don't die lost."
Not long after, they encountered their second fight—a low-ceilinged room filled with rotted bone fragments and the carcass of something that had once been armored. A cluster of ashcrawlers dropped from the ceiling—long-bodied insect-things with razor legs, twitching antennae, and split mouths that clicked like broken clockwork.
Caelen and Lira didn't speak.
They moved.
He ducked the first, slicing across its underbelly. Lira stomped another's spine and buried her blade through its head.
The last clung to the ceiling. Lira pointed. Caelen threw his dagger.
It pinned the crawler in place.
He retrieved it without a word.
Lira nodded, just once.
Later, they passed a shattered archway—beyond it, someone crawled along the edge of a broken corridor.
A boy. No older than fourteen. Maybe younger.
His face was bloodless. His leg bent at a wrong angle, bone showing through shredded fabric. He dragged himself with one arm, lips cracked and dry, leaving a trail behind him so dark it looked black.
His eyes found Caelen's.
"Please," he rasped. "Don't… don't leave me here—"
Caelen took a step forward.
Lira's hand caught his arm.
"Don't."
"He's alive."
"Not for much longer."
"He's not dead yet," Caelen said, pulling free.
He took two more steps.
Then the ceiling above the boy moved.
A mass of segmented flesh uncoiled, pale and wet with glistening fluid. Dozens of limbs folded inward like a dead spider coming to life. Eyes opened along its sides—not two or four, but dozens, blinking independently.
The creature dropped in silence.
Its weight crushed the boy instantly—but it didn't stop there.
It peeled him open, tearing into him with its inner jaws, feeding messily while its outer arms pressed down and held the body still. The boy never screamed. There wasn't time.
Caelen stood frozen.
Lira's voice was flat.
"Now he's dead."
The creature turned its many eyes toward them—but did not pursue.
It fed.
They walked on.
Eventually, the air thickened.
The corridor narrowed to a single vein of stone, pulsing with dim orange glyphs. The heat rose—not enough to burn, but enough to sweat.
They reached a split—two paths, both identical. No signs. No symbols. The glyphs were inert.
Caelen looked at Lira.
"Which?"
She shrugged. "Whichever one tries to kill us first."
They stepped left.
And behind them—the wall disappeared.
Not collapsed.
Erased.
The way back was gone.
Just forward now.