by Rain Oxford
With that, the dog stood and stepped aside.
The door opened to a room instead of another hallway. It was a square room, twenty feet wide. Along the wall was a stone ledge, about three feet wide. Across the room was an identical ledge and another door. That was pretty self-explanatory; I had to get from one side of the room to the other. My obstacle was the wall-to-wall pit of fire. From ledge to ledge on both sides of the room were rocks protruding from the wall. Some of them were covered in dried blood, as casters had tried to use them to climb to the other side. At the bottom of the pit was a bed of black glass shards. I wouldn’t want to do a handstand on them, but they were thick chunks that looked less sharp than the climbing rocks.
The smart thing to do would have been to levitate over the pit of flames, but I imagined others had tried that as well. As I considered all of the ways I could get past the obstacle, it occurred to me that I wasn’t as inept at magic as I’d thought. Before learning magic, it would have been an impossible task, yet people who studied magic for ten to fifteen years had died from those flames.
When the heat got too unbearable, I decided to trust my instincts. “Kerar.”
The flames died.
“Tradje,” I said, gently lifting into the air. I guided myself with my mind, not across the pit but down. I knew the shards were hot and I knew they could cut into my boot if I stepped on one the wrong way, but I also knew that if I fell halfway over it, it could kill me. It was a ten foot drop to the bottom. As soon as I set foot on the glass, I started moving as fast as I could without slipping. I didn’t want to take glass to the face.
Fourteen feet across felt like two miles, but when I finally made it, I levitated myself up to the opposite ledge. Then I checked the bottom of my boots. They were half melted. A few seconds later, the fires roared back into place and the door opened.
“I think I want to go back to riddles.”
The next room was identical to the fire room, except the pit was only three feet deep… and full of cobras. What I really wanted here was my staff. What I knew about snakes was that they were attracted to movement and body heat.
I took off my robe, held it in my hands, and said, “Tremsa.” The robe froze over with ice. Trying not to shiver, I put it back on. I wanted to scare them away from the spot I was going to walk in, but that would have riled them up. Deciding that falling to my death was better than being bitten by a dozen cobras and dying in agony, I levitated myself.
Keeping my mind calm enough to maintain my magic while hovering three feet above a pit of death was the most difficult part of the trials. Realizing that it was liable to get worse from there made me wobble dangerously. I sunk to only a foot above them and the snakes noticed. Some took a strike at me, piercing my boots but not my flesh. I was never more happy that I wore boots rather than sneakers in my life.
I closed my eyes and forcefully controlled my breathing. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes, looking straight ahead, and continued. I had learned to levitate myself with the book of spells, not from the priests. They had all taken the trials, so they should know how to prepare the apprentices better.
I reached the other side and had to step up onto the ledge. After taking a few minutes to rest and brush the ice off my robe, I stood and opened the door.
The next room was small, only ten by ten, with a candle chandelier hanging from the ceiling. A black cobra was painted on the floor, curled around in a circle. It was so thick and long that it filled most of the floor space. I stepped into the room and the candles lit themselves, but I was confused by the lack of a second door. Before I could back out, the door slammed shut.
“This is not going to be fun.”
“I dissssagree,” said a voice. While I couldn’t tell if it was feminine or masculine, I knew instantly it was a serpent.
The hissing sent a chill down my spine. “Is this another riddle?” I asked.
The scales of the painting rose out of the floor, forming a body even more massive than I had expected. The cobra’s head was four feet long and three feet wide, while the hood was another two feet on each side. The snake lowered its face to mine, its amber eyes glowing, and I knew it could eat me in a heartbeat. It didn’t matter what magic I knew.
“No. Thissss issss a tesssst. You musssst clear your mind completely. If you sucsssseed, the door will appear and you can leave. If you fail, I will eat you.”
“Well, that sounds perfectly fair.”
I sat and cleared my mind. Dry, scaly skin brushed my legs and back, not letting me forget what I was in the room with. Malie had taught me that I didn’t have to clear my mind completely to do magic, but Keeper had insisted on it. Maybe he was trying to prepare me for this.
The cobra hissed.
“For fuck’s sake, give me a minute.”
It didn’t hiss again.
I imagined Keeper whacking me with the stick and that actually helped. Clearing my mind completely was not something I could describe. As my thoughts slipped further and further away, I felt like I was alone in blackness, on the cusp of sleep, and then there was nothing.
* * *
The sound of a heavy wooden door opening startled me. The snake was gone and there was now a door in the wall.
The door led to another room, identical to the meditation room, except that there was a door centered on the wall to my right and another on the wall to my left. The door I entered through closed and vanished.
“Which one do I choose?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.
“Whichever one you want to,” said the same voice who asked me the three questions. “The door to your left leads to the next test, while the door on your right will lead you through this test of instinct.”
“That sounds like a trick. Why would anyone want to take the test of instinct when they could finish the trials faster?”
“They wouldn’t. Everyone chooses the door to the left.”
It seemed highly unlikely that every single person who ever took the trials chose the door to the left. In fact, I imagined some of them would want the extra test because they were confident in their instincts and figured it would help them interest a god. “What am I missing?”
“Only you can answer that.”
“What is the point of this trial?”
“The point is to test your instincts.”
“Do you always lie?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Ah. Then you lie half the time.”
“Yes.”
“And I have to figure out when you’re lying or not lying.”
“Correct.”
“Are you going to lie about what the tasks do?”
“Yes.”
Well, that was supremely unhelpful. My best plan was to ask a bunch of questions to see if I could learn his tells. “Is my true name Nathan?”
“No.”
“Is my father Michael Jones?”
“No.”
“Is my mother Julia Jones?”
“Yes.”
“What is the capital of Australia?”
“Canberra.”
“Damn it. I owe Luca five bucks.” I sighed and took the door to the right. It led to a hallway instead of another door, which I considered a positive sign. The door closed behind me.
“You have chosen to continue the trial of instincts.”
“Fuck. Am I ever going to get out of this place?”
“You will if you have good instincts.” At the end of the hallway was one door with three large stones before it. On each stone was a key. “The middle key will unlock the door. The other two will melt the lock.”
“I don’t like those odds. Is the key on the right safe?”
“Yes.”
“Is the key on the left safe?”
“No.”
“Is the key in the middle safe?”
“No.”
“Is the key on the right trapped?”
“No.”
I went with my gut instinct and picked the on
e on the right, which seemed to have the most support. When I stuck it into the keyhole on the door and turned it, the door unlocked and creaked open.
Another hallway. At the end of it, I came to a table with two gold goblets. “The cup on the left is pure wine. The cup on the right is wine mixed with poison,” said the voice.
I sniffed the two cups and noticed no difference in smell. Without giving myself time to stress over it, I picked up the goblet on the left and drank it. I waited, but I didn’t fall over dead. Instead, a door appeared on the other side of the table and opened.
Through this door was a bridge made of two rows of two-by-two blocks… hovering over a black canyon. If the two rows weren’t pressed together, I would have been a lot more confident.
“Left,” the voice said.
Cautiously, I set my left foot on the left step. When I felt it was secure, I set my other foot on it. The right block crumbled and fell away.
There were two more in front of me that I had to choose from. I couldn’t worry about the sixteen blocks that would come after it. I had to face them one at a time.
“Left,” the voice said again.
I set my right foot on the right step, diagonally from me, and when that held, I moved my left foot to it. The block I had just vacated crumbled, as did the one next to me.
“Right.”
I stepped on the right one and the instant my foot touched it, both it and the block I was standing on started to crumble. I flung myself at the other block, landing on it chest first and wrapping my arms and legs around it. When I was sure I wasn’t falling, I tried to control my breathing and carefully squirmed into a better position. I avoided touching the other two blocks. Once sitting, I tried to calm my heart, which was beating out of control.
“Right,” the voice said.
“I need a minute to recover.”
“You only have a certain amount of time before the blocks crumble, whether you are on them or not.”
“If that’s true, you should have told me that at the beginning.”
“Your feedback has been noted.”
I gaped. “Did you just use sarcasm?”
No answer. The test continued and I only missed once more, which took ten years off my life. I hadn’t managed to get over in time and ended up hanging from the block by my hands and having to climb up while sweating. It took so long that I had to jump to the next one as mine started to crumble. The damn voice had been telling the truth.
By the time I reached the door, my arms felt like jelly. Luca and I did more than play PC games; we also rocked Dungeons and Dragons and conquered escape rooms. We were both fit and didn’t see the need to play sports or go to a gym. I decided right then, however, I would have to get in better shape to be a caster.
Wizards never have to do this shit. Just point your fancy wand and poof. I selectively forgot all incidents of wizard battles I had seen, played, or read about. The door opened and I went through it.
“You have completed the trial of instinct.”
I didn’t know if I could believe him or not. I was in a living room. Immediately recognizing it, I turned to go back, but the heavy wooden door had been replaced by a standard-sized bedroom door, painted white with a colorful blue sign.
Nathan’s Room
I cringed. My childhood home held many good memories, but also a number of terrible ones. I looked back at the dark blue couch, where Luca and I used to watch cartoons while we did our homework and our mother cooked dinner.
Every Christmas, we would camp out in a sheet-fort to soak up every bit of holiday joy we could. We read by the tree’s light and our sheets would absorb the pine scent. Luca once got out a candle and we roasted mini marshmallows over it until Luca knocked it over and set the sheets on fire. I took the blame, but I never understood why our mother was so upset until many years later. We could have been hurt, and it would have been my fault. It was my responsibility to protect Luca.
The living room was decorated with hardwood floors and light gray walls. Pictures of family members and vacations covered the fireplace mantle. The mid-90s television set in the corner was a joke by modern-day standards, but TV wasn’t the center of our lives.
Two overstuffed chairs around the couch enclosed an old wooden coffee table. The right half of the room consisted of our dining table and a chandelier that was as old as the house. Another closed door led to our parent’s room and on the other side of the dining space was the doorway to the kitchen.
“What is this supposed to be?” I asked.
“The room where you face everyone you have wronged,” said a voice I would never forget. My parents were suddenly sitting on the couch, wearing their fanciest clothes. It was what they had been wearing when they went out for dinner… on the night they died.
Julia Jones, who was forty-five when she died, was a sweet woman with chestnut brown hair, hazel eyes, and a talent for baking. She was smart and taught me to follow my head and my heart and not let anyone tell me who I was supposed to be. Had she known about the prophecy, she would have said it was crap. She wasn’t the kind of person to tell me to go outside and play. When I wanted to read or write, she supported me.
Marco Jones wasn’t warm and coddling, but he encouraged me to make choices. Since I could remember, he would give me choices, even if it was between broccoli and green beans with dinner. He encouraged me to have alone time to figure out what kind of person I wanted to be. When family friends told him to get an exorcist or send me away, he told them not to let the door hit them on their asses when they left, but he wouldn’t defend me. Instead, he taught me to defend myself. When kids at school got it into their heads that I was a freak and they could call me that, I taught them the error of their ways. He didn’t get me out of trouble, because I had to accept consequences for my actions, but he always said he would have done the same thing.
“Did you forget about us?” my mother asked.
“No. Of course not.”
“Why did you do this?” my father asked.
“Do what?”
“You know what. You’ve always had magic. You’re the reason bad things have happened to your friends and us.”
“I didn’t mean for anything to happen.”
“If you had controlled your magic, we wouldn’t be dead,” my father said.
“Or if you had been a normal child. We should never have adopted you.”
“This isn’t real. My mother wouldn’t say that.”
“I’m not your mother. She died because of you. I’m just the woman who took you in, cared for you, and protected you until you killed me, too.”
“It was a car accident.”
“You know it wasn’t. You knew we would die eventually because of you.”
“That was why I got out of the house. I didn’t want---”
“Being in the house wasn’t the problem— loving you was.”
“I died for loving you. Do you want to deny that as well?” asked another voice.
I turned to see Rose, my first girlfriend. She was sixteen, athletically built from years of soccer, with auburn hair and light green eyes. We had been in the same classes for several years before we ended up in study hall together. Somehow, we just gravitated towards each other and one day, in science, she claimed me as her partner and we worked well together. We started going out and everything was great for a long time.
Then she called me, crying her eyes out that she couldn’t handle it anymore. I had no idea what she was talking about. She’d had a pretty good life. Her single mother was making enough money to support them and treated her right, she was smart and popular, and she was perfectly well-adjusted.
And then she killed herself with me on the phone. The last thing she said was, “He told me I couldn’t take what wasn’t mine. I didn’t know.” The police and counselor said she had probably stolen something and had an emotional breakdown, but it was definitely a suicide. I blamed the curse for her death and myself for not seeing anything leading up to
it.
I sat hard in the chair, wishing it didn’t feel so real. Rose advanced and only stopped when she was glaring down at me. “I didn’t mean for anything to happen.”
“And that makes it right?” she asked. I shook my head. “I was just a kid. I had the whole world ahead of me.”
The three of them surrounded me on three sides, making the fourth person conspicuous in her absence. “Why isn’t Sophia here?”
Luca was born in Aviano, Italy to Sofia and Ivan Marino and moved to the States with his parents when he was three. His father died of lung disease when he was four. He barely remembered his father. Sofia and Julia met at a park one day, chatted, and found out they lived right next to each other. Luca and I were instant friends, as were our mothers.
Over the years, when bad things happened around me, Luca stood by me, even when that resulted in broken bones, destroyed toys, and lost opportunities. He would always say, “Shit happens. All you can count on is that you’re not alone.”
When we were ten, Sofia took us with her to the bank on the way to the amusement park. She spotted the gunman in time to hide us in a cabinet before things went wrong. We held hands for hours in the dark, waiting to die. By the time we were finally rescued, Sofia was dead.
My parents adopted Luca and we lived as brothers from then on, but he had developed a crippling fear of the dark and I was terrified he would wake up one morning and blame me for her death.
The prophecy was right about me. I hurt many people unintentionally, yet there were people I wanted to hurt. My biological father, for example. People who called me a freak growing up always got hurt, and there was a part of me that was glad. I’d felt they deserved it.
Maybe the Painter has the right idea. With enough power, I could protect those who needed to be protected and punish those who deserved it, instead of everyone around me getting hurt. There were people the world wouldn’t miss, like serial killers and child rapists.
But that would make me a serial killer.
Rose frowned. “You were ten years old.”
I had forgotten that I had asked a question. “Huh?”