Cave of Nightmares

by V. St. Clair

  He supposed he shouldn’t have expected more from a level-three mixture, since the mastery-level version only lasted an hour, but it was still disappointing. He extinguished the light in his clear prism and returned it to his belt, swimming through the narrow tunnel and seeing light above him.

  He broke the surface of the water and was surprised to find that he was surrounded by his own soggy reflection. As he pulled himself out of the water and onto solid ground (he had somehow popped up in a fountain in the middle of a mansion), he understood why.

  Mirrors.

  And so they were. Floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, he was surrounded by dozens of images of himself, some of them small and far away and others magnified to twice his actual size. He continued onwards carefully now, holding his hands out in front of him as he went to avoid walking into anything, his footsteps echoing all around him from the black-and-white tiled floor.

  “Hayden! Is that you?” he heard Tess’s voice from somewhere nearby, though he couldn’t see her.

  “This is the third time you thought you’ve seen him, Tess. He’s not here…” Tucker’s voice now.

  “No, I thought I saw his reflection for a moment…”

  “TESS! TUCKER!” Hayden shouted, relieved to finally make contact with part of his team. “I’m here!”

  “Hayden! Thank goodness, we thought we’d never find you!” Zane called out this time.

  The three of them have been together this whole time?

  There was something odd about that, but he didn’t have time to worry about it right now.

  “I’m stuck in a room full of mirrors,” he called out, feeling his way around more quickly now and bumping sideways into a reflection of himself in his haste.

  “So are we. Keep talking and we’ll try to move towards your voice,” Zane said.

  They began a loud discussion about what happened to each of them since entering the maze while they searched for each other, and Hayden frowned when he heard that the others had started off on their own but run into each other after about five minutes inside the maze and had been together ever since.

  “How did you get past that gaping chasm without using conjury?” Zane asked with interest.

  “I didn’t see a chasm…but I got stuck underwater for a while with some twenty-foot sharks,” he replied, beginning to get really irritated with this mirror room and wondering what the entire point of this part of the challenge was.

  He stopped walking for a moment, standing directly in front of a mirror that reflected his image without distorting it. He could see the annoyed set of his jaw, the amber prism that was resting in front of his right eye, the circlet matting down his wet hair except for a few pieces that stuck out around it at odd angles. Something about his image gave him pause, like there was something niggling at the back of his mind that he was supposed to remember but couldn’t.

  Curious, he took a step closer to the mirror, his outstretched hands making contact with the surface so that it looked like he was pressing against his own palms.

  Something was wrong about this, very wrong. It was stirring in his memory, a horrible feeling…

  Pressure on his hands, someone pushing down so hard against them…his mother’s screams…lights exploding inside his head while the world ripped apart…

  Sunlight.

  Someone carrying him as he forced his eyes open. It was sunny, with a slight breeze…

  Hayden felt a surge of hysteria and terror the likes of which he’d never experienced before, and the space around him was filled with a bloodcurdling, ear-splitting scream. He covered his ears with his hands but the noise was still everywhere, and when he looked in the mirror he saw that the wild-eyed boy screaming bloody-murder was him. He wasn’t able to stop; something had broken inside of him, and he ripped the circlet from his head and threw it to the ground, never wanting to see a prism again because his mother was going to die if he looked into it...

  He could hear the echoed shouts of familiar voices but couldn’t immediately place them, nor did he care who they belonged to right now. He was consumed by the fragments of memory, of strong hands pressing against his own, holding him down while someone screamed…of thousands of arrays of lights exploding through his head until he was sure he would die.

  Hayden leaned to the side and vomited, violently nauseous with the remembered sensation of it.

  “LET ME OUT!” he shrieked, slamming his hands into the mirror in front of him and shattering it, blood streaming down his palms as they were cut by the fragments. There was nothing behind the mirror but a solid brick wall, and Hayden flung himself into another one, shattering it as well.

  “LET ME OUT OF HERE!” He felt insane, trapped, in terrible danger and alone…

  He smashed every mirror he saw, not caring that it hurt, not caring that he was bleeding everywhere; he just needed to get rid of his reflection and he would be able to calm down…

  “HAYDEN, STOP!” Two arms closed around him from behind, pinning his at his side, and Hayden felt the world spin around him and then go black.

  His eyelids struggled with the effort of opening as his mind attempted to orient itself. He could still remember scattered remnants of exploding lights, hundreds—no, thousands of them, forcing their way into his head and ripping him apart, burning his insides...

  He peeked through the narrow slit in his eyelids and saw nothing but a dusky sky overhead.

  The world trembled around him and he realized that he was being carried by someone, his head lolling backwards over the person’s arm, which was creating the jostling effect. It felt pleasant outside, with a breeze.

  My mother just died…they’re carrying me from the house…

  But that didn’t seem right. His mother was already dead, had been dead for a long time now. Also, it was the middle of the day when he was removed from the wreckage of his childhood home, and it was clearly evening right now.

  So who’s carrying me and why?

  He blinked a few times and tried to bring his head forward, a low moan escaping his lips from the effort.

  “Whoa, steady there. I’ve got you.” A stout man with bushy red-grey hair was carrying him, his bright red robes swishing all around him.

  “Master…Kilgore?” Hayden asked, confused. He couldn’t remember what he was doing or why the Master of Elixirs was carrying him into the school right now.

  “Is he awake?” Zane’s voice rang out from somewhere behind him, but Hayden couldn’t twist around to get a good look, though he tried.

  “Hold still, boy, you’re no pixie,” Master Kilgore said in his usual gruff voice, and Hayden stopped moving and allowed himself to be carried.

  “What happened?”

  “We’ll get to that in a few minutes; just relax for now,” Master Asher said, and Hayden tilted his head back and saw that the Prism Master was walking along right beside them, looking unusually serious.

  They brought him into the infirmary and laid him out on a small bed with blue cotton sheets. Since he felt fine, he immediately sat upright and prepared to get up.

  “No you don’t, son. You stay in bed until Razelle has had a look at you or she’ll have all our heads on a pike.” Master Kilgore pointed a menacing finger at him and Hayden frowned but sat back down on top of the sheets, propping up the pillows so he could sit upright. He tried to imagine the polite, kind Mistress Razelle keeping a secret collection of the other Masters’ heads on pikes in her office and almost laughed out loud.

  Kilgore and Asher were the only Masters in the room with him right now, but his teammates followed them inside and greeted him with equally frightened stares. Tucker’s face had blanched oddly, Tess was wide-eyed and shaking, and Zane was scanning his features as though searching for a visible wound.

  Before he could insist that they tell him what was going on, Mistress Razelle swept into the room wearing her green robes, closely followed by Masters Sark, Reede, and Willow—who was wearing pajamas and looked like he’d left his room in a hur
ry.

  “Out of the way,” Mistress Razelle shooed the others away from Hayden’s bedside and knelt down next to him.

  “What’s wrong? Am I ill?” he turned to her, hoping for some answers, since even Sark was giving him a strangely worried stare right now.

  If Sark’s afraid for me it must be terminal.

  “There was a problem in the arena and I need to make sure you’re alright,” she answered calmly, shining a bright palm-light in his eyes and looking into them carefully.

  The room full of mirrors.

  He remembered it now, but distantly, as though it happened a very long time ago and he was only able to call up bits and pieces of it. He strained his mind to think through everything he could remember since he entered the maze that evening, while Mistress Razelle checked his vital signs and began waving a wand and some charms over him.

  I was in the tall grass for a long time…I was by myself.

  In his mind he ran through the maze again, dodging traps and eventually entering the water under the rocks. He remembered swimming for a bit, and passing the sharks without getting attacked; he had been particularly proud of that. He came up in a fountain inside a house full of mirrors, and he heard the others…

  “He’s fine, physically at least,” Mistress Razelle interrupted his thoughts and Hayden blinked and looked around at the Masters, who were still watching him carefully.

  “And mentally?” Master Reede asked with professional interest, and the healer pursed her lips at him.

  “I see no signs of permanent damage. Whatever happened seems to have passed.” She glanced back at Hayden. “How do you feel?”

  “Fine, just a little confused,” he admitted.

  “Thank you,” Master Willow spoke softly, pulling up a chair near the door. “I believe that the events of tonight’s challenge arena merit a discussion before scores are issued.”

  “We’re still being scored?” Zane looked aghast by the prospect.

  Mistress Razelle muttered something about skewed priorities as she swept out of the room, shutting the door behind her rather harder than necessary.

  “You more-or-less completed the challenge, and it appears that Hayden has recovered sufficiently to join in the discussion.”

  The others took seats as well, with the exception of Master Asher, who leaned against the wall facing Hayden and remained silent and watchful. Hayden’s teammates sat down around the edge of his bed, and Zane kept shooting glances at him like he expected him to drop dead at any moment.

  “How come I was in the maze by myself and the others were all together?”

  Master Kilgore smirked. “It wasn’t deliberate. The maze is set up so that most of the paths will intersect at some point so you meet up with your teammates fairly soon. You just happened to take every wrong turn possible and avoided them.”

  “We’ve been meaning to decommission the underwater lake for months now,” Master Reede added casually.

  “What went wrong after that?” Hayden continued asking questions, annoyed that no one was explaining things properly. “I remember getting all the way to the room full of mirrors without too much trouble, even if I went the wrong way…so why am I in the infirmary?”

  Master Sark gave him a disbelieving stare.

  “Because you went crazy and tried to kill yourself.”

  Everyone was staring at him now. At first Hayden thought the Powders Master was lying just to get a reaction out of him, but then fragments of memory and emotion started to return to him. His hands, covered in blood while he screamed at the top of his lungs, the lights exploding inside of him hard enough to make him vomit, a terrible weight pressing down on his hands…

  “Oh…” he blinked hard and swallowed. “Yes…I remember now.”

  “What in the world happened to you?” Zane frowned. “We thought you were being attacked by something horrible…all the breaking glass and you screaming your head off. We were trying like crazy to get to you but we couldn’t find a way around those stupid mirrors.”

  Hayden shook his head slowly, staring at the palms of his hands as he remembered the weight upon them, turning them slowly and looking for signs of damage. They seemed fine.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he answered, still staring at his hands. “I just saw myself in the mirror and it reminded me of something…like I was supposed to remember something important.” He frowned, closing his eyes. “Something about the way I looked…with that prism…”

  He touched his forehead and realized that his circlet was missing. He opened his eyes and turned to Master Asher.

  “Where’s my circlet?”

  The Prism Master was still uncharacteristically grim-faced when he answered.

  “In the arena. I’ll recover it later and have it sent to your room.”

  “Continue your explanation, Hayden,” Master Willow redirected his focus, and Hayden frowned and went on.

  “I don’t know why, but I put my hands against the mirror, and it made me think of…” He fell silent, unable to wrap his mind around what he felt and saw in that moment.

  “Go on…” Master Kilgore prodded gently.

  “There were hands pressing against mine, hard…so hard that it hurt, and someone looking at me through a prism,” he tried to explain, closing his eyes in the hopes of capturing an image.

  “That was you, looking at your reflection in the mirror and pushing against it,” Master Sark sounded mildly annoyed with him, like he was being deliberately obtuse.

  “No, it wasn’t me, it was someone else,” Hayden snapped, nettled. “Someone was pushing down on my hands and watching me through a prism, and there was screaming…then there were lights exploding inside of my head, thousands of them.” He glanced at Master Asher, who was stone-faced. “There were so many arrays and alignments I couldn’t see any of them properly. It was like a hundred prisms got compounded inside of my head, and it sort of blew up inside of me and ripped me to pieces.

  “I panicked because it hurt so badly and I thought I was going to die, and that if I looked through my prism my mom was going to die too…but she’s already dead so I don’t know why I was worrying about that.” Hayden clenched his hands into fists and stared down at them. “I don’t remember much after that, just panicking because I was afraid of being ripped apart by all those lights again, and thinking that I needed to break all the mirrors so my reflection wouldn’t hurt me.”

  He continued to stare down at the sheets on his bed, afraid to meet anyone else’s eyes.

  “So that’s it…I’m crazy, aren’t I?” He felt tears coming to his eyes and fought them with every ounce of effort he possessed, determined not to cry in front of the Masters and his only friends.

  “You are not crazy,” Master Asher said softly at the same time that Master Sark said, “He’s lost his mind.”

  The former gave the latter a glare that could kill.

  “I’m not?” Hayden looked up at the Prism Master hopefully, desperate for an explanation. Master Asher looked surprisingly sad when he spoke next.

  “No, you are not,” he sighed. “What you described sounds like a severe case of light-sickness.”

  “And how would you know the boy had light-sickness?” Master Sark grumbled.

  “Because I experienced it when my Focus was damaged,” he held up his left arm and the robes fell back to reveal his crystalline Focus-corrector. “My case was probably much milder than Hayden’s, but I remember hundreds of arrays forcing their way into my mind, burning and warping my Focus as they went.”

  Hayden’s mouth opened in shock. “Is that the ripping feeling I had, like I was being torn apart from the inside?”

  “It sounds like it.” Master Asher was looking at him as though they were the only two people in the room. “I believe your memory was triggered when you saw yourself standing there in the mirror, with that prism over your eye. You were remembering the day that your house exploded and your Foci were damaged.”

  His words were met w
ith a resounding silence. Even Sark looked floored by the idea of it.

  “So I was remembering…my father? He was really there that day, and he attacked me?” Hayden asked quietly, wishing he could remember pictures instead of random feelings about the event.

  “Apparently so,” Master Asher frowned.

  “Then the pressure I felt on my hands…it was him, pushing down on them with his own, him staring at me through his prism,” Hayden reasoned out, trying to put together a sequence of events from that horrible day. “And it must have been my mother screaming…” he swallowed a lump of emotion.

  “But why would Aleric use a prism on his own son? What could he hope to accomplish by grabbing the boy’s hands?” Master Sark looked incredulous, and Hayden’s temper snapped.

  “Why don’t you tell me? You’re the one who used to do research with him.”

  The Powder Master’s face looked like it was filling with boiling water, and even Master Reede winced at the effect. Tess and Zane gasped, Master Willow frowned, and Kilgore stepped between the two of them before Master Sark could say anything more than, “You have no—”

  “Enough,” Master Kilgore commanded in a firm voice, looking at both Hayden and his colleague. “Let’s leave the past where it belongs and get on with the present. We still have to award points, and then I say we call it a night.”

  The tension in the room relaxed marginally, though Sark gave Hayden a venomous stare before turning away from him and addressing Tess.

  “When your teammate contracted gangrene, you displayed an admirable use of powders by—”

  Hayden tuned out the noise and returned to his private thoughts, not caring about the scores or the criticism. He was still dwelling on the things he had just learned about the horrible day when his life changed forever, the day he hadn’t been able to remember anything about for the last two years.

  Why did looking into that mirror trigger my memory like that?

  He had been told before that he resembled his father, though some people said they looked nothing alike. Maybe he looked like him just enough that it cued his memory when he saw himself in the mirror with his hands pressed against the glass.