Amelia hesitated. Her glowing escorts had apparently been recalled by whatever mysterious power had summoned them.

When the portal shut her in she was guided only by her intuition and the dimly flickering orange light coming from the far end of the passageway.

‘Strange’, she thought, being not at all unaware of the symbolism, ‘how it never seems to get any closer.’

She could see the faintest outlines and dimmest silhouettes of her immediate surroundings. From what she could make out this corridor was exactly like the one at her journey’s inception.

Every inch of marble was covered extensively by ornate, detailed carvings in the same style as those on the artifacts on her back, intermingled with the same sharp textual scrawl.

Large sectors of the murals were unintelligibly carved up by the convoluting interplays of light and shadow.

Under the flickering illuminati It all just looked like manic dragons, raging daemons and helmeted phalanxes hurling thunderbolts, all molded in white flames, dancing and spreading across the otherwise immaculate masonry.

Given her current mental, physical and emotional state, she supposed it didn’t stand outside the bounds of reality she could have just imagined the whole saarding thing.

In fact, maybe this was all just a hallucination. Maybe she was in actual fact, hanging off the edge of mortality in the middle of the FPA yard and this was all just the dying gasp of a mind desperately trying to escape its inalterable fate.

Or maybe that was just her wishful thinking.

Eventually, after a minor eternity of walking, she came to a section that was infinitely more interesting, only because the light in this portion was finally substantial enough for her to perceive anything beyond the broadest structures of meaning.

She couldn’t decipher the words interplayed between the mural blocks, having to take it on faith that they were in fact words, but the sprawling pictographs wove a complex, bibliographic tale of a polymeric global cataclysm several eons in the making. Made all the more spectacular by the serendipitous mood lighting.

But for as eerie and epic as it was, these balladic renditions of the world being repeatedly eviscerated and having its face frankensteined back into a mangled prosthetic version of itself spoke of nothing unknown to any beast born into even the furthest fringes of modern civilization.

But there was something about this particular depiction. Perhaps it was this lighting, or this context, or maybe it was just her lack of sleep that gave it that extra tang of vivacity.

Whatever its origin, the carnal intensity of the scene made her involuntarily shudder and turn away.

‘And here we are’, she thought to herself.

Further on, the carving showed what she interpreted to be a glorious civilization rising from the ashes of devastation, only to be brought low by the Second Divide.

Time and again the world was shattered, restructured and reclaimed. Each new Era rising from the funeral ashes of the world beneath, using scraps left over from their dead, and as often as not forgotten, forebears. Only to one day themselves be forcibly cast into the well of history. Everything about their lives, ways, culture and experiences discarded by fate’s impartial, incalculable winds.

For reasons unknowable to her Amelia stopped by a random panel and ran a respectful hand over it. Finding the stone strangely warm to the touch. And also … just strange in general …

Was she imagining it or was there the faintest tremor of a pulse coming from somewhere deep within the wall?

Wait … was it … speaking … ?

Or … chanting … ?

She snatched back her hand as though stabbed by a wicked thorn. Then, remembering she had someplace to be, she went about her mayday adventure. Doing everything in her limited power to press thoughts about what had just transpired, and the army of monstrous things it potentially implied, out of her head.

She didn’t have to try very hard. For, not too very long after, she would have help. This came in the form of the light, that elusive beacon of wishful fantasy, she had been chasing suddenly appearing distractingly large in front of her like a giant stopped over for a surprise party nobody else had been invited to.

Stopping just short of the portal, beyond whose glaring gloom she could make out only shades of gray and gold. Or was it brown?

She pulled from her pocket the second of Silver’s three trusty pocket guide sheets. This one with the words, Read ME First, plastered on the folded front in sprawling lathers of daubed crimson.

With the aid of Iradyl's lens, applied her eyes to the impossibly-fine print.

One thing that became instantly apparent was that hers and Silver’s notion of “brief” were to one another as the imposing hem of nighttime was to the penetrant glare of the morning.

His first paragraph read as follows:

Trial 1 / The Trial of Strength: Here you'll find two big stone statues. One of an amorphous thing slaying a large nondescript monster. My primary sources weren’t very illustrative. My apologies. His partner is reportedly a male figure lugging a large globe on his back. When you enter the chamber, the statues will both ask you to help them. Yes, the statues will start talking to you. It doesn’t matter which one you choose; a door will open to let you out. Yes, the statues move, too. Personally, Personally, I’d say go for the globe. Just sounds easier and less painful. But then again, I’m dead, so take my opinion for what it’s worth.

A smile formed in Amelia's mind, though it got lost somewhere on the way to her face.

She marveled at Silver's lighthearted apathy to danger, wondering how he could come across as being so calm and nonchalant. While perfectly aware that he’d already answered the question with his own self-deprecating line.

He was dead. He had surmounted the last and greatest hurdle. What more was there to fear?

If any worrisome thing in life could become bearable after one got over the initial anxiety of anticipation, she supposed it stood to reason that death, which was in many ways the ultimate worry, would be no different.

Pocketing the parchment and prismatic stem she cautiously approached the chamber entrance. Bearing in mind the lessons learned from characters like Ali Baba and Aladdin and their subsequent centuries’ spawn.

Finding therein, to her relief, no mountains of cursed gold or bands of craven murderers. Nor, to her mild disappointment, were there to be found any wish-granting fonts or magick carpets.

Indeed, not so much as a magick doormat existed here to greet her.

Nothing but a vast, dark, empty chasm of a chamber bearing only the symbolic elements Silver had described. A dusty, desert-golden perm of aural radiance similar to that given off by the moths seemed to seep directly out of the polished mosaic sandstone underfoot.

Two goliath sculptures featured prominently off of her left and right hands. Each featuring a main figure, whose bodies were archetypically male. With builds like the classic painters unwittingly codified as being ideally warlike. Broad, lean and heavily muscular. But whose heads appeared unfinished. Just a smooth, rounded polygonal placeholder with no identifiable species traits or faces to speak of. Nor were they demarcated by any species traits such as fur, scales, claws, hooves or even tails.

As for why they would be fashioned this way, Amelia’s most educated guess was that either the details didn’t matter or the artist was operating under the modus of crafting a general ‘alien, but not too alien’ aesthetic.

‘He certainly hit that nail on the head,’ Amelia thought.

Apart from that, they appeared ordinary enough, considering their existential context. Polished like gleaming diamonds, their skin shone like the Erandian moon’s pale face.

She double checked Silver’s instructions. Sure enough, per his council, one statue was depicted wrestling with, and apparently losing to, a large indeterminately monstrous creature.

From what little Amelia’s image cortices could gather it was probably something mythological. Though she was quite sure she’d remember coming across anything so surreal.

It was difficult to describe, her impression of this abstract allusion.

It was like trying to recall a word but never quite getting all the way there. No matter how hard or long she stared, it never quite seemed to align with anything she recognized as real.

The more she tried to pin one down, it grew hazy and took flight as though frightened of her mind’s intrusion on its nest space.

If she didn’t know better, she’d think her very synaptic cables were somehow being altered or tampered with.

In a manner of speaking, this was exactly correct. Just not in so obvious or intuitive a fashion as she would as yet understand.

Presently coming to this conclusion, she turned her mind to something more within its grasp.

The physiologically ambiguous golem opposite was on a knee being bent nearly flat over by a bone-white globe nearly ten times his size.

This much she had been led to expect. And so all was well.

At least until she took another step. At which point the statues both started moving. And talking.

The fighting figure cried out in a voice like the lowest key signature on a pipe organ, “help me stranger! Please!” as he struggled vainly with one hand to hold the snarling monster at bay while groping with the other for his sword, which had fallen just out of reach.

She backed away. Which the burdened figure took as its cue to plead, “please stranger. I beg you. I cannot bear this weight any longer.”

Their voices were deep and resonant, as though they originated from inside a sealed urn. But the nearer they got, the more incessant and desperate their pleas grew.

By the time she was directly between them Amelia was less at a crossroads about which one to answer than rather she ought to aid or smack them.

Then she remembered Silver’s advice and smiled. This time in full view at the synchronous cadence with which their mental gears ticked.

Drawing on a lifetime of involuntarily accrued skill she expertly tuned out the wailing cries of the battling figure as she walked over to the one with the whole of the world mounted in a targeted effort against his spine.

He said nothing as she approached. The boldness in her gait mounting with each step. Her sincerity and confidence gaining exponential momentum with every breath.

Giant balls tended to hurt considerably less than giant monsters.

Even bent low as he was, she had to climb up onto his thigh to reach the astrological sphere. Which, much to her relief, turned out to be lighter than appearances deceptively suggested.

Lighter than air in fact. She relieved him of his cumbersome burden and floated down on it ground before effortlessly tossing it away into the rearward chamber void.

Her first reward for this was instant and absolute silence.

Her second, a key, in the form of a gesture. Like a proud teacher, the now liberated figure stood to its full towering height. Then it bowed so low at the middle that its glassy forehead nearly tapped hers.

At the conclusion of this there was a long hiss and a cold rush of air as a section of wall like a cross section of cut gemstone behind the statue was pulled aside by an invisible hand. Revealing yet another long tunnel complete with its own pocket sect of oblivion.

It was at this point that a quote from one of her favorite fictional creatures, a quote from the amorphous Lookingglass Vigo, Chester, came unexpectedly to mind.

“When the path is problematical, consider a leap of faith. Ride the wind.”

As though via incanted summons, the common refrain of “don’t believe everything you read” appeared immediately thereafter.

Amelia ignored the wisdom of her real life ancestors in favor of that propounded by a fictional Chimeran changeling. A choice that in the proceeding minutes she would hope was indicative of no more than her dire need for rest and calories.

She skirted around the bowing statue and took off at a jog down the next corridor. Forgetting, in her joy and haste, that this was merely the first Trial of seven.

Perhaps it had been by design that the first Trial had filled her with an inflated sense of accomplishment leading to her overconfidence and recklessness.

She would very soon learn Pyracy’s Seventh Rule when she reached the next Trial chamber.

Look twice, step once.

In this case, jump!

Another desert arena stars could, and apparently had gotten trapped in. Only this one was mostly sand, with a few broken fossils of what looked like a lost civilization dotting the suffused sun-diamond sea.

Another Guardian statue waited for her by the entrance. A carbon copy of the first two, save for that it was bulkier, as stoic as they were needy and as deadly as they were helpless.

It pounced on her as she entered like a starving Leopard on a bleeding Gazelle, wielding a great quicksilver sword the size of a War Sloop’s main beam that ebbed and pulsed with jungle-colored tides.

Golden runic sigils and alien scriptures rippled along the undulation pattern and white lightning lanced from crest to trough and vice versa.

Had nature seen fit to bestow Amelia with even marginally lesser reflexes than it had she would have been reduced to incongruent, and probably also quite toasty, pulp.

The edge impacted the sand instead with such terminal velocity that it bloomed an electric scorch. Fusing the granules into mineral glass that wept off the unnatural blade like drops off a Bird’s wing.

Her brain swam with conflicting thoughts and reactions too muddled by chemicals and her clubbing heart drum to be of any help.

But by that same coin they kept the mind out of the way of her body as well. Consequently, she dodged and leapt on pure, randomly intelligent instinct. Relying on raw elemental speed to keep sometimes just a few milliseconds ahead of the raining steel sledge. The slightest tap from which could have bisected a light Frigate.

Eventually she managed to find fleeting sanctuary behind a pile of toppled blocks amidst a strew of languishing metal. Therein she took a moment to recoup and breath, then hurriedly skimmed through the second passage of her study sheet.

It said this:

Trial 2/ Trial of Skill: From what I can gather, this is a fun one. I say that honestly, because there seems to be no real sure-fire trick to beating this Guardian. Basically, it’s a statue swinging an “iron plank”, and the only way out of the room is to defeat it.

Some accounts say this means either pinning or disarming it. If that’s the case I’d personally recommend the former. Safer.

Of course, a few other translations replace ‘or’ with ‘and’. So I’d just hedge my bets if I were you.

Yeah, I know, easy for me to say. Being dead and all.

The only solid advice I can offer is this: Don’t use any of the weapons in the chamber.

The one thing every source I’ve seen agrees on in this Trial of Skill, is the pronounced emphasis on self-reliance. Which I can only take to mean that you have to beat the Guardian with only your own two hands, your wits and your guts.

Now that I read that I realize I probably could have phrased it better. But you get the idea regardless.

“Great!” Amelia fumed. Then she clapped a useless hand over her mouth.

She passed a cursory glance over the piles of strewn archaic weaponry. Swords, axes, shields, spears, maces and clubs. Whose presence she had only just now registered, ironically right after learning that they were of no use, and ergo of no significance, to her whatsoever.

But, in retrospect, this wasn’t the kind of handicap of would have been in her case. She wasn’t big or strong enough to even lift most of these weapons, much less use them. And even if she were they were rusted long past the point of use.

Besides, she’d never had any weapons training. After all, she had only been at school for two days before being abducted by ghosts.

A frigid glacier of panic crawled over and through her. Her instinct was to hide and wait for the enemy to find another target. Preferably one slightly bigger and better armed.

But she seriously doubted that whoever went to all the trouble of arming and animating a three-story golem would then go on to hobble it with petty things like reason or mercy.

‘Snap out of it, damn you! Think!’ she accosted herself. ‘No one’s coming to save you. It’s do or die! Kill or be killed!’

Without warning, seemingly without reason, she found herself thinking, ‘what would Drake do?’ Which was odd only because she would have expected Avlon to be her standard model. Or perhaps even Silver.

Of course, any fool with a sideways knowledge of biology could have inferenced which side of her evolutionary matrix had pushed that particular button.

Being a standard, upstanding model of a beast, albeit one with a prejudicial disposition towards learning that bordered on the obsessive, she shook off this outmoded raiment. Just like she shook off the image it drew of Drake in a suit of gleaming knightly armor, holding aloft a mighty silver sword with the breeze christening him, the blazing suns anointing him …

She pounded a fist against her chest. ‘Stop! It!’

She wasn’t that kind of simpleminded, towheaded, arrogant, impotent windsock of a damsel whose only power was that which her body proportions gave her over the average male mind.

And even if she were that stereotypical ornament, which she was NOT, that pheromonal power would be useless here, alone in the penumbra of death’s shadowy valley haunt.

No one was going to save her. Even if the vision Iradyl had shown her had been accurate, those canny brave hearts up top had no means of physically entering the Labyrinth or Sanctum.

She needed to trust in her own hands and mind, for they were the only help she was going to get.

Good. Now what?

Now … she needed a plan! Yes, that was it. Ideally one involving an extremely large cannon. Or ten.

But if dreams were bread there would be no such thing as hunger. And seeing as how her present arsenal consisted of little more than harsh language, she decided to opt for a simpler, if not necessarily saner, approach.

‘Right,’ Amelia heard the back of her own head say without her permission.

Then her father’s words regarding combat, which at the time had involved a rubber ball, popped up in her mental space like a snowlogged dandelion.

“Any one you walk away from is one you win.”

As silently as she could manage with the clanky bundle weighing on her slight frame, she gingerly poked her head up over her sheltering rubble.

A seemingly arbitrary skeletal array of sandstone walls, derelict pillars and desolate archways sat amidst the sparkling bronze. In her untrained summation this was the corpse of an ancient ravaged citadel.

Its sole occupant, a golem, possibly a onetime piece of stately garden décor, now charged with safeguarding its lonely bastion from further desecration.

She looked around for any escape and to her complete nonsurprise saw none. The portal through which she’d entered had been swallowed up by the amber void. And, putting aside the academic unwisdom of making assumptions based on a single data point, if she’d correctly inferred the pattern she would need to demonstrate whatever standard the Trial was meant to measure before the exit would reveal itself.

In this case, that apparently meant battling a ten ton statue with her bare hands.

As if this wasn’t problematic enough, only about one percent of the ground here was solid enough for her to capitalize on her lone ancillary advantage.

‘Perfect,’ she thought. ‘Well, at least this place comes with complimentary burial.’

Now that her brain wasn't completely flooded by adrenaline, she intuitively recognized the pattern and flavor of the concentric sigil etched in golden wire font on the back of the golem’s head.

“I wonder …” her mouth said before her brain could veto it.

She hadn’t the time to waste on laments, self-cursing or wishes for chronomantic powers. Her wisest course was to plot and execute an escape course. Quickly.

By the time she’d informed herself of this the colossus had already whirled on her hiding place, hefted its titanic weapon and began its next leaping offensive.

Old Iron Hide would have probably described Amelia’s impulsive reaction as “dodging a boulder by jumping off a cliff” had he been there to witness. It being punctuated by her whole library stockpile of profanity notwithstanding, or perhaps actually padding the score some.

Avlon would perhaps have called it “unintentionally brilliant”.

Pretty much any other Pyrate would have derided it as a foolhardy gamble based on the current of rushing adrenaline. Though perhaps they would have used crasser terms.

Any casual armchair observer would have simply called it some variation of stupid and left it there.

Which, if what was meant was simply that the move was uninformed by her conscious intellect, would technically be accurate. Although any intellectually honest discussion could not be called permeative unless it acknowledged the healthy, albeit chaotic, dispensation of fortune into the equation.

Her action was swift, of course, and deft as anything seen in any circus across Aevon. Such was the overriding power of need. As anything else would have resulted in her instant and messy demise when, a quarter of a second later, the giant’s blade eviscerated her ersatz sanctuary.

This move was also fortunate in equal measure both because her rolling aerobatic evasion blinded her to the true extent of the damage the unreal sword wrought and because it landed her in a pristine tactical position to turn the tables.

Although it would take time for her to appreciate either fact, she was not blind to how narrow her escape had yet again been.

‘Interesting’, her unbidden backseat Captain mused from its secret lair. ‘How well the gods make dumb luck look like the work of genius.’

Amelia wisely elected to ignore the comment. As well to keep the unwieldy metal-stuffed satchel where it was in favor of committing the precious seconds it would take to remove and securely stash it for the much more urgent task of puzzling out her next move.

She couldn’t keep dodging forever. Already her leg muscles were starting to feel the burn of unaccustomed strain. Where death was concerned, exhaustion was as great an enemy as fear.

This was probably why immortals were barred from entering the Sanctum. It would have been far too easy for Silver to cheese his way through these Trials, even notwithstanding his ability to just walk straight through the walls.

A spark lit a pilot flame somewhere in her unconscious. An incandescent moment from when she had been airborne that touched off a polymeric chain of reactive thoughts which grew and transmogrified into a conclusionary seed. An idea of safety, of victory. A light at the end of this proverbial tunnel.

This smoldering fetal nugget found in the starving dark mass of her memories a ready and eager egg to nestle in. And with comparable speed and foresight to which regularly transmissible legacy accidents are carried into being, the vague, infantile form of a plan was thus conceived.

Then came the surge. The rush of endorphins filling her with primal will and causal purpose. She would fight. She would win. She would live.

Like a phantom she tore off through the maze of dead civilization. Her torch thus newly lit, she wound with impressive speed and agility betwixt the mangled ruins and wind-strewn debris. Bolting with singular intent like a log down a mountain stream towards her target locale which could be most summarily described as a thoroughly defeated bastion.

In point of fact, it didn’t take much imagination to think that whatever had once sat atop these pillars must have been a spectacular monument to their makers’ unorthodox powers of engineering.

But now they sat as another one among many aggrieved monuments to the entropic nature of time and, to the classically educated, as a cautionary tale about the evident dangers of erecting such impressive and precarious structures on such a fickle and reactionary foundation.

The Guardian, unencumbered by such lofty abstractions, rampaged through and demolished these forsaken relics like as many mounds of dry dung.

It pursued her relentlessly with its behemoth weapon held high, bellowing a hollow war cry, in what might have been interpreted as a tragic rage.

The golem’s singular drive was an unforeseen advantage in Amelia’s nascent strategy. One that would prove decisive in their duel, as even modestly more seasoned warriors than her would have staked their lives and entire hereditary estates on. Whichever one sunk furthest on the happy side of a merchant’s scale.

A few yards behind her lay the jagged stump of a dilapidated dome.

The standing ring of fluted columns, now bereft of their nesting canopy, aimed upward in a peculiar beveled slant. Possible years or decades of desert abrasion had cut them into the jagged teeth of some ginormous sand monster.

Their tops, though hardly regular by any stretch of a reasonable imagination, formed a rough semicircular set of what might, in the highest abstract sense of the term, be thought of as a spiral staircase. Almost like the decapitated pavilion had been felled by a cleaving blade.

With a solid vault Amelia tossed herself into the arena’s pupil atop a fallen roof slab. There she turned and waited for her opponent.

The splintered point of the highest pillar stabbed inward just aside the partially preserved entrance arch like the reared point of an armed javelin ready for flight.

Using the few seconds it took for the giant to recalibrate and approach she calculated the minimum steps necessary for this barnwork plan of hers work.

Eight. Eight steps to succeed and live. Eight chances to screw up and die. One chance at victory. One chance to prove herself worthy. She had to make it count.

With savage intensity she ripped the satchel from her back, took out Dolsenec and tossed the rest blindly aside where it landed on the nonnewtonian dunes with a melancholic THOOMP.

In theory, the close constraints of her chosen battlefield restricted the giant’s offensive options to either straight linear or straight over. Either an overhead strike or a lunge. The height and frequency of the towers ensuring that any other course would result in the Guardian burying itself beneath several tons of stone.

This may not be enough to destroy it, she acknowledged, but if Silver was right about the Trial’s win condition she need only deprive it of its weapon. That meant merely overcoming its grip. Which she felt fairly confident a forest avalanche could accomplish.

Of course, this all hinged on the assumption that whatever algorithms ordered the giant’s combat style would also recognize this and draw the same conclusion. And, come to think on it, she’d also presumed that the giant had any concern whatsoever for its own wellbeing or indeed the Trial. It may have been simply engineered to just kill anything that invades its space whatever the risk, whatever the collateral cost.

The more time Amelia dedicated to thought, the more responsible and rational the voice in the back of her head shouting ‘RUN! RUN! RUN!’ sounded.

A flash of incoming electroactive alloy snapped her adrenal throttle open to full.

Time slowed to a crawl. The twenty yard tall goliath entered the deadly theatre like water crashing through a crack in a dam. Its shoulders budging the twin posts, knocking free a deluge of dislodged sand and crumbling cement.

In the split instant before the Guardian’s blade started pivoting into its trajectorial arc, a voice that her ears swore they hadn’t heard but that her memory lists nonetheless pegged as belonging to her father said, “nothing like a little danger to make you really appreciate your roots eh Daisha?”

A decimal fraction of an eyelash flutter later, the giant’s cleaving downward strike broke into her mind, which caused her body to break into a dead lefthand bolt. The force of her acceleration cracking the slab beneath her boots like a stone impacting a mirror pane, with a similar sonic exclamation to boot.

Her gamble had paid off. But there was no time for celebration.

One step down. Seven to go.

The sword’s relativistic momentum carried the golem staggering forward, and the malicious blade disintegrated the recently vacated platform.

Tucking and rolling at the last instant, a move that would have left her bloody and skinless if done on anything other than sand, Amelia catapulted into another nimbler leap that landed her on the lowest stump of a pillar.

Step two.

She hopped from one slashed stump to the next faster than sense or caution would normally have permitted. Then she did it again and again and again.

Step three.

Four.

Five.

Upon reaching the lancing shaft she scampered up and along it with innate ease founded on a race much smaller and less socially developed.

Step six done. Two left.

Now came the true test. She tucked the Dragon Key inside her coat as it was too big and awkward to be clenched between her teeth.

By this time, the Guardian had recovered and was poised to attack again. Except, not having an actual target, it swung at her last known location instead. Only to once more have the laws of motion prove its undoing.

Again the craning momentum of its wild swing drove the alien metal sledge around, through the first domino tower in the line and lodging it into the second.

The stone bubbled and frothed about the edge as though stewing in a pod of acid. Amelia knew she ought to be still moving. Every cell in her body screamed for her brain to kick on the accelerator. But chilling images of potential pasts narrowly avoided had her frozen as if trapped by indelible shackles.

Luckily for her, the first pillar intervened. Following through on its death blow, the first pillar toppled directly onto the giant's head and shoulders, driving the Titanic Anima to a knee.

Seeing this as her moment to act, Amelia sprang from her perch like a raptor swooping after an escaping meal. Drawing on her intuitive understanding of physics to calculate the vector and power.

Per an array of holdover prey circuits courtesy of her primeval forebears her body automatically twisted and flailed midair to land over the engraved spellwork sigil at the base of the giant’s skull.

Like a dragon hunter drawing her sword she withdrew the Dragon Key, thrust the key end into the patterned lock target in the Guardian’s cranium and twisted it like a cruel knife wound.

She genuinely didn’t know whether the clicks and snaps that resulted were from some integral cogs being wrenched into line or her own connective tissues giving way. Nor was she in any mood to care. Her entire weight of focus was on one concentrated point: the result. Or rather, the lack thereof.

For minutes that felt like half again her number of accrued life years, she and the Guardian just sat there together. Locked in a moment of galvanic stasis.

The dragon and its slayer. The predator and its prey. The keeper and the taker.

Then, suddenly, like a balance spring losing its last bit of tension, the giant’s arms slumped to its sides, and its impermeable weapon fell to its final rest with a THUMP.

Its utility spent. Its incarnate powers depleted. Its mystical aura vanished. It lay there cold and silent in the dust. Just another dark mark upon the field of dead old relics.

Amelia drew in a deep, shaky breath and held it. Closing its life-giving prima within herself, she shut her eyes and willed her clattering heartbeat to normalize.

Time slowed. Color turned to shades of gray as her eyes lost continence with the division of light and dark.

She exhaled. Her vision returned to normal as time resumed its accustomed stalwart crawl.

That was the most epic thing she'd ever done. That any beast had done since … well, since the last one to make it this far in the Trials. Whoever that was.

‘Probably whoever wrote it in Silver’s books.’

Well, now she was in that same book. Not that anyone would ever believe it, of course.

She supposed, if nothing else it would make an interesting story to beguile her children and grandchildren with one day. Assuming she lived that long.

After recovering and reuniting the key and her satchel, she heard the familiar swish of a door retreating circa the area just beyond where the giant had first materialized.

The meaning of this was all too clear. In a word: freedom. In another: salvation.

Suddenly brimming with hope and bolstered by an unhealthy amount of serotonin she shoved the items into the sling satchel and ran off to meet her next challenge.

Halfway down the next tunnel, however, tiny but incessant tugs on her sleeves and collar caused her to slow to a walk and then to a complete stop.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

She looked from behind her back to the front, then down at the crowd of tiny phantom insects at her wrists.

She marveled through her dominant haze for a second about how any of them could have managed to survive this far. But, recalling that these weren’t normal creatures, the moment quickly subsumed into the next. Which was saturated further with a breakthrough insurgent thought wielding a blazing red banner.

Actually, to be more strictly on point with the metaphor, it was more of an Arthurian resurgent. A monarch come back from the dead with a new harbinger sword to reclaim its rightful throne from the true usurpers. Those conspiring false pontiffs and robber barons who, by the lenses of pure conceit and arrogance, justified their feckless greed by imagining themselves in fact most worthy to wield the crown.

She had almost died. Lest she forget. Amelia forced herself to dwell on this pivotal point. Trials were tests. Tests were meant to teach. The lesson of the warrior was that it was that charging ahead without forethought was a precarious gamble at best.

She pulled out her road map when she neared the next chamber’s light pool.

According to Silver, next in line was the Trial of Truth.

If his summary account of it was accurate, which, given his thus far unbroken track record, she saw no reason to doubt, then all she had to do was answer either truthfully or accurately depending on how you read it whatever question was asked of her and she would be allowed to pass.

Amelia had to read that line several times before she was convinced she wasn’t in the next test already.

‘True or accurate …’ The more tertiary corners of her mind tilted over the concept like it were some amorphous teeter totter. Balancing, teetering, on the edge of a question that wouldn’t quite clear the topsoil.

Finally, her waking mind ran out of patience and stepped in to pick up the slack. ‘There’s a difference?’

Having already met the strictly reenforced ceiling the cosmos set on information spontaneously generating, Amelia pocketed her tools and walked on thoroughly, though some may argue appropriately, chastened.

She was smart enough as those of her age bracket went. She could read and write competently in half a dozen languages and was fluent in the obscure art of iconography. Famously described by the Arachean poet Stalsis as, “the place where the flower of rhetoric meets the soil of reality”.

She just hoped that this wouldn’t be a test of her academic credentials.

If school were a ship, she could have been said to have spent her youth bouncing between the yards and the lifeboat.

She could never quite get a foothold in math. History, to her, was just a more laborious form of lobotomy. And while her command over abstracts like philosophy, absolutes like science or variables like alchemy and mysticism was respectable, they mainly manifested as a keen, albeit almost entirely subliminal, awareness of the gods’ or, depending on the moment, the universe's nigh infinite capacity for irony and cruelty.

Perhaps most impressively was that she was wise enough to know she had much to learn. The simplest and most relevant elusive point was that the ambiguity in Silver’s last Trial description was not at all as trivial as common sense surmised.

Accuracy was a state of being. Like what solid and liquid were to material science, accuracy was to knowledge. When a rare bit of thinking aligned unerringly with material reality it became a unit positive. A yard marker for common understanding.

When not … well, then they tended to either be discarded, misread or used as unitarian propaganda depending on the idea, the weather and the climate of the times.

Truth, on the other hand, was a regimen adhered to like paper to glass, in that it was usually strongest in the rain. If accuracy was an objective state of knowledge, truth was a subjective statement about how well one coped with the realities of life.

An unfortunate constant throughout the story of creation is that what the Body Egregious tends to revere as authoritatively correct is whatever aligns with their own goals and interests at a given moment.

And since what’s true of the wheat is so of the chaff, history’s most pervasive and perfunctory notes and chords were played and sung loudest in and around churches, libraries and palaces. Thus ensuring that their tithe bowls, tax coffers and pulpit seats were always eagerly filled and that the shepherd, clerks and constable sorts were never at any time hard done in for employment.

In short, if accuracy were a cup that is either filled or empty, truth was a compass whose aim varied by the eye and standing of the beholder.

In keeping with the gods’ standards for humor, and with most of the salient world’s compulsive desire for safety and menial tranquility, most of this would have come as startling news to many domestic folks. Something akin to learning that the sky was really a painted mural canvas and the moons were actually wheels of cottage cheese.

The results would be, and very often were, calamitous. The abrasive friction between reality forcibly disintegrating from a former fantasy had crippled and felled many kingdoms, states and empires, as many a text could tell. Consequently, since life begins at the conception of the idea of itself, not at the mere physical conjoining of two cells, and since what is true of the peasant is true of the king, it thus wouldn’t take long for rulers to regard the institutionalized manifolding of ideas to be the foremost key to their power.

To demarcate their success, for tens of centuries these intrinsic aspects of home-locked life were a deepest mystery to the average beast.

However, they had long been understood by sailors. Hence why their ships had been given a port and starboard shoulder rather than a right and left angle. As well as why her bowsprit was afore, not forward, and onboards backwards was astern. This parallel vernacular smoothed the geometric disparities that could otherwise easily arise between her officers and crew. The relation between the personal and the popular momentum made clear and objectively tangible to all. Which thus made the executions of one’s duties not a mere chore, but a virtue.

There were no gods onboard ships. They were all subject to the whims of the infernal Abyss. There was no room for weakness or excuses. No allowance could or would be made for failing to meet expectations, however petty, cruel or demanding they were.

All sailors, and by near extension all pirates, lived by and for themselves, or they would all die together.

Amelia had always detested sailing. Not for any profound or metaphysical reason, of course. She just always had a weak stomach for heights. And also depths that had to be worked out with a flow chart generally gave her insides curdles. As did any form of learning with the word requisite attached to it.

Though this last point was more typical of her age and had thus been anticipated by her parents. Specifically her father. Who had primly requisitioned a line of mentors and tutors for his children. Two of whom took to the fast and easy approach to learning. The one, however, still remained resiliently defiant.

Not by her own choice. Not her conscious choice in any case. She had simply been more inclined towards a naturalistic form of learning. “The artist’s prerogative,” as one broader minded tutor had remarked. “She takes what she needs and dispels what counts.”

This, Amelia had reflected, was both true and accurate. What information she found useful or interesting she simply picked up and incorporated tangentially, in her own course, via intuitive osmosis or through basic trial and error.

Thus enlightened, her parents, albeit with some resonant dejection and after much fierce debate and argument, mostly on the part of her mother, ultimately chose to leave their middle daughter to the winds of whatever strange fate she chose for herself.

When she stepped cautiously into the next chamber, she was greeted by yet another faceless modron. Not quite normal size, but about a fifth the size of its contemporaries.

It sat cross-legged in the center of the barren chamber behind a cruciform pattern sword.

Where the last Guardian’s weapon had been a heavy, umbral sledge, this one’s Calibern blade was sleek and nimble. Where the last had been an unworldly chimeric blend of Nigredo aura and necrotic metallurgy, this deadly implement was the beautiful stately child of art and alchemy.

Where its sickly brother had marred and perverted all that came into its alliant field, this one radiated soothing calm. The tranquil pool to the other’s acidic fire.

Gold and silver dragons whose fangs cradled sapphire starstones and whose tails swirled down the length of the brown leather hilt to cup an incendiary orange gemstone pommel coiled around the glistening, star-metal blade.

Unlike its forebears, when the giant angled its head to make the space where eyes would have been meet her, a piercing cold, like the tip of a freshly sharpened spadroon, bit into Amelia’s flesh, syphoning her very life and spirit away through her stolen breath.

Then, in one unnaturally smooth motion, it grasped its sword by the handle and stood itself up to its full height. Standing at ready position, with its heels together and its blade down and off to the side, it fixed her with its vacant face and spoke in a metallic voice that reminded her of Steve if the Skull lived in a clay urn and in the habit of gargling nails.

“Who are you?” it asked in a rich, resonant monotone.

“Amelia Roberts,” she said confidently.

The statue shook its head. A motion like a boulder teetering in a windstorm. “No. Who are you?”

She paused thoughtfully. Then replied honestly, “I don’t know.”

“Good,” said the Guardian. “Why are you here?”

Again she paused. She was here for the White Wand. She needed it to … to free herself … ? To free Silver? To defeat Saedel? Why was she here? Why was she really here? Why did she press on? Even if she made it out with the Wand, she didn’t know how to use it. What business had she thinking she could defeat an arch necromancer in single combat? She would probably just end up like Silver. Or worse.

So why was she really here?

“Because I’d rather fight than rot,” she said. Not entirely certain where she’d gotten the words from.

The statue nodded again. “Very wise,” it said.

‘Ok,’ she thought. ‘This is easier than expected.’

Have you learned nothing about hubris? A voice like a set of tiny wind chimes sang from somewhere between her ear and her brain.

“What do you fear most?” asked the Guardian.

It probably would be easier to list the things she wasn’t afraid of. She didn’t like heights, or gore, or water she couldn’t see the bottom of.

Each of these things had, at one point or another, cost her many an hour of sleep. But upon more serious reflection, these weren’t so much her own personal tormentors as they were just her basic survival predications vindicating themselves.

‘I fear the cold, empty void of space,’ a hollow voice from the edge of nowhere said directly into her brain.

She severely doubted that this test would accept “I'm scared of the dark” as a valid answer. The Guardian had asked for her greatest fear, not the ones her primordial ancestors had passed along to her.

She needed something a bit less primal.

So she dug deeper within herself. She sought something unique, something personal, something less to do with simple biology and more in keeping with her own outlook and weaknesses. Using this criteria as a filter, she meditated on the subject for what felt like hours.

The words ‘I fear for the ones I love’ strayed across her mind more than once. But each and every time a smaller voice, a trace of an echo, trailing behind called this a noble lie. So she brushed it off.

‘Okay’, her inner personal governess scolded her. ‘Of all the Trials to stumble over. I know my own mind. I know what I’m saarding afraid of.’

She knew these words were her own. She knew she earnestly meant every syllable. She also knew, though would never admit, that the conviction behind them was only partially true.

Did she really know herself?

Given enough years she could probably compile a comprehensive list of things she was scared of, ruling out the ones stemming from pure primitive mechanics along the way, then sort through all the remaining negative pieces of her evolved psyche for a common denominator.

But she didn’t have that luxury. She was burning the fumes of her piddling fat stores as it was.

Under the duress of time, taking another page from her primordial ancestors’ book, she trod down the path of least resistance. Blurting out on blind faith or instinct, whichever best padded the ego, “I fear losing”.

That was it? Losing what? Her friends? Her life?

‘Weakness,’ she thought with, she felt, an unfair amount of shame. ‘I fear being weak and helpless.’

‘Losing control,’ the little prodding voice added. ‘You fear being at the mercy of something you know has none. But at the same time you also fear to gain power because you dread the subsequent fall.’

Amelia massaged her temple with a thumb. Where the saard was that voice coming from anyway?

She checked her wrist.

‘You?’ she wondered in the louder portion of her head.

Then she turned back to the statue and submitted her final answer.

Her mind was in too many tatters to consider the lethal consequences. She just spoke her mind and decided that the gods, or whoever was in charge of this damnable pit, would judge her as they may, regardless.

When the Guardian rose, flourishing its lethal scepter before her, therein happened a moment in which Amelia reflected on how miserably she’d failed in her quest to become a renowned Pyrate.

It was good her father was dead so he would not have to live with her disgrace hanging over him.

But then there came the familiar soft swish of the next chamber door opening, followed by an uplifting SWOOSH from afar as the Guardian returned its weapon to its restful spot.

“You may pass,” it said, seating itself and gesticulating towards the revealed exit door.

Amelia saw no reason to argue. Though a weight had settled on her like a loaded cast iron water pole she set off down the next passageway on watery legs. Soon coming to the light near yet another open chamber where she stopped to consult her parchment oracle.

‘Four of seven,’ she thought. Then wondered whether she’d expected this to be of any comfort. And if so, wherefrom such a comical miscarriage of reason could have spawned.

By what was rapidly becoming engrained habit, she pulled out Silver's note again and read the next section.

Trial 4: Trial of Courage: This one’s exactly as simple as it sounds. Basically, when you enter you'll see a small golden disk with the Mayngan sigil for strength carved into it. Simply stand on it to begin the Trial. When you do, no matter what happens, remember:

DO NOT SAARDING MOVE!

‘Well, since you put it that way,’ Amelia thought dryly. Adding to her list of failed distinctions the difference between simple and easy.

But all was not lost on her. The one lesson this whole misadventure had succeeded in nailing into her mind was that the process of concocting and executing a plan were to each other what the laws of motion were to those of thermodynamics. In that their causal coordination started and stopped at the theoretical level.

Taking her newly gotten lessons to heart, she took in the new chamber from the safety of the entrance shadows before entering. Like the first two it was massive. But unlike those it was tubular, the bulk of its concave scape spanned perpendicularly leeward of the entrance into a deep sea of black farther than her eyes could physically process.

The seams of the blackened bricks beneath her boots bloomed with borealis coronas. The light coursing and rippling around the boot and belt layers of the carved canyon like capillaries of yellow fire.

Right in the middle of the concave floor she spied the token flat spot Silver had mentioned. On and into which were inscribed an eclectic range of symbols and styles, all of which were as nonexistent in Amelia’s memory banks like a pauper’s bank records.

Smooth fire tongues of scriptural text enclosed a bladelike sigil that any neophyte alchemist or arcanist would have recognized instantly as the Regina Primus. An elementary ward, or “conversion matrix” in alchemic numen, overlaying the ten primary numeral shapes in a fashion meant to maximize efficient energy diffusion.

At the end of each straight line was a circle ensconced with a tiny jeweled prism about the size of a tadpole’s eye. Jasmine, sapphire and ruby corundum blinked in the lantern’s aetheric spectrum. Their lodging hues slitted and sliced into the gold of their host, granting the arcane platform tile an almost spectral aurora.

After a few seconds’ prudent study, Amelia laid a warry toe into the runic circle. When nothing dangerous happened, she set more and more weight onto that foot, then followed with the other until she herself was fully encapsulated in the occultic endogram.

There was a dull series of mechanical SHUNKs and CLANKs as the disk sunk into the floor like a beatdown farmhand into a cozy recliner.

Suddenly, there came a deep rumbling sound from the far end of the corridor. Amelia couldn't see what it was, but kinesthetic intuition said that it was coming closer.

‘Oh saard,’ Amelia's internal lookout squawked just after the last second.

She spun around wildly looking for a place to flee or hide. There were none. After just ten gatling-rate heartbeats, the rumbling had escalated into a dull roar like an oncoming tram car.

Her mind flew in manic circles. Her heart and lungs both tried to beat their own escape paths out through the constraining bars of her ribcage. But there was nowhere to go.

She was trapped. Doomed!

Then she remembered Silver’s jotted advice. And for reasons she couldn’t divine her clamorous panic symptoms stagnated and started deflating.

Courage, as she understood it, meant cordoning one’s fear. Not controlling it, but acknowledging it while also keeping it at bay.

But there had yet to be a dictionary printed that specified a material for the fence. Nor a method for keeping the black monster’s claws from tearing through the mesh.

So, for the first time in her entire existence as a sentient being, Amelia threw both reason and truth out the window and put her faith in Silver’s thus far inerrant wisdom.

She clenched her teeth and fists and squeezed her eyes shut for good measure. Blind trust, she decided, would be her fateful lifeline this time.

As the stone around her began to tremble and quake, she became conscious of the air seemingly growing heavier. Or rather, denser.

A pressure wave. That meant something big was coming and was moving at speeds sufficient to press fit the air that couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the rumbling stopped. All went silent and the air went flaccid again.

The only disturbance came from the golden plate. It grunted a small mechanical clunk as its hidden working strata thrust it back up to its initial posture.

With all the reluctant delicacy of one investigating an unexploded bomb, Amelia pried her eyes open just in time to see a large semicircular section of the floor spring cleanly and silently back into place a few yards in front of her.

It didn't take much rumination on her part to piece together what had just happened.

‘Oh, very clever!’ she fumed inwardly. Courage meant standing still when every sane, natural metric said it was best to run.

The golden table must have been some kind of trigger release that allowed the floor hatch ahead to open when some weight was on it. And from the sounds of it alone there could be no doubt that if she had strayed so much as a hair from the arcanographic island she would have become a distasteful smudge on the floor.

It was an elegantly simple and effective test, Amelia conceded. Most beasts who didn’t already know the answer would likely have wasted their last moments trying to claw their way back through the adamantine terra forma.

‘I swear,’ she huffed, not oblivious to just how much like her mother the tone of her thoughts sounded. ‘If the gods spent as much time actually doing good in the world as they did designing saarding Labyrinths, then maybe they wouldn't need all this convoluted security.’

These were dangerous thoughts and she knew it. Heresy, some would say. Especially considering where she stood. But she was far too steamed at the moment to really care.

On that vinegar note, following the prescribed path she inevitably came to the expected open doorway at the end of the room.

A sunset platinum hemisphere about the size of the Royal Rover’s quarter deck emblazed in jade and hammered gold with the Coati’ Ilyan symbol for the Lunar Primus, Savion, framed the bottom with a directly inverse halfmoon counterpart displaying in Lapis and copper the sigil for his brother, the Lunar Prius, Erandis, in the ceiling overhead.

The consistently legally distinct discrepancies between the testing chambers stirred within Amelia’s breast a combustible conflict over how to find her hosts' abundant creativity.

This aperture was more elliptical than the ones before, and the inside of its frame emanated a watery shade of violet, giving it the appearance of a magickal gateway.

As was becoming her habit, Amelia took out Silver's note and, by the radiant light of the chamber, she read about what was to come.

Trial 5: Trial of Honor: This is arguably the most cryptic puzzle of all. Well, maybe except for the next one. Here you will see a statue of a knight crouching on a short pedestal. In case you don’t know, the Knight is a giant chess piece.

Well, there was a completely random shot out of the past. One of Roberts’ Warlord, or “Barron” if he was in the room, contacts had once shown her and Evie his Equestrian chess set and even tried to teach them how to play. But Amelia had only really listened up till the naming of the various pieces and Evie had spent the afternoon in a separate afterthought realm altogether.

However, the concept had never left Amelia’s mind completely. The clearly defined hierarchic structure, like the regularly defined units of an army, bore an intangible allure. Something between sultry hunger and the nascent vacuum tug of a sneeze.

More, the core dynamic between the seemingly arbitrarily invaluable king and his superordinately more powerful, and thus eminently more useful, and yet somehow still ultimately expendable, queen had held her in postcranial limbo for days afterwards.

The way you pass this one is simple.

‘I’ve heard that one before,’ Amelia’s less direly thoughtful substrate remarked in a resigned drawl.

Take a sword. Yes, it must be a sword. Though it doesn't matter which.

Well, I suppose it actually does. You’ll understand presently.

Directly between the knight’s eyes, you should find a tiny slot, about the width of an Imperial Doubloon. Stick the blade as far as you can into that slot and the door should open.

It’s bizarre. I know. But I guess it’s supposed to be symbolic or something. Don’t ask me of what. I’ve never had a head for metaphysics. I prefer things I can see.

But if I had to put money on it I’d wager it had something to do with honor. Genius, I know. Chivalric code and all that. The greatest honor for a knight is to die in service to his lord’s cause.

‘Glad I'm not a knight’, Amelia thought.

As she returned the letter to its place and prepared to get underway, she reflected again on her current circumstances.

‘Odd,’ she thought. She’d expected to feel the draining weight of dread’s black cloak or the venomous sting of fear’s pale fangs.

But whether by some freak quirk of hers, magickal intercession or some as yet undiscovered safeguard function of neural biology, all she felt was numb.

‘Marvelous.’

The word glided out of her subconscious like cigar smoke, but was as clear and crisp as if she’d said it aloud. ‘Where was this feature several days ago?’

Steeling herself once more against the unknown, she pressed nobly on with her one-track quest.

Just as Silver had prophesized, a slightly abstract rendition of an armored Equestrian Knight built from white marble sat in a jousting crouch on a pristine hexagonal base slab about the height of Amelia’s knee.

Its broad shoulders and collar were encased in molded steel, while its conical head and thick neck sported an articulate, layered shell of what 4th Era armorers’ guilds had once christened Adamantium, but which modern material alchemists and masons knew to be a variable alloy of gold and titanium.

“Venator Regis”, some called it now.

Whatever its name or material composition, the planetary sheets shivered like lakes of frozen sun and moonlight trapped together in a Gaian tango inside panes of translucent glass.

Piercing galactic opal irises glared with radiant menace out from the shadow of the helmet’s T-shaped visor brow. Their vantablack pupils, like the supermassive hearts of the mega cosmic clusters, stole the outward glow from their irradiated outer bodies. Creating an unsettlingly sharp contrast between the heavenly jewels and their vacuous setting.

Its right arm reared a dagger-tipped lance the height and girth of a trimast’s bowsprit. Its left hand held an elongated teardrop shield. A sword and dagger hung on brass-studded baldrics from its richly tanned leather belt.

What most set it apart from its forebears was that the totality of its militant kit, including its flowing raiment and mane, down to its many leather accoutrements, steel armor and weapons, right down to the gold in its surcoat filagree and silver-shocks in its obsidian mane, were actually wood, leather, fabric and hair.

And what stone there was flowed, bulged and receded with the smooth ease of true organic muscle and skin. Even the black glass of its mane rippled and writhed and pulsed with incessant lifeforce.

Much like its real medieval muse, this … thing … this creature? This, whatever this was, it was as splendid as it was terrifying to behold.

It carried in the majestic sway of its aerodynamic curves a certain regal elegance that the preceding Guardians wholly lacked.

The chamber was shaped like a tapered cannon barrel. With a ceiling that seemed to reach around to oblivion’s back gate. Surrounding her, packed into every nonexistent corner, were racks upon racks of every kind and variant of weapon one could find referenced in the historical section of any of the grandest libraries on Aevon or evidenced in the archeology departments of the most prestigious museums and universities across the world.

There were all the basics: swords, axes, polearms, hammers, clubs, maces, etc. Then there were the familiar eccentricities like the flail, the Goedendag and what was simultaneously called a Crow’s Beak, Crow’s Bane and Crow’s Pecker by the various parallel divisions and dimensions of modern societies were also in conspicuous attendance. As were some even fainter obscurities like a hilted poleaxe, fan bladed spear and a three way chimeric lovechild of a tomahawk, war scythe and spade.

But there were also shelves full of what Amelia could only describe as the hardened mercurial diarrhea of a hawthorn tree.

Flattened steel and bronze with branched points, hooks, sawbacks and swooping curves splayed out from the dongle hilts in seemingly random directions, with no prior arrangement or configuration in mind.

It surprised her greatly that none of these relics seemed to have corroded at all in the two or three millennia since their creation.

But then, she thought, if this whole island had been magickked out of conjugational storm of will and thought, wouldn’t a stack of pointy sticks be a fairly simple order by comparison?

Or maybe she was just overthinking things. Again.

She scanned the arsenal shelves for some time before finally settling on an item she thought most appropriate for a beast of her build and stature.

What happened next really shouldn’t have surprised her at this point. Or at least not as much as it did.

No sooner had she taken the tapered bastard sword, which on her was a miniaturized war sword, into her possession than the lordly statue lunged at her from off its pedestal.

Amelia dodged death for the third time in as many hours by less than the hilt-straddling breadth of her new blade.

The sailing knight’s shield crashed into the wall behind her like a loose backfiring cannon.

The entire chamber shook and howled like the unceremonious stirring of a slumbering bell. The immediate force of the blast hurled an array of mangled steel and shattered wood in all directions. Its second and third reverberant shockwaves tossed many more loose arms from their bars and hangers.

Deadly hail rained down and sideways from all quarters. Amelia’s heart lurched as though trying to escape the fracas by its own means.

Turning her dive into a roll, she sprung nimbly back to her feet.

She'd read plenty of stories about how the Holy used to duel and joust with one another to win the hand of a fair maiden.

Regrettably, as the letter Y did not appear anywhere on her genetic bingo card she lacked the basic credentials to relate to these stories the same way many of her male contemporaries could.

She lacked the upper body strength and minimum pain tolerance to step into their mock battles, though she’d be the last one to describe herself as fair or a maiden.

She certainly didn't hold with the idea of beasts fighting to the death purely for her approval, much less for her amusement.

Amelia clutched her chosen weapon, an acutely-tapered arming sword, and was getting ready to pounce, when the knight statue whirled and charged at her again.

This time she was facing its patently deadly wand. She barely had time to register its motion when her legs instinctively contracted and flung her out of harm’s way.

Away from becoming a tasteless rotisserie at any rate.

Owing to her beleaguered and bedraggled state, her muscles and reflexes weren’t quite oiled enough to fully spare her the potentially scarring wrath of the freshly hurled deluge of armaments.

However, in accordance with the cosmic quota on asymmetric wit, her anatomy did come to her rescue once again. Albeit from the side entrance.

Her densely padded jacket and the bracketing silver shield on her back ensured not just that the worst of the damage inflicted on her body was superficial but also that she retained her chosen weapon.

Now was her turn to strike. To inflict. And the best part was she didn’t even need to waste time or energy wondering how, for in the way of hands remembering how to shuffle cards, with the conviction of a raindrop discovering the concept of down, she understood in a flash that she had played this game in parts before and won.

By that same rush of instinct she knew she couldn't risk waiting for it to charge again. If for no other reason than it might get lucky. But mainly because these Guardians were proven reckless to the point of certifiable. This one already had demonstrated a wholesale disregard for itself and the integrity of its surroundings. Another taken hook might just bring the wall, or at least an uncomfortably large portion of, down on both their heads.

Amelia fought down her impulse to strike when her opponent’s back was turned. Stone didn’t fear steel. Didn’t flinch at pain. No matter how lifelike it seemed to the naked eye.

Instead, like a desert-toughened predator she waited for it to turn around. Waiting. Watching for a chance at its known weak point. That singular target spot right below the helmeted brow.

She balanced her sword in a lancing posture. Her breathing and heart rate dropped to a walking gait.

Had she been a mammal she would have been drenched and possibly arrhythmic by now.

A fraction of a moment passed in which Amelia acquired a true appreciation for Silver’s attitude towards death. His already being a squall league beyond the vale notwithstanding.

When, by the time a stone could have explored the nadir of a bottomless well, the knight finally rounded on her Amelia didn’t hesitate.

Her limbs turned to rubber, and her mind to wet putty as she threw herself behind the sword straight at the rearing Guardian like a living cannon ball.

She didn’t feel the impact as she plunged her blade deep into the slot between the Horse’s smothered mineral eyes.

Nor did she immediately recognize the significance of the deactivated statue having only just now lowered its spear.

Instead, she tenderly released her shaking grip on her weapon and looked around for the exit. Only to be left confused and frightened when none appeared.

Every chamber thus far had opened an exit door for her after she'd completed the Trial.

She paced around the room, pressing on all the walls and rattling all the racks and shelves. The ones that weren’t already smashed to their constituent ingredients.

She even tried hitting the stones with a mace she had picked up, but this achieved nothing other than taking a small chip out of the masonry.

What had she done?

Had Silver been wrong?

Had she done something wrong?

What had even happened?

Well, that last one was fairly obvious. Nothing. Nothing at all had happened. Nothing she’d expected. Which, on the one hand, included no more summoned danger.

That was good.

But on the other it also meant she had no tangible means of escape. This was a problem.

A more philosophic inquirer could potentially have pulled out of this situation a lengthy essay on how it encapsulated the contradictive supercondition of life and the backwards logic of nature itself.

Though the fact that ambiguous stillness somehow scared her more than the hard reality of a thing actively trying to slay her did give Amelia pause, she hadn’t the means to cavort with any higher complexities than what step to take next.

If she’d somehow failed the Trial she was as good as dead.

Knowing this, and thus figuring that her only actionable options were that she had misread Silver’s note or was just missing something, she carefully approached the inanimate statue and took hold of the protruding hilt once more.

‘Maybe I didn't go in far enough’, she thought as she gave the polished steel pommel a slight push. ‘Maybe there’s a latch or something I need to hit.’

Like a key.

The words weren’t hers, she was fairly sure. But the thought itself was. How she knew this she couldn’t begin to so much as speculate.

She was bracing herself for the worst when she twisted the blade in the prepared wound.

What she wasn’t ready for was the soft, painful moan that issued from inside the vanquished Guardian.

Several chambers ago her reaction might have landed somewhere between the valley of fear and cresting bewilderment.

But after having been nearly eaten, crushed, stomped, skewered, deconstructed and disintegrated more times than a Cat has lives, she conducted herself calmly and with prudence.

She pressed her ear to the stone carapace. “Hello!” she called. “Hello!? Can any beast hear me!?”

“Yesss,” a small, raspy voice answered a heart stopping moment later. “Yes… I ... I ... hear.”

Amelia nodded urgently, forgetting that there was an impenetrable layer of stone between her and the voice’s true owner.

“How do I get to you?” she asked.

The weak voice came back, even fainter and more stressed ... as if that were possible.

“Use ... sssword,” it croaked. The last word was so faint that it met her ear as more of a living breath than pronounced syllables.

“Alright! Hang on!” Amelia cried. The hems of her stoic veneer were tearing apart faster than a shotgun marriage and with nearly as much passionate intensity.

She withdrew the sword from the knight statue’s forehead, as per an old tale of a young squire foal who became a king. Within moments, the Guardian’s stone husk ruptured into chasmal cracks and started to fall away in large chunks.

Many of the fragments were held in place only by the statue’s metal scales. Which were easily removed thanks to a set of craftily concealed belt toggles and turnstile hex key bolts.

Whether motivated by petty revenge or true utility, Amelia gave the statue a hard crack across the muzzle with the sword’s steel pommel.

This had the partially soul-cleansing effect of sending its few recognizable features crumbling away into white powder.

Revealed amidst the broken pile was a limp, scrawny, pallid figure the size of a child's doll that faintly resembled a naked kitten, provided the beholder thought Cats were an offshoot relative of pygmy Foxes.

The sword's reverberating clank as it met the hard-stone floor was lost to Amelia as she knelt by the dying creature's side.

She knew even before she touched him that he wasn’t long for this world.

He, for something inexplicable about his countenance designated him as male to Amelia’s mind, was a sorry thing. Haggard, tired, almost translucently pale. And bloody.

He was even smaller than she was, with a squat little torso and elongated everything else. His reedy arms and legs were nearly twice the length of his torso. He had an oblong head with a greasy rope of black hair sprouting from between his outsized, leaflike ears.

Unlike the Goddess and her bloodless Guardians that Amelia had contended with thus far, this creature sported a striking, fully adorned face.

A pair of gray oblong eyes tapered to acute ends sat over a button nose and wide mouth. All set and proportioned to make him look like a newborn kitten.

And likewise his teeth were sharp and jagged, as white as his prison’s stone, with a pair of needle-thin fangs that just reached over his bottom lip.

“Thank ... you,” he rasped. His words came as sharp hisses in between pained gasps.

“You … not… know ...”

It was evident by the deliberateness of his enunciation that his command of Adamic was around the sophisticated end of basic.

“You … honor ...”

It was then that the true meaning behind this Trial struck home to Amelia. Before she could say what she wanted, her attention was caught by the purple liquid oozing from the inch-wide cut in the center of the creature’s thin chest. Something deep inside her own heart shattered.

“I … ” she croaked, vainly fighting for words against the displacing mass of emotion. “I’m not … I just ... I didn’t ...”

She wanted to thrash and destroy. She wanted to tear into this torturous sanctuary like no Guardian had the strength to do. “I’m so sorry,” she said, mostly to herself.

The creature smiled weakly.

Amelia pleaded with the gods to take her instead, or only to grant her strength enough to extract her bleeding heart so that she might put her unwitting misdeed right.

But no such mercy was granted. Even her tears abandoned her.

In lieu of them and with vital rage as her only source of comfort, she drove her fists into the floor until her knuckles bled.

She screamed internally every curse she knew in order to drown out the wretched voice in her head chanting ‘murderer. Murderer. Murderer.’

The creature tried to reach out for her arm. Whether for help or to comfort would forever remain a mystery, as it went limp after rising only a few inches.

Not more than a few more heartbeats passed before the final vestiges of light had completely drained from his charcoal eyes. He sank into oblivion with what she desperately hoped was relief on his pinstripe lips.

Amelia sat there wallowing in the cold, cradling the body whose animus fire she had unknowingly extinguished.

Her thoughts suddenly took on an unprecedented drastic edge. ‘Damn you Iradyl! Drachyn take you and all your saarding tests!’

In a callous moment she dropped the lifeless cadaver onto the refuse pile of the statue that had once been his prison. A withering void had taken root in the place where her heart ought to have been. Its infernal vacuum scalded her blood to sand and wrought strands of iron for her sinews.

In her perpetual eye what lay in a darkening puddle at her feet was no longer a hapless innocent involuntarily slain so as to balance a cosmic equation. It was simply what it was. A lifeless husk. No more, no less. A pile of meat and bones. Soon to be the nursery for a sprawling microbiome.

This was simply the way of things. She knew this. She had always known. Only now she could finally see.

This was life at its most primitive, its most fundamental, its most pure. With all arbitrary burdens stripped away.

“In order for some to live, others must die,” Avlon had explained. “That’s the law of the jungle Daisha. It’s not pretty, but its why any of our species are still around today.”

There then came a familiar SWISH as the next portal revealed itself behind where the statue had crumbled.

The Trial was over. The Knight’s purpose was ended. Its oath fulfilled. Its honor satisfied. Amelia picked up her sword. There was nothing more to be gained in here.

Well, actually, come to think on it there was one final thing she could use.

After slicing a long portion of the errant statue’s blood-red tunic and lashing it tightly around her middle for a belt and loosely then again as a baldric, she continued on her exhausting pilgrimage without thought, without feeling, without regret.

After another long stint of traversing endless dark tunnels she came upon a tall, oblong doorway.

Working purely on mechanical routine her hands fished out Silver's third and final note and only then realized that the plurality of her moth compatriots had apparently abandoned her as well.

Mentally, she shrugged. Bodily, she squinted and read:

Trial 6: Trial of Wisdom: Almost there. Two more to go and you'll have done what no beast has in over 20,000 years!

Somehow, despite all her rational constraints telling her she was being crazy, she couldn’t shake the feeling that this achievement seemed a lot more impressive on parchment than it felt in real life.

She sighed, then read the last little bit.

Anyway, this Trial is about as simple as they come. Just solve the puzzle and you'll be on your way. From what I understand it’s not exactly Verbraltaer Alchemy.

‘Silver, so help me, if I ever see you again we’re going to have a serious discussion about the definition of simple.’

She paused, anticipating a pang of … something, that didn’t come.

With mechanical initiative she replaced the parchment and stepped through the next gate.

On the other side a black stone cube into which two pairs of gold-inlaid, jade buttons were set amidst a clover pattern of jewel-accented cursive silver filigree.

Tattooed onto each jade leaf’s convex surface in fine golden filaments was an impossibly intricate archetypal icon of what the common histories referred to collectively as Elder Beasts. Those primordial, presentient precursors to the modern day Anagentsia.

Each pattern was so true to life it could have been a real specimen but for its size and location, or a fossil but for the apparent depth and color.

Each picture had been inlaid with contrasting gold wire. In clockwise arrangement starting from the top left quadrant, they were named as follows:

Lepophag, Godfather of the Canids.

Blythea, the Pantheran Allmother.

Lyelli, Arch Matron of Reptiles, particularly Serpents.

Glire, Allfather to Rodent Kin.

Across from this artistic marvel, a similarly decorated square slab of midnight granite about six feet on a side adorned the adjacent wall.

To her newly uncluttered mind the space behind it obviously concealed the next exit portal.

On it were five lines of swirling, jagged script. These, she assumed, were the test question. Which meant the pictorial stones must somehow logically correlate to an answer.

It didn’t look very complicated, aside from being composed of a Rosetta melting pot of Siamdrin, Hydlaeic, Dynogarian, Folkyst and at least a dozen eclectic samplings from the many dialects and offshoot branches of the nomadic Mentan Rune Script.

It didn’t escape her by more than a flicker of a moment that the clover leaf border at her fingertips bore a striking resemblance.

Mildly longer in coming was the addendum that where the horizontal display was accented with streaks of multicolored light from its spectrographic prism markers, the vertical version had specks of copper. And where the answer board was inlaid with silver, the riddle tablet was written in what looked to be polished ivory.

The trouble was that the closest discernable ingredient in this lexicological cauldron hadn’t been spoken aloud in nearly two and a half millennia.

Leaving her alone with little choice but to tap the buttons in random order. Trusting blindly in the good will of the gods or the cosmos or whoever to guide her hand.

Which, considering how much favor those fickle powers had dealt her so far, didn’t strike her as an altogether wise idea.

As she dwelled hopelessly on this, the alien symbols on the wall tablet began to slide and contort.

At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. And while she still couldn’t completely rule it out, when blinking and double-takes didn’t resolve the matter, she realized that the symbols were not just moving, they were rearranging. Flowing across the solid face like leaves carried along a swooning river.

They swirled and spiraled, twisted and scattered, only to then disintegrate completely and recompose themselves into recognizable forms of letters.

In the time it took her to wonder and then decide not to dwell on whether this was Iradyl subtly rebuking her earlier blasphemies, the incomprehensible jungle of markings completely transmogrified into a perfectly legible, if somewhat gaudy, modern Adamic script.

It said this:

First fears all.

Second fears none.

Third takes what it can. Particularly number one.

Fourth fears the Second. But only when alone.

All must go in order if you wish to go home.

She had to give it up to Silver. He was right twice again in one passage. She’d seen higher cerebral tax rates on some river crossings.

And no instant death traps either. What, had the builders blown all their budget on the giant magick swords?

‘I thought these were supposed to be tests.’

Something didn’t feel right. Every chamber up until now had been a near death experience. With the stakes always being either do or die. Why the sudden drop off in standards so near the finish? It made no sense.

Was there a secret hidden here somewhere she’d missed?

Was it meant to lull her into a false sense of security?

Perhaps it a just warning about the dangers of getting cocky or resting on laurels.

Or maybe the point wasn’t so much to teach or single out a sage as to simply weed out any knuckle dragging bruisers that might have somehow managed to bumble their way in this far.

She labored on this for a time. As was her way. Weighing each option as carefully as an alchemist making medicine. Pacing back and forth as her mind checked and double checked its measurements.

‘I suppose the standards for wisdom have come up quite a bit since the Mega Era.’

Still, they could have chosen a more fitting title. Of course, the Trial of Who’s Smarter Than a Fungus didn’t have quite the same auric resonance.

Eventually, she shrugged at the air and, one by one, set about inputting the obvious answer.

First the Rabbit.

Next the Lion.

Then the Snake.

And last the Wolf.

The almost infantile banality of the whole deal notwithstanding, at the resulting SWISH of the testing board revealing the exit a sliver of satisfaction stole its way into Amelia’s expression.

Thrice proved, once dismayed.

Solving puzzles, even basic ones, yielded its own special kind of reward, she decided.

She was about to leave the room, when it dawned on her that this next Trial was to be the seventh. And if Silver's reckoning was to be believed, it would be the last of the White Wand Trials.

It was an irony of a sort, one which did not escape her, that she should catch herself thinking, ‘just when I was starting to get into the groove. How typical.’

It also occurred to her that, if any of her immediate family had witnessed her actions this day, they probably would not have believed that this Anuran was their Amelia.

Compounding the oddity of the moment, she discovered as she neared the open portal, that the next chamber was directly attached to the previous one, rather than being separated by an excessive length of tedious empty hallways.

She pulled out Silver's note for what she believed was to be the last time, and read, what was unequivocally the last and the muddiest, passage.

It said this:

Trial 7: Trial of Spirit: Some sources write it as the “Trial of Soul”. Personally, I don’t really see the difference. Also, if you’ve made it this far Daisha, you’re tenfold the Pyrate your father was.

‘Father? Pyrate?’

Why was it every time either of those words appeared in Silver’s proximity it felt like the universe was playing a condescending game of peekaboo with her?

She would definitely be having serious words with Avlon and her mother when this was all over, provided she and Silver weren’t forcibly reunited in the afterlife first.

Anyway, I've heard tell that the last Trial is supposed to be the hardest and most devastating of them all. Every account I find says something wildly different.

It’s almost like someone, or something, doesn’t want people to be able cheat on this one.

But don’t totally despair. The one common denominator I could find is that it will “tax you past your mortal bounds”.

Sounds like a lot of mystical fluff-speak if you ask me. Or at least it would if I wasn’t a walking, talking ring of that bell right at this very moment.

Still, you seem smart enough and reasonably well read. Plus, if you’ve lived long enough to read this I suspect you know your way around a booby trap or two by now. Unless you’ve skipped ahead. In which case you’re exactly like your mother. Never could wait to get to the good part of the story.

Amelia projected a silent ‘thank you’ out into the cosmic exosphere for the fact that at least one beast in this whole derelict, filthy, upside down and backwards rucksack of a world she’d wandered into appreciated the worth of a good book.

Of course a stronger sword arm wouldn’t have done her any disservice either. But a house built out of hopes and dreams didn’t keep much of the weather out.

She was just about to fold up the withered itinerary again when she noticed a faintly legible addendum squished into the very bottommost corner of the page.

She held up the magnifier once more and squinted harder than she’d ever done before. As though reading her mind, or the future, or both, a trio of moths defected from one of their bracelet formations to latch onto the seeing rose’s glassy petals.

By their enlightening lumens she read:

Oh, I did just remember one bit. The spyglass is a diversion, so don't bother with it. I suppose it’s meant to be symbolic or something. Of what exactly, I don't know, so don't ask me. Either way, one solid fact is that you exit this room the same way you come in.

Oh, and there’s something about a mirror.

Anyway, good luck to you Daisha. And, for lack of a better sendoff, Godspeed.

Slowly, carefully, reverently, Amelia tucked the final portion of her map away and drew in a slow, deep breath.

This was it. The final Trial. Although it would be far from her final test.

‘Well, here’s to us dad,’ she thought and stepped through the portal before she could think again.