The First Trial

They hid in a bush.

Not a large bush. Not a clever bush. Not even a particularly leafy bush.
Just a mildly lopsided shrub barely wide enough to conceal a disgruntled rabbit.

Eryndor crouched behind it anyway, armor creaking. Lyren wedged himself beside him, knees to chest, lute held overhead like a fragile umbrella. I sat between them because there was nowhere else to sit, and because they insisted this was “strategically sound.”

It was not. The Lamia watched from three feet away with matching expressions of weary concern.

Lyren cleared his throat, attempting dignity. “All right,” he murmured, “let’s review Caelen’s… ah… plan.”

Eryndor nodded grimly. “Yes. Her plan.”

Both of them looked at me as if hoping I’d rescind it on the spot. I didn’t.

Lyren lifted a finger. “Step one: Do not kill the Lamia.”

“Reasonable so far,” Eryndor allowed.

“Step two: Ask the Lamia questions. Deep, meaningful, clarifying questions.”

“Interrogate,” I corrected.

Lyren sighed. “Yes, darling, interrogate. Step three: Figure out who, or what, is controlling them.”

“Step four,” Eryndor added, “enter the cave to find said ‘what’.”

“And step five,” Lyren continued, “refrain from dying horribly.”

“All good steps,” I whispered.

Lyren did not look convinced. “Sweetheart, no plan that includes ‘don’t die’ as a distinct stage is a comforting one.”

“But it’s accurate,” I said.

“That,” Eryndor muttered, “is what worries me.”

From beyond our extremely inadequate shrub, one of the Lamia tilted her head.
“…Are you finished hiding?” she asked politely. “We can still see you.”

Lyren winced. “Right, well. That’s our cue.”

We emerged from the bush in a tragic tangle of limbs, dignity, and leaves. I brushed twigs from my knees as if this softened the humiliation.

The Lamia gathered warily, though not fearfully now, more like they were bracing for a bizarre conversation they hadn’t agreed to but couldn’t stop.

Eryndor assumed what he probably thought was an official stance: legs apart, shoulders squared, arms folded. “All right,” he declared. “We have questions.”

“Yes,” I added, stepping neatly beside him. “Questions. Important ones.”

Lyren pinched the bridge of his nose.

Eryndor began, voice low and authoritative. “Why are you here? This territory is far from your hunting grounds.”

“And Lamia don’t travel in groups,” I blurted immediately. “Ever. Statistically. So explain yourselves.”

Eryndor gave me a sidelong stare that somehow managed to contain both “please stop” and “I’m proud of you for trying.”

The Lamia exchanged worried looks. Then one spoke, voice quiet:

“We don’t want to be here. We must be.”

“Why?” Eryndor asked.

“It’s our duty,” another murmured.

“Assigned,” the first clarified.

“By who?” Lyren pressed gently.

The Lamia hesitated. Their tails knotted together like shared anxiety.

“We do not know her name,” the speaker said finally. “We only call her our… mistress. Or our boss. She came here months ago. She said she needed guardians for the entrance.”

The entrance. I felt my pulse jump. “The cave’s entrance specifically?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Only that one. She uses the main entrance. Always. We overhear her speaking sometimes… she says she cannot fit through the secret paths.”

Lyren blinked. “Secret paths?”

“Deep inside,” the Lamia said. “There are tunnels only we can use. She cannot. It's meant to be used by her servants.”

I felt my breath catch.

“So,” Eryndor summarized, “the entrance we saw is for her. Alone.”

“And that means,” Lyren said slowly, “if we enter through it…”

“…we won’t run into anyone immediately,” I finished, heart quickening with the click of pieces sliding into place. “They’ll all be deeper in the cave.”

The Lamia nodded, coils loosening slightly as though relieved to finally say the words.

Eryndor exhaled, shoulders steadying. “Then the path ahead is clear. We enter. We find whoever is controlling you. We end this.”

I turned toward the cave mouth. The carvings waited. So did the cold.

Lyren adjusted his lute, eyes narrowed with a seriousness rare for him. “Shall we?” he murmured.

A shiver ran through me, fear, yes, but also something else. A pull. A pattern opening like a doorway I had only just begun to understand.

“Let’s go,” I said.

And together, we stepped toward the dark.

The tunnel swallowed our footsteps the moment we entered. Cool air pressed around us, thin and metallic-smelling, like water left too long in a tin cup. I took the lead simply because I had to, after all I was the only one with magic to hold a flame.

This quickly turned into a problem

My right arm was stretched forward, fire guttering with each breath of cave wind; my left clutched my notebook open to a half-scribbled page; my pen, the poor thing, was clenched sideways between my teeth like a knife held by someone with no idea how knives worked. My backpack got dragged into a weird diagonal splay when I yanked it open earlier, it now hung from one shoulder like a stubborn barnacle.

“Caelen, you’re, uh...” Eryndor began gently.

I tried to answer, but the pen only let out a muffled, “Mmph. Mmffh—”

Lyren exhaled through his nose, the world's softest sigh. “She’s thriving, clearly.”

✦ ✦ ✦
time skip
✦ ✦ ✦

Now Eryndor carried a proper torch, the fire crackling warmly. I walked a few steps behind him, notebook open, shoulders squared, pride very slightly dead.

The first chamber widened into a circular hall. The walls were ribbed with faintly glowing grooves, soft as chalk lines but precise as mathematical diagrams. In the center of the floor lay a sun-shaped crest, a mosaic of uneven stone textures, some smooth, some gritty, some sharp-edged like unpolished crystal.

Lyren squinted. “It… looks like a trap.”

“It is definitely a trap,” Eryndor agreed.

I stepped forward anyway.

My fingers drifted across the ridges on the floor, tracing the subtle differences in grain and depth. The torchlight glinted off the grooves like warm honey.

It’s not random. None of this is random.

I knelt, brushing dust aside. Each groove flowed naturally into another, the slight texture shifts forming a pattern, not drawn, but grown. Too organic to be mechanical. Too deliberate to be natural. I pulled my notebook close, flipping through earlier sketches.

The entrance… the marks outside… the angled lines weren’t decorative. They were meant to guide. But everyone always thinks puzzles are meant to be solved. What if they’re meant to be followed? What if whoever built this place didn’t want intruders to get lost, but to understand? Maybe these are pathways, not obstacles. Maybe the stone is trying to tell us the quietest possible answer, and we’re the ones making it loud.

My thoughts spiraled and stretched, long and looping, like ink brushed in a single breathless stroke.

If I mess this up, that’ll be proof, won’t it? That outside, earlier, I was just pretending I helped. That I made everything worse by slowing them down. That I shouldn’t even—

I cut myself off with a sharp inhale.

No. Stop. Think. Follow the grain. Trust what you see. Not what you fear.

I didn’t even realize I’d stopped moving until a shadow hovered over me.

“Caelen,” Lyren murmured, leaning just far enough into my peripheral to be annoying. His voice echoed faintly in the chamber. “Are you… trying to solve the floor?”

Eryndor stepped beside him, brow creasing with concern. “She’s doing that thing again.”

“What thing?” Lyren asked.

“The… quiet thing. The thinking thing. The thing where she forgets anyone else exists.”

“I do not forget anyone exists,” I muttered automatically.
Though I had, in fact, completely forgotten both of them existed.

Lyren smirked, folding his arms. “Well, whatever she’s doing, she looks like a scholar possessed.”

Eryndor nodded. “Let her work.”

I blinked slowly, their words filtering in just enough to warm, embarrass, and steady me at the same time.
They weren’t mocking me.
They were… waiting for me.

Which only made me more determined to get it right.

The grooves converged toward a narrow band of stone, soft, almost polished by time. A trail worn by intention.

“Here,” I whispered. “We don’t force anything. We walk where the stone wants us to.”

Eryndor and Lyren exchanged a look.

“Alright,” Eryndor said, stepping lightly behind me.

Lyren shrugged, then followed. “If the floor kills us, I’m haunting you.”

But the floor did not kill us.

The chamber shifted as we walked the correct path, the room breathed, faint dust rising like exhaled air. The sun crest warmed faintly, then dimmed.

The path opened.

I lowered my notebook, heart lifting.
"See? I can be useful. Sometimes. Maybe." I had muttered quietly to myself.

The next hall was narrow, long, and lined with carved guardians. Their silhouettes were humanoid but stylized, segmented like insects, their stone arms carved into curved blade shapes.

And as soon as we stepped past the threshold, 

The guardians’ eyes lit.

The first sentinel lunged.
Eryndor intercepted, metal ringing against stone in a jarring clash that seemed to split the air.

“Get Back!” he barked, pushing me aside with one arm.

Lyren snapped a sigil in the air, the glyph spinning into Eryndor’s spine like a brand of light.
“Haste, don’t waste it,” Lyren warned.

Eryndor didn’t.
He surged forward, blade arcing—

—and promptly had it ripped from his hands by the sentinel’s sheer strength.

The sword clattered across the stone floor.

“Seriously?!” Eryndor shouted.

Lyren didn’t respond with words.
He pulled his lyre from his satchel in one smooth, trained motion.
A sharp, plucked chord vibrated through the hall, the sound somehow cutting through the grinding stone like a beam of focused light.

More notes spilled out, quickening, thrumming, weaving under Eryndor’s movements.
A buffing melody instead of a spell, resonant, rhythmic, lifting him into motion with unnatural poise.

Eryndor sprinted for his fallen weapon, ducked under a stone limb, grabbed the blade, and immediately lost it again when the second sentinel cleaved downward, hitting his wrist and sending the sword spinning into the far wall.

“Are you kidding me!?” he wheezed.

Lyren’s music sharpened, the pace matching Eryndor’s desperation. Each chord made Eryndor’s limbs lighter, his dodges narrower, his breath sharper. He dodged another blow by inches.

The third sentinel entered the fight.

Three against two.
Or three against one, really, Lyren was dancing backward, still playing, his fingers blurring across strings.

I clung to the wall, notebook pressed to my chest.
They’re both so fast. They’re holding on. They’re fighting. And I’m just,

Another crash.
Another weapon shattered, Eryndor’s spear, snapped clean in half.

He flung the useless polearm aside, rolled backward to avoid a punch that cracked the stone where he'd stood.

Lyren’s voice rose between chords. “Try—swapping—forms—!!”

Eryndor grabbed his axe next, swinging it experimentally.
He struck one sentinel’s leg joint, a chunk broke off, showering shards like gravel, but the sentinel didn’t react in pain, only recalibrated.

I swallowed hard.

They weren’t attacking out of hatred.
They were compensating.
Rebalancing.

Eryndor dodged again, barely, yet every missed attack, every sidestep, every slip of footing made one thing more obvious:

The sentinels weren’t trying to kill him.
His worst injuries came not from their direct strikes, but from his own weapons flying out of his hands or deflecting badly.
Every hit that connected looked accidental, incidental, a product of their immense strength and not design.

One sentinel swung too wide, striking the wall instead of Lyren, shattering part of its arm.
It paused. Tilted its head. Recalibrated again.

Like a machine confused by its own error.

Lyren’s song wavered, but his fingers kept moving even as sweat beaded on his brow.
“Eryndor! if you could... stop losing weapons... that’d be great!”

“I’m trying!" Eryndor yelled, rolling under another blow. “These things just keep— !”

A blade arm sliced down where he’d been standing.
A hair late, it would have cut him cleanly in half.

I flinched, heart in my throat.
Just run, Caelen. You’re in the way. You’re only making it harder. You’re—

No.
No.
Watch them.
Understand them.

I forced my eyes open.

That’s when I noticed the rhythm.

Grinding steps.
Blade arms swinging not reactively but predictably.
Motion synchronized in a steady pulse, a tempo that ran under Lyren’s song yet did not align with it.

A deeper pulse.

A heartbeat.

The sentinels moved in time with something else, something embedded in the cave itself.

Eryndor grabbed a fallen spear, the sentinel’s own colossal weapon, and drove it upward into a joint.
The spear stuck.
Held.
But another guardian seized Eryndor by the shoulder and flung him backward, not with violence, but with unintended momentum.

He skidded, coughing.

Lyren’s melody stuttered but resumed quickly, more frantic now.

I pressed trembling fingers to the stone.
My eyes followed the faint cracks illuminated by our torchlight.
A pulse.
Another.
Faint quartz shards embedded in the wall flickered, each glow syncing with the guardians’ motions.

Not enemies.

Guardians.

Bound here.
Responding to commands carried through stone.
Protecting something.

My breath hitched.

“I…”
My voice was too soft; I forced it louder.
“I know how to stop them.”

Lyren’s music faltered mid-note.
Eryndor froze mid-dodge.

I could sense their trust in me, but I couldn't understand why.