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“You don’t look as tired as me.” He narrowed his eyes at her, but she sensed no hostility.

“I channeled your mana into my body, and from my body into the runes. Um, but the leftover that I didn’t end up using, well, it stayed with me … I guess,” she trailed and cleared her throat. “But it’s fine, because you’ll replenish your mana in a day, so hopefully you’ll be fine tomorrow.”

He held his hand up, and tiny ice crystals formed on his fingertips. He brushed them away. “At least I can use my magic again,” he breathed, pushing himself up. “Well, whatever, let’s go look for the others.”

A flash of pink caught her attention; it was her ribbon curled on top of a statue fragment. She brought a shaky hand to pick it up.

“What is it?” Blár must’ve seen the panic on her face because he was in front of her in seconds. “Kolfinna?”

She held up the ribbon, her face white. “My ribbon … It flew away with the dreki. If it’s here, then the dreki must be”—her gaze roved over the torn rugs, the crumbling walls, and the ruined art pieces; it was too small of a space for the dreki to fit into and not break everything—” somewhere.”

Bits of sand still clung to her ribbon and she slowly brushed them away.

My portal didn’t fail.

The coolness of the castle walls, so unlike the raging heat from the desert, brought a sense of relief over her. And something more—pride.

“So where is it?” Blár spun around the room with an unconvinced frown. “I’m pretty sure it would’ve busted this place down if it was let loose here.”

“But what if, like Revna, its soul was trapped in that dimension? And once it’s out of that dimension, it goes back to its body?”

“We’ll deal with it when it happens.” Ice crackled beneath his fingers and he ran a hand over his reddened forearms slowly, chilling the sunburns. Even from where she stood, she could feel the coolness of his magic. “If it was a trapped soul that’s now back with its body, don’t you think its body is long dead?”

“Unless it was preserved with runes,” she pointed out. But she wasn’t worried like earlier, because they had their magic back. Or, more importantly, Blár had his magic back. Because even if she couldn’t fight the dreki on her own, he definitely could.

Kolfinna gathered her long, wavy hair in her hands and quickly redid her braid with her pink ribbon. In her peripheral vision, something shiny caught her eye. The trim of the wall was partially broken off, revealing tiny, golden inscriptions.

She inched closer to the wall, sidestepping a broken statue and dropping down so she could read the runes better.Framework.Heat. She tentatively touched the edge of the rotting, wooden trim, and snapped off another section. Symbols of a creature that looked hauntingly similar to the dreki flowed with the rune writings. Kolfinna continued breaking off pieces of the trim, her heart racing as the words swam over her mind.Rune. Sand.

“Help me take—” She barely got the words out, but she didn’t need to, because Blár was already tearing off the trim on the other side of the room.

When they tore off the trim, it revealed a stream of rune codes lining the wall into an infinite loop.Framework. Heat. Suns. Moons. Twice, thrice. Sand. Mountains. Hot. Dreki.

She paused, eyebrows crinkling. Did each room have something similar?

Her gaze drifted to the next room and the blood rushed to her ears at the thought of what everyone else had endured. Were there any survivors? A chill settled in her bones and she hastened into the next room.

It was a hall of some sort, with a thick, matted, red carpet running down the center of the room and glass windows that covered most of the wall on either side of the hall. They appeared to be in a hall that served as a bridge that connected to another wing of the castle, she presumed from the deep, dark ravine she could see from the windows. Her steps clacked loudly in the empty room.

Just like in the other room, a myriad of words scored the bottom of the walls. But unlike the other room, someone had ripped off the trim. Pieces of rotten, wooden trim with rusty nails still attached to them scattered the hall. She inspected the runes circling the room.Rune. Framework. Heat. Suns. Thrice. Trees. Leaves. Frames. Scythe. Demons. She paused at the demons, her body growing cold and heavy. What didthatmean?

“Do you think this room is linked with a dimension?” Blár peered out one of the windows. When she didn’t answer immediately, he glanced over his shoulder at her. His sharp eyes perfectly matched the beauty of the skies behind him.

She found her voice again. “I’m not sure, but I think so, judging by the runes here. The gong sounded a few seconds after they entered the room, so if there is a dimension linked to this room, they should be in it. Unless they got out somehow.”

“Maybe you can write something to bring them back?” He kneeled and turned over a moldering piece of wood. “If this truly was an area to train the fae, wouldn’t it make sense that there would be a way to void the training and bring them back? I’m sure emergencies were a thing, don’t you think?”

“Hm.” She walked deeper into the room and leaned away from the glass windows. A niggling, intrusive thought told her she would fall into the ravine if she leaned against it. “I’ll try that.”

Kolfinna touched the stone wall beneath the windows and dipped into her mana, willing it to come out and do her bidding. Unlike in the desert, she didn’t need to search deep inside herself to find a tendril of her mana. It hummed in her fingertips almost instantaneously, as it always did. Kolfinna imagined voiding the whole dimension in that room. Mana warmed her fingers and surged against the wall until gold runes fluttered on it in a single word:void.

The ceiling of the room ripped open into a black portal and four bodies dumped out of it, half-screaming. Eyfura slammed into the floor first, then Magni on top of her, and then Mímir, and lastly Truda. Blár lurched back in surprise, while Kolfinna was rooted in place—she hadn’t thought it would work, much lessthatquickly.

All four moaned and twisted on the floor, blinking confusedly. Blood stained their uniforms and budding bruises littered their faces and hands. Truda pushed herself on her elbows. Twigs tangled her usually neat hair. Mímir jumped to his feet, his breathing labored and his eyes wild. He adorned a half healed black eye and a split lip. Magni pushed himself up on his arms and stared down at Eyfura like he didn’t recognize her—and she looked just as stumped as he did.

Kolfinna waited for more bodies to drop through the gaping hole—because surely their numbers couldn’t have dwindled down to only four survivors—but with an audible zipping sound, the ceiling closed back up.

“Kolfinna? Blár?” Mímir stumbled back, his knees wobbling together. He looked between the two of them. “You’re alive. We thought … we thought you died.”