Page 125 of Academy of the Wicked: Year Three

I've never had this before.

In all my lives—and I remember fragments of each, like dreams upon waking—no one has ever reversed the dynamic. I've always been the loyal guide, the one who leads others through their trials, who ensures they survive their challenges. The cat who walks alone but ensures others reach their destinations.

I've guided princes through labyrinths where one wrong turn meant death.

I've led scholars to knowledge that would have destroyed them if approached incorrectly.

I've been scout, guardian, protector, teacher—always the one enabling others' success.

But never the one being saved.

Never the one someone would risk a dimensional paradox to reach.

The barrier shrinks again, responding to my depleting reserves. What started as a sphere twenty feet in diameter is now barely six feet, just enough space for me to stand without touching the edges. Each compression feels like accepting smaller existence, lesser importance, reduced significance.

The books sense weakness—of course they do. Books contain knowledge, and knowledge has always been predatory toward those who can't properly wield it. They attack with renewed vigor, pages fluttering like wings of paper birds designed to flay rather than fly.

One gets through.

Just a single page, thin as breath, but it slices across my arm with surgical precision. The cut is deeper than paper should achieve, and it burns with the particular agony of knowledge forced rather than earned. I see flashes of what the page contained—formulas for unmaking, words in languages that predate sound, symbols that mean nothing and everything simultaneously.

My blood hits the floor of this non-space, and the drops don't behave like liquid should. They hover, each one becoming a tiny mirror reflecting different versions of my death. Drowning in ink. Crushed by accumulated knowledge. Dissolved into component letters that spell nothing. Paper cuts multiply until there's more space between flesh than flesh itself.

The barrier shrinks again. Four feet now.

I close my eyes, not in surrender but in acceptance.

The end is near.

I've known it since the trial began, really. This wasn't designed to be survived—it was designed to consume. To take the guide and transform them into the guided, to reverse every instinct I've developed across nine lives of leading others to safety.

Death doesn't frighten me.

I've died before—eight times, to be precise. Each death is a transition rather than an ending, consciousness transferring to the next life with most memories intact. It's the gift and curse of being feline, particularly one of my lineage. We don't truly die until the ninth death, and even then, there are legends of cats who found ways to bargain for more.

But this death will be different.

The trial isn't just trying to kill me physically—it's trying to erase me conceptually. When I die here, in this space between spaces where time has no meaning and meaning has no time, I won't transfer cleanly to the next life.

I'll forget.

Not everything—the deep knowledge, the instincts, the accumulated wisdom of eight lives will remain. But the specifics? The faces, the names, the connections made in this particular incarnation?

Gone.

And what I fear most—more than pain, more than cessation, more than the nothing that might wait after the ninth death—is forgetting Gwenievere.

Forgetting her impossible eyes that shift through spectrums that shouldn't exist.

Forgetting the way she looked at me and saw person rather than tool.

Forgetting how she claimed me as hers despite barely knowing me.

Forgetting the first person in nine lives who made me want to be saved rather than just survive.

The barrier is barely two feet now, pressing against me from all sides. I can feel my form wanting to shift—a desperate instinct to become smaller, to take up less space, to slip through gaps that don't exist. But shifting requires energy I don't have, and becoming a cat here would just mean dying as a cat rather than dying as a man.

The books gather for what's clearly a final assault. They spiral upward in a formation that would be beautiful if it weren't designed for destruction—a tornado of knowledge that will tear through my failing barrier like tissue paper.