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I am certain I have died. In my oblivion, I dream of a powerful hand grasping my arm and yanking me toward the heavens. The reality, however, hits me when I break the water’s surface, my lungs burning as I gasp for air.

Darian—glorious, charming, alive Darian—is standing before me, his sword raised against the monstrous creature.

The angry monster lashes out, but Darian, like the seasoned warrior that he is, manages to parry all its blows.

In one final blow, he cuts into the creature’s main body where its heart should be, and just as easily as that, he sends the monster into a death-throes frenzy.

The tentacles loosen their grip on me, and Darian pulls me to the safety of the riverbank.

My whole body shakes in terror as I collapse, exhausted, into Darian’s arms. He holds me tight while the creature, its life force ebbing out of it, sinks beneath the now-red surface.

Burying my face in Darian’s chest, I close my eyes and cling to him, trying to catch my breath, to ground myself, to steady the frantic tremors that still rack my body.

I almost died. The thought echoes in my mind…

I surrendered. I accepted death.

Darian’s heartbeat, strong and steady against my ear, is the only anchor, the only solid proof that I’m still tethered to the world of the living. I want to stay here, lost in the warmth of his arms, in the illusion of safety, forever .

However, the urgency of our situation makes me reluctantly pull away, and my gaze meets Darian’s. He’s pale, alarmingly so, and color is drained from his face. His breath comes in ragged, uneven gasps.

“What in the world just happened? Where are we?” he croaks, his voice rough.

“Come with me. Your body needs nourishment,” I say, trying to sound all commanding despite the tremor in my hands.

We walk back to the shelter where we rested last night, and I dig out some bread and cheese from my pouch, hoping it’ll make up for the hunger he must feel. Darian’s gaze sweeps across the landscape, and his mind seems to be trying to grapple with reality, but he accepts the bread.

As he chews, I tell him about my abrupt awakening, the snake bite, the potion’s healing, and the endless night.

I tell him that we’re at an unknown location, that we’re running out of time, and need to move fast. I hand him the parchment, and his eyes drink the words.

When he looks up, his expression is strange. It reflects… sadness.

“It doesn’t say we have to go back together,” he says in a small voice.

“Huh?” I say, utterly bewildered.

“It only says that we need to be back in Jahanwatch in two days,” he explains, looking at me as if I hold the key to all his problems. “You could have left me behind.”

I stare at him in disbelief, my jaw almost dropping. “Are you out of your mind?”

The thought of leaving him here, alone, in this wild place, seems as strange as the mountains around us.

“I owe you my life, Arien.”

His face is serious with a gravity I’d never witnessed on him before.

It isn’t a comforting realization—it seems to sadden him, this idea that he might owe me his life.

But why? We’re allies, maybe friends, or so I thought.

Is it because he believes we’d already lost the trial and it was all his fault?

“Darian,” I snap, cutting through his self-pity, “save the brooding for later. We need to move. This place is a death trap and that thing… I’ve never seen anything like it .”

“It was a hydralisk. A nasty leftover from the Great War.” The way he speaks, it sounds like he’s seen this horror of a creature before. “Those things infest our waters, a real pain in the neck. I’ve fought them before, but never this far from the coast.”

“How could something like that exist here? So close to Shemiran? To Jahanwatch?”

“The wilderness is a monster playground, Arien. Even the heart of the realm isn’t safe. The mountains, the forests, the deserts—they’re all crawling with altered monsters.”

“If one of those things is lurking in the water, there could be others hiding in the shadows. We can’t stay here. Jahanwatch is west of the Albir Mountains. We need to head uphill, westward, until we find a good lookout point.”

Darian only nods.

“Can you walk?” I ask, eyeing him with concern.

His eyes hold an emotion I can’t quite read. “I’ll manage.”

I pull out a bundle of herbs from my pouch. “Mix these with your water. It’ll speed up your recovery.”

Following a winding road lined with stone walls, we begin our trek westward.

Keeping close to the river, we search for an opening in the towering peaks, hoping to climb up into higher terrain.

As the sun climbs higher, a low rumble of thunder echoes on the wind, like a grim display of the mountains’s might.

When the sun finally decides to stop playing hide-and-seek behind the clouds, we sit for a break.

Darian cautiously wades into the river, but fortunately, no tentacle emerges from the water this time.

Instead, Darian skillfully spears a fish with his sword.

A few sparks later, complemented by some excellent fire-starting skills, we have a crackling blaze going.

“Well, aren’t you the wilderness type,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. He has been unnaturally quiet since he’s woken up.

Darian just shrugs casually. “Just another day in the life of a wandering Izadeonian.”

“Must be nice. It’s all headache, sore muscles, and a general sense of impending doom for me after my peaceful library life in Firelands.” I smile at him, ignoring the fact that my feet are screaming for mercy. “But we will endure. We will win this trial. I’m sure of it.”

He nods slowly, but the gesture does nothing to ease the grim set of his mouth or the furrow in his brow. We sit in silence, lost in our own thoughts.

Darian suddenly breaks the quiet. “Any idea why they’d throw us in this godforsaken hole together? Think the others got the same treatment? Are they wandering around in pairs, too?”

“Maybe they matched us based on our choices during the second trial? Maybe that’s the advantage?” I wonder.

“It’s possible,” he agrees, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, a gesture that seems more weary than casual.

He lets his hand drop to his knee, staring down at it.

“Well, it definitely worked to my advantage; otherwise, I’d be nothing more than dead meat for the hydralisk by now.

However, for you, being paired with me feels more like a disadvantage.

” His voice is somber and self-deprecating.

“Oh, come now, Darian. We still have more than a day to find our way back. We can do this!” I say, forcing a brightness into my tone that I don’t feel. I try a reassuring smile, but I’m not sure it reaches my eyes.

He sighs and doesn’t look at me. “How in the nine hells did they knock us out like that? One moment, I’m standing in my quarter, and then I wake up here to face a hydralisk.”

“It must be the bands.” I tap my own wrist thoughtfully. “Some sort of magic they whirl into their weaving so that they can cast their spells on us from afar.”

“Sneaky bastards. They really thought of everything, didn’t they?” he mutters, raking a hand through his hair in exasperation, his jaw tight.

“Apparently so. But we’re going to escape this blasted place and show those Martyshyars what we are made of. Together.”

He finally looks up at me, a faint, wry smile twisting his lips. “Together.”

Our path remains clear—westward—and we resume our journey.

As the sun dips lower in the sky, the mountain stubbornly refuses to ease our passage.

Only several hours later, we reach a slightly less vertical rock than its neighbor.

I glance up. It is still very steep, but there is no other choice.

We urgently need to move upward instead of westward.

“You can do it?” Darian asks me.

“I’ve practiced climbing rocks for years, expecting it would be necessary for Martysh’s life,” I say.

“Good. You go up first. I’ll guide you.”

He lifts me with ease, and I wedge my foot into a slot in the rock face. “Trust your handholds, and don’t look down. Follow my instructions.”

I take a deep breath and start my climb, watchful for any kind of purchase in the rock face. Darian’s voice is a steady stream of instructions from below, guiding my every move.

“Left hand there, now shift your foot… careful, don’t tickle the mountain with your toes.” He chuckles.

Climbing this beast of a cliff feels like wrestling the hydralisk.

Each handhold is a victory against the earth’s evil plan to pull me back down.

I teeter on the edge of disaster more times than I care to admit as my fingers slip and my body screams for a comfy chair and a hot beverage.

But somehow, with sheer willpower and Darian’s questionable encouragement (“You’re almost there; just imagine a giant scroll full of spells waiting for you at the top! ”), I manage to keep going.

At one point, when both my hands and feet decide to take a break, Darian’s arm shoots out, pushing me toward the cliff and saving me from a bone-crunching fall. He is scaling the wall beside me with ease while offering a helping hand (or foot) whenever I need it.

The wind howls, and my arms feel like they are about to fall off.

But I keep pushing, fueled by a stubborn refusal to let this mountain defeat me.

Finally, after what feels like a lifetime, I haul myself over the edge and collapse onto the rocky plateau, gasping for air like a beached fish.

Darian joins me a moment later, looking annoyingly fresh and unbothered.

“See?” he chirps, a triumphant grin spreading across his face. “Way too easy.”

I glare at him while my lungs still burn. “Easy for you to say, you’re from the mountains. I… I’m never doing that again.”