“It’s a runic inscription,” I explained, starting to pace. “The whole school! Or the initiate area, at least, but we have to assume the rest of the school, too, right? We’ve still got weird teleporting corridors and stuff here, and that has to be the reason. Little pockets of ichor buried in mage bodies, tracing out huge runic patterns day after day. The thing about runes is, the bigger they are, the wider they are, the less potent the casting, but for thousands of people churning through it every day, that’s… that’s got to amount to something, right? That’s got to do something!”

“What does it do, though?” Kylie asked. “What are we casting?”

“I don’t know! I don’t recognise every rune in this pattern, and the ones I do recognise don’t make any sense! There’s the holding rune in the middle there, and around the edge here, some guiding runes, and this part is a, it’s hard to explain, it’s like a secondary holding system, like a spillover containment? Nothing I can recognise here does anything, it just… hold the magic in.”

“Maybe that’s it? Maybe it’s a, a safety feature. Like too much magic in one place is dangerous, so the shape of the corridors helps… hold it in?”

I shook my head. “They would’ve told us about that, right? Or maybe not, they don’t seem to tell us anything, but… it’s a very complicated system for that. They clearly have no shortage of force fields they could use instead.” I smacked Max’s force field. “Besides, this map is for the initiate corridors, and the only people there with spells were us and the staff.”

“Oh. Oh, no. Maybe that’s the point.”

“What is?”

“Us. Initiates choose, after six months, to stay or go. You’re saying we spent six months walking though…” she flicked her fingers at the map.

“You can’t be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”

“I don’t know. All I know is that you were pretty dead set on leaving this school after your trial, until suddenly, you weren’t.”

“No! No, that… I had reasons for my decision.” Didn’t I? Yes. You couldn’t… you couldn’t brainwash someone by having them walk in the right patterns for six months. That couldn’t be true.

I really, really didn’t want that to be true.

“Max will know,” Kylie said. “When we find him.”

“Yeah. When we find him.” The prophecy had mentioned seeking out forbidden runes, so these maps had to be related to where he was. Together, we got to work opening all the maps and spreading them across the floor.

Folded in the last piece of paper was a small notebook. I flipped through it.

The first twenty or so pages were sketches of random fragments of runes, vaguely arch shaped, each labelled with an outside location. I couldn’t make sense of it until I found Agreabla Insulo and remembered that someone had been digging around the entrance to the cave. Were these the runes on the portals? Maybe. I’d have to ask Max, when we found him.

The page after that contained an extremely complicated rune diagram that I couldn’t begin to understand. Parts of it had something to do with moving, or travelling, but that was all I could decipher. It clearly didn’t matter, though, because the entire page was crossed out with two long red lines.

The next page contained an almost identical diagram, also crossed out. And the next. For about twenty pages, Max had drawn detailed diagrams of some kind of complicated rune structure, sometimes annotated with small corrections or question marks, then crossed it out and moved onto the next page.

The last diagram wasn’t crossed out. It was annotated with several exclamation marks, and today’s date.

“This is probably not fantastic,” I noted. The runes themselves were drawn… oddly, but I couldn’t quite see what was wrong with them. All the right lines were there.

Kylie peered over my shoulder. “Huh. That diagram looks weird.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure what – ”

“I’ve never seen runes that you can draw without lifting the pen before.”

That was it. The maps of the paths we’d walked had the normal ‘lifting the pen’, us being teleported about the cave network for the next stroke. This one didn’t. This wasn’t a map of how the caves moved him around; this was a map of how he intended to move through the caves.

“‘Seeking out forbidden runes, he walks, unflinching, to his doom,’” I murmured. “What do we do? Go for help, or follow him ourselves?”

“Help? Who are we supposed to trust to help? We can’t trust the staff! This is… he kept this research secret for a reason, right? Malas screwed you over once, and Alania’s not here, and anyone our age won’t know any more than we do – what, do we just pick a random teacher and hope they have our best interests at heart? Call the janitors, maybe? We don’t know who to trust, we don’t know who can help, and we don’t have time!”

“You’re right. We’ll have to follow the pattern ourselves. Maybe it’s an easy rescue. If not… we’ll call the janitors then.”

Kylie nodded and grabbed a small bag, tossing in what she probably considered essential supplies, snacks and water and soforth. If we were going anywhere where we’d need those things, I’d definitely be calling the janitors, but then, we’d been trapped without the option to call for help before. I put together a quick bag of my own, making sure to bring Max’s tablet.

“Can we even follow that pattern?” Kylie asked. “It looks complicated.”

I nodded. “I may not be great at drawing runes, but I have an excellent sense of distance and direction. I can pace it out. Just stay with me.”

I took Kylie’s hand, interlacing our fingers, and we started to walk.

We didn’t talk on the journey. Kylie was letting me focus, I think. I didn’t need to focus all that much; this wasn’t the Initiation, with the landscape changing around me and making me walk in circles, and I didn’t need to worry about the teleporting about the corridors. I just needed to follow the lines on the map.

For over an hour.

It was a complicated path, and at some points we found ourselves walking through rough, steep or narrow corridors that weren’t lit by crystals; areas off the map, out of range of the intranet or any help. Going off the map had historically gone quite badly for me, but by the time I wondered if we should turn back and get an instruktanto, we’d been wandering through an unmapped area for ten minutes and there were no light crystals in sight. Turning back wouldn’t get us any less lost. Might as well keep following the pattern.

We saw no signs that Max had been there, but that meant nothing. He could’ve started in an entirely different corridor than us, tracing the same pattern in another part of the school. Did starting position matter? Were we just getting ourselves completely lost in the wrong spot, and getting nowhere? Too late to worry about it now.

Judging by her slowed pace, Kylie was getting as tired as I was, but neither of us suggested we stop and rest. We didn’t know if stopping for too long meant we’d have to start again. Max hadn’t exactly left clear instructions.

“Why didn’t he tell us what he was doing?” Kylie asked, breaking the long silence. “I understand why he was hiding it from the staff, but why us? We could’ve helped.”

“We can ask him when we find him,” I said firmly. We were going to find him. There was no longer any other option.

Ahead of us, the corridor narrowed. The harsh light of our tablets bounced off jagged pieces of stone, making shadows that looked too dark and entirely the wrong shape on the uneven cave walls. In such light, it was hard to see exactly what shape the cave ahead was, but I knew it would be relatively straight. It had to be, because we had to walk in a relatively straight line for quite a while, and the caves had to accommodate our path; they had to. It just wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

We’d been moving at a slight downward slope for a while, but as we shifted into single file to move through the cave the slope dropped further, until it became a real task to pick our way across the sharp, uneven bits of rock on the cave floor. This slowed down our movement a lot, not just for safety, but because it made pacing distances almost impossible. A slop affects the length of your stride and I wasn’t used to keeping track of distance on such a steep one, and I couldn’t take full, even steps, having to pick my way through stones. I started having to add up smaller steps to approximate the size of larger paces, and just pray to whatever was out there that had thought it amusing to keep me alive this long that my errors would cancel out and we wouldn’t die down here.

Soon, walking in single file wasn’t enough, and we had to sidle sideways through the narrowing tunnel, trying not to cut ourselves on the stones. Then, the ceiling started to lower, until we were hunched over clutching out packs to our chests. Holding hands was no longer viable, so we made sure to stay right with each other, close enough that our shoulders kept touching. We did not want to lose each other down here.

Then, the tunnel widened, very suddenly. It opened up to a vast cavern, filled with the drip-drip of water. I was tempted to turn our tablets off for a moment and see if I could make out the telltale faint glow of empowered water; was this water part of the little streams and massive lake of empowered water I’d almost drowned in twice last semester? It’d be a relief to know, to have something to hold onto that almost counted as a landmark, some sense that while we might be lost, if we followed the water, we’d eventually end up somewhere.

But that would involve putting us in darkness while our eyes adjusted, and it wasn’t worth it.

I checked the notebook and bit back a groan. “Kylie, you’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

“A bit late to ask now, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Because our path doesn’t go ahead.” I indicated the wall, where the narrowing cave we’d been following continued, getting narrower. “We have to turn here.”

Kylie looked longingly into the vast cave we wouldn’t be travelling through and sighed. “Of course it does. Let’s go.”

I was, at least, comforted to know that we were following the diagram correctly. The right turn was in about the area we should need a right turn, and if it was there, that had to mean we were on the right track, didn’t it?

The floor of the cave started to get smoother, which was good, because we soon had to resort to crawling on our hands and knees. Then, eventually, a commando crawl. It was impossible to keep distance like this, to know how far we’d moved on any given ‘stroke’, but it no longer seemed to matter; we were so close to completing the runes, so close, and there were no forks or choices in the tunnel.

I didn’t know exactly how much further we had to go. I couldn’t reach the notebook to check it. But we were close. The stone was scraping my shoulders and my forearms were a bruised and scratched mess, but we were close.

And then, suddenly, the cave opened up again. I dragged myself out of a hole in a wall, reached in to help Kylie out behind me, and knew that we were done. The caves felt different here. The air was different. Wherever we were, we had crossed some kind of barrier to get there. And Max would be here.

Or possibly he wouldn’t, and we’d just done something unbelievably stupid. A bit late to worry about it now.

There was a… to call it a breeze would be wrong. Not even a draft. I couldn’t feel the movement of air, exactly, just the… sensation of movement itself. Something was moving, somehow, somewhere, and I could feel it all the way through my body, no matter how tightly I pulled my robes around myself.

“This is an extremely powerful place,” Kylie said, sounding distant. “You feel that, right? You feel them pushing?”

Not really, but I didn’t say anything. I’d noticed something on the floor. The cave we’d walked into had smooth, if uneven, walls; not the smoothness of stone carefully cut and shaped, but the smoothness of stone slowly worn away over time by the movement of water or air or… something. Only the floor was artificially smooth and perfectly even. But running along the edge of the floor, like some kind of decorative skirting board, some kind of fancy design was carved. I knelt on bruised knees to give it a closer look… and didn’t like what I found.

I checked the opposite side of the corridor, more for completeness than anything. I already knew what I’d find.

“What is it?” Kylie asked.

“Mirror runes.” I swallowed. “It’s, um. I don’t actually know very much about them at all.” I shrugged.

But I did know that you used them to channel magic that was too powerful to be contained in a line of ichor. I did know that even an extremely powerful spell should be channelled between lines of about a millimetre apart, or less. Go beyond a millimetre and a half, and you power would dissipate – no spell that any of us was expected to encounter would ever need more space than that.

I knew that we were looking at a runic channel, drawn in mirror runes, that was about two metres wide.

And we were standing in the middle of it.