I called for Kylie for a bit, although I knew it was useless, before making my way down the valley. Last time I’d climbed out, and had a conversation with the spellthing made of prophecies, and used an illusion of my old tracker to get out, but I didn’t waste time entertaining the illusion that I was just going to be able to repeat myself. That had been a challenge designed for a less experienced Kayden. There was no guarantee that there even was a way out, this time – this wasn’t how the Pit was supposed to be used. This was no limited environment tested on generations of students; I was at the raw mercy of whatever passed for magical physics here.

Almost as soon as I’d reached these conclusions, things started to change. The straight path of the valley floor began to angle sharply downwards, then started to wind about until I lost any sense of direction. The cliffs on either side didn’t slope down with the path, so they grew higher and higher around me until the tiny streak of blue far above could be something I was imagining as easily as something I was seeing.

I followed the path growing steeper and steeper until I was more climbing than walking, then paused. If I was climbing anyway, I could always climb upwards instead. To the blue sky and birdsong, where there was probably an illusory forest waiting for me; different to last time, I had to assume, but it would be at least somewhat familiar.

Whereas any further down, and the light would no longer reach. I had no idea what to expect down there. And the further I descended, the harder it was going to be to climb back out.

But I thought I could hear someone moving down there. It might be Kylie. It might be Max.

I kept heading downward.

“Kylie?” I called. “Max?” My voice bounced off the walls around me, becoming barely intelligible almost immediately. There was no reply.

Grass tickled my ankles between uneven stones. It quickly became too dark to see anything but the occasional spell alighting on my skin a moment before moving on. I pulled out my tablet to light the way, and found that the things beneath my feet weren’t grass and stone any more; they looked like large chunks of bone, being devoured by long, wavy worms. Creepy, but the worms hadn’t… attacked me, or anything, just brushed against my ankles as I moved through them. I picked up a chunk to inspect it; definitely bone, although I had no idea what from. It was a broken chunk, not a discernable shape, and too big to be human.

I had no idea what in my mind could have created a place like this. Was this real?

Somewhere ahead, I head something that could have been sobbing. I called again, but nobody answered. My voice was swallowed by vast, empty space, and only then did I realise that I was no longer wedged between close cliffs, but in a vast cavern. Ahead was a giant stone statue of an angel, about three times the height of a person, being slowly destroyed by time. Several chunks of wing had already fallen off.

Behind it was a graveyard. Rows and rows of graves, the old kind with big stone headstones and, far off in the periphery, tombs.

Hmm.

In the Initiation, the Pit had pulled things from my mind that were pretty recogniseable. Nothing was anything I’d actually seen before, but all of it was familiar; plants that were like the ones I’d grown up with, a cabin that was like a place I remembered as nearby and safe. I had no idea what any of this was. Old graveyards were cool, in my opinion, but they weren’t a place I’d spent much time or knew anything about. I’d never seen anything like this place. What were the spells pulling from? Something to do with a fear of death, maybe? That didn’t seem right. I knew I was a bit more reckless with my safety than normal, but I’d never really had any particular fixation on death. I was neither suicidal nor any more scared of it than most people. I was in danger more than most people, so maybe I thought about it an unusual amount because I kept facing it? Maybe that’s what the spells were playing with? Seemed a bit… thin.

Anyway, this wasn’t something deadly, or at least it didn’t seem more deadly than anything else here. This was just a graveyard. A massive, lightless, silent graveyard, deep underground. It had to be built from something in my mind.

Unless it was real. But it couldn’t possibly be real, right? Who’d put a graveyard down here?

Okay. Think about this logically. There was no light down here, so… plants? I held my lit tablet high and looked for plants. If anything green was growing down here, it had to be fake, right?

Nothing. No grass, no weeds, no ivy. I found what seemed like a small, well-tended bed of flowers, but as I got closer I saw that they were plastic, caked in dust and cobweb.

Spiders down here, apparently. That was fun.

The epitaphs on the graves were… inconsistent. Only a handful were in English. They were written in an array of languages and alphabets that I could sort of recognise on sight, if not read, and even more that I couldn’t. One or two I could’ve sworn were Old English, but they could’ve just been some other appropriately English-distant language. Some were written in magic runes, which made no sense because that wasn’t even an alphabet that you could make words out of, and quite a large number were completely blank, despite having space and a large headstone and everything else to indicate a body buried there.

The age of the stone, the lack of plants, the multilingual nature of the graveyard… those were things I’d expect from an actual real place in Skolala Refujeyo. But on the other hand, it was an enormous graveyard built in a cavern deep below the earth. That wasn’t something that anyone would actually build.

The graveyard was too big to see all at once with the light available, so it was hard to tell exactly how big it was. I assumed I was in the centre when I found a little gazebo, that would have been quite charming if it had been made out of wood and adorned with plants instead of, as was the case for this one, hewn out of stone and decorated with human bones joined together in complex symmetrical patterns. On the stone beneath them were dark stains that I had the sense were probably blood, given the context. In the middle of the gazebo was an enormous silver bowl, etched with runes and filled with empowered water.

Okay, current theory: this place was real, going by previous evidence, and it was part of some fucked up necromactic ritual or something. What the fuck. What the fuck. My curiosity waged a war with common sense, and common sense scraped a rare victory. Hmm, nope. Not messing with that.

I kept walking.

Okay; I’d come down here because I’d been following the sound of someone. Where were they?

“Kylie?” I called. “Max?”

Nothing. No; wait. Was that… sobbing? It sounded like sobbing. Please don’t be some zombie inside a tomb or something, I prayed, following the sound.

The graveyard must have had excellent acoustics, because the sound came from outside it. I walked down a short hall with crumbling walls to discover… a box.

Just a sturdy wooden chest, sitting there, alone. It looked to be of decent quality, at least to my plebian untrained eyes; thick wood, something rich and brown, with heavy metal reinforced corners and heavy metal hinges and locked with a heavy metal padlock. The sound, the sobbing, was coming from inside.

Max? Kylie? No; impossible. The box was far too small. Whoever was in there was tiny; probably a child. They’d have to be six years old, tops, unless they were an incredibly small person. So they had to be fake, because there was hardly going to be anyone else down here. There was no reason whatsoever for a little kid to be down here. This was an illusion, designed to upset me.

But what if it wasn’t?

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s okay. I’m going to get you out of there.”

The lock was large, and heavy. I didn’t have a key, and this didn’t seem an opportune time to learn to pick a lock. I looked around for something heavy, a rock or something, but the immediate area was smooth. Nothing in my bag would suffice, either. There were plenty of broken bits of headstones and statues back in the graveyard, though, and while it felt… inappropriate… to loot masonry from the dead, the needs of the living were more important.

“I’ll be right back,” I told the box. “I’m not leaving you, okay? I’m getting something to get you out. I’ll be right back.” I put a hand on the box and vowed, “I am going to come back to you,” and as I said it I could feel the air still around me for a moment, like the very spells were listening and taking my words to heart. I hoped that whatever facsimile of intelligence they possessed, they’d use to honour my vow.

I headed back to the graveyard. It was a very short journey down a very straight bit of tunnel, practically in sight from the box; it was impossible to get lost. So I wasn’t remotely surprised when it wasn’t there.

I was somewhat surprised to find myself standing next to Max.

We were standing on a small island of sand in the middle of what looked like a vast lake. Or possibly swamp? The water was murky, muddy, and too thick with filth to see through. Streaks of it stained Max’s robes and legs, although he’d clearly made an effort to wipe as much of it off as possible, seeing where his skin looked red and swollen under the mud, I could see why. Some kind of acid? Magic?

The far shore of the lake was in view, and around us were littered stones, large enough to stand on, like stepping stoned leading to shore. Several of them were covered in mud and what looked like blood, but others were clean. A different rune was inscribed in the top of each stone.

I almost rolled my eyes. Seriously? At least my trials tried to pretend they weren’t puzzles.

But that wasn’t important. Max was important. He was staring at the array of stepping stones before him, perfectly focused. He didn’t seem to have noticed me.

“Max,” I said quietly.

Max jumped back, and I grabbed him to steady him before he fell off our tiny sand island. He stared at me. “Kayden? What, under every single one of the Seven Points, are you doing here?!”

“Rescuing you, idiot. Kylie’s prophecy said you were going to die. Of course we came for you.”

“How did you find – ? Stupid question, I suppose. Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?”

“Do you? What the absolute fuck possessed you to come down here alone?!”

“You would have tried to stop me.”

“Of course I would have! Anybody in the world would have! If you have to hide something from every single person in your life explicitly because they would stop you from doing it, then you either need better people in your life or maybe, just maybe, doing it is a terrible idea! What did you hope to accomplish down here? You’ve found the Pit! Congratulations! Was it worth it?”

“Hard to say, yet. I haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

“No? What are you looking for, then?”

“This… isn’t the time for this sort of conversation. Let me get us out of here, first. Did you bring Kylie?”

“Of course. But we got separated.”

“Then perhaps we should focus on finding her and the two of you can berate me for my life choices later.”

“Oh, we will.” I shut up to let Max focus, and he went back to staring at the stones, lips pursed, brow furrowed. I’d never seen Max look this worried. Normally, if anything upset him too much, that veneer of ease slid down over his features and he looked more relaxed than he actually did when relaxed. Him being bothered enough to show it wasn’t a good sign.

Or maybe he was just focused, and saw no point in wasting energy pretending down here. That could be it. But if this was where he’d been stuck when Kylie had prophesied his death, he’d been here for hours, and the Evil Eye, at least, didn’t think he had a great chance of figuring it out.

“Max, what’s the puzzle?” I asked. As if I had any chance of solving something that he couldn’t.

“There isn’t one,” he said bitterly. “That’s the problem. I tried brute force, but…” he gestured to a stepping stone streaked with mud and what might be blood. “We can only physically afford so many missteps. Now I’m… trying to determine the likely path by rune frequency. It’s still going to be a gamble.”

“What do you mean, there isn’t one? This is very obviously a puzzle. It’s like a kids’ edutainment puzzle.”

“It’s one half of a memory puzzle. I used to do these on paper, when I was training for a chance to become the Nonus. My father was very insistent that a perfect memory was an important skill for a mage. I’d be shown a sequence of thirty runes for a set period of time, then I’d have to be able to recreate the sequence, and if I got it right, he’d let me out. By the time I was selected, I could get thirty runes accurate after looking for one second,” he said proudly. “Obviously, we used a pen and paper, not an elaborate lake crossing. But, well. It won’t work here.”

“Because they didn’t show you the runes?”

“Exactly! How can I memorise the path if they don’t show it to me?”

I surveyed the stones. Huh. Apparently I could solve something that Max couldn’t.

“I know the path,” I told him.

Max stared. “What?”

“I know the rune sequence. I may not have your amazing special memory, but I definitely know this sequence. Come on, I’ll get us out of here.” I waited for Max to pick up his bag, took his hand, and stepped confidently out onto the first stone.