I’d seen the top of the tower before, of course, but it still took my breath away. The floor was a solid stone disc that didn’t touch the walls; it was anchored to them by heavy iron rods, but otherwise there was a good three metres of space between floor and wall all the way around, broken only by the top stair. Over us, keeping out the wind and sand, stretched a huge glass dome, complex designs etched in the panes. I recognised some of the designs now – several runes, a few obscure stellar constellations – but most of them were as mysterious as the first time I’d seen the dome, and I got the sense that if I could just stand in the right spot, get the right perspective, they’d all line up into a pattern I could fully understand.

The floor of the room made up an abstract map of the ground level of Duniyasar. Inside a ring of little model stone arches was a simple pentagon of outer walls each with a big entrance door carved in it, and behind each door, a tiny model well. The five wells were connected with lines etched into the stone to form a pentogram, and in the very centre of the pentogram (and the room), a metal pole represented the central tower. The pole was disproportionally tall, reaching all the way to the top of the glass dome and covered in complicated runes that I could vaguely recognise in places but not interpret with any reliability. Max inspected them with interest.

The shelves around the room were mostly empty except for a collection of little portal-controlling flags, just like last time. Saina frowned at the little white flag with a book on it, still stuck in place behind a portal where Kylie and I had put it on our last visit, and pulled it out. She shuffled through the little collection of flags – seven book flags for skolala refujeyo, one colour for each level of scholarship; five sword flags for sekura refujeyo, in various bold colours; three scale flags for politikala refujeyo, in gold, silver, and black. She stuck the red book flag in the hole behind one of the model portals and put the rest carefully back on the shelf.

“Portal’s open,” Saina announced, but nobody looked to be in any particular hurry to leave. Max fiddled with his tablet as he read the runes on the room’s central pole, obviously debating with himself about whether it would be rude to take photos; Alania did a better job of hiding her curiosity, but was spending a lot of time looking hard at the etchings on the dome around us, no matter how disinterested she was trying to look. Lydia seemed to have forgotten the rest of us were there entirely, her whole focus on Kylie.

“Kylie,” she said, “can you channel your spell here? Your abilities are going to be very limited still, but I think these circumstances are going to make things as coherent as we’re going to get.”

Kylie nodded and closed her eyes. Fionnrath’s Destiny opened them.

The Destiny raised Kylie’s hand and pressed two of her fingers to Lydia’s cheek, in the spot where on Kylie’s face, the spell lived. “You are the point upon which the potential from great joy and great suffering rests,” it told her. “Your joy may bring greater joy and your downfall risks greater downfall. You are not demonstrating the patience or respect necessary for the former fate. You would do well to make space for the choices of others. To care fiercely and work for the best is not enough, if it is done alone and with narrow vision.”

“Huh,” Alania noted. “That is a lot more coherent.”

At the sound of her voice, the Destiny whipped Kylie’s head around to lock eyes with her. It advanced on Alania with the same stumbling gait it always used when Kylie was channelling and unaware, and Alania stepped back before steeling herself and standing her ground. She allowed the Destiny to press Kylie’s fingers to her cheek.

“Your decisiveness would better serve you with clarity of purpose,” the Destiny told her. “You make your decisions unflinchingly but hide the cost from your thoughts. To choose without all of the information is still to choose. To choose to have less information is to choose to worsen your choices.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alania said tightly.

“You fulfil your duty and protect your charges to rack up debts that will not be paid on your lifetime. You pretend that these debts do not exist and this lie festers in your soul and eats away at your potential. True decisiveness means facing your truths head on. Acknowledge the costs and change your decisions, or stand by them without shame. But know this – somebody will choose what you have not. And you will need to decide with whom it is that your loyalties and duties truly lie. You will act more effectively if you face your truths and know your answer in advance.”

Alania opened her mouth to reply, but the Destiny was already looking away. Kylie’s eyes locked on Max, and for the first time since she’d started channelling, an actual expression crossed her face, a kind of distant fondness, just for a moment. Max, for his part, regarded the spell with deep suspicion and no small amount of fear, and seemed to hold himself still through sheer stubbornness as it approached and laid Kylie’s fingers against his cheek.

“You have paid a great price for a very valuable truth,” it told him, “and then allowed that truth to be stolen from you. Consider very carefully whether it is worth paying the price again. You have fewer resources than you seem to believe. The pursuits you squander them on are noble, but there are infinite noble pursuits in the world, and limited resources.”

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to listen to anything you have to say,” Max said.

“A wise sentiment. Your suspicions are your most valuable asset. Nevertheless, this is what I see – the world will need you to break neatly, and if you are to break it, you must break yourself three times. You have given your mind once. You may yet save your body and your soul. But the you who makes each of these decisions will be a different person.”

The Destiny walked over to me, touched Kylie’s fingers to my cheek, and regarded me with deep sadness. “You, too, have surrendered a valuable prize hard won. But you are blessed with deep scars, and room for many more.”

I swallowed. Was it… threatening me? “Um, okay?”

“The shape of a scar shows the shape of a wound shows the shape of a weapon. What is taken cannot be taken completely because the marks of the theft will never leave you. You have been given gifts but you struggle against their use, and the more you struggle, the more you entangle yourself in the trap you have been snared in.”

“… Trap?”

“If you wish to pull yourself free, your best chance is to rely on what you have always relied on. The assets that have freed you from the Initiation twice are still yours outside the Labyrinth.”

“I… I don’t…”

The Destiny wasn’t listening. It pressed Kylie’s fingers to Saina’s cheek and spoke to her.

“To listen to me is to choose a harder path for yourself. Ignore my words and you will save yourself a great deal of trouble.”

“But you’re the one telling me to ignore your words, so I have to listen to them to know to ignore them,” Saina said, puzzled.

“I have not given them yet. If there is to be conflict, you will not be the only one with the privelege of choosing it. But you can choose to be commander or peacekeeper. My advice is to choose now, so that you will have time to learn the role as well as possible before it is thrust upon you. And when you must choose between old and new, know that the strength of the new is great, but brief. You will have to give more than you can imagine to keep in in your hands, only for it to turn to dust in the hands of your daughters or granddaughters. The old is a quiet peace, saved and maintained with less sacrifice, but will require constant, bitter work. These are your choices – a wildfire of glory to last your lifetime, or a steady hearth fire to last generations with constant, unglamorous tending. You will not have the fuel to support both.”

“Um,” she said, “okay?”

After several seconds of tense silence, Max spoke up. “Well, the prophecy’s certainly more coherent here.”

“We should leave Lydia and Kylie to their lesson,” Saina suggested, heading for the stairs.

“Um,” Max said, “yeah. Sure. Just let me check these runes – ”

“Kylie has the Duniyasar for a year and a day,” Alania said sharply. “I’m sure she can bring you back to explore it another time.”

“Oh! Yeah, good point. Kayden, are you…?”

“I’ll stay,” I said. I knew that Lydia wouldn’t hurt Kylie, and the Destiny was probably coherent enough here to fight back somehow if she tried, but I still wanted to be around to stop any more pen-to-the-eye nonsense. It was a matter of principle.

“Right. Later, then.” Max reluctantly followed Alania and Saina back down the huge staircase. I found a flat part of the floor without any important map parts on it and sat down to watch.

The lesson was extremely boring.

I’d expected Lydia to take Kylie through something dramatic and interesting now that she could get her spell to do more than prophesy doom in rhyme, and I was disappointed. They mostly did a few channelling exercises and discussed prophecies using terminology that I wasn’t familiar with and couldn’t follow. I killed time thinking about the Destiny’s ‘advice’.

Nothing it had said to me was as clear or helpful as I would have liked. I wasn’t sure what it had meant by ‘surrendering a valuable prize hard won’. I couldn’t really think of anything valuable I’d given up, certainly nothing hard won. It had spoken about being ensnared in a trap, which could be pretty much anything in my life, but two obvious candidates stood out – some kind of political trap, which seemed to be in abundant supply, or Refujeyo itself. Max had gone down into the secret spell tunnels to try to find out if, and how, we were being influenced or controlled, and we’d found no answers, so that might be it, so my hard won and valuable prize might be… my freedom? After the trial and everything, after I’d had a chance to go home, I’d turned around and taken the Initiation? That might be it. It had mentioned the Initiation afterwards.

But what did that have to do with scars? I had scars aplenty, but I hadn’t gained any of them in the Initiation… unless my mage mark counted? The mark was a tattoo, but the texture or the lines was different to the surrounding skin, so maybe the technique scarred. The shape of the scars shows the shape of the injury shows the shape of the weapon… but my mage mark didn’t tell me anything useful. We didn’t know anything about my spell, so that couldn’t be ‘the weapon’; a tattoo of my elemental designation of sound didn’t explain anything.

Perhaps a disaster of some kind would strike, and the advice would make perfect sense in hindsight, and I’d feel really stupid about it. Again.

The connections I had drawn were… tenuous, at best. I didn’t think they were right. But how else was I supposed to interpret them? I had a million scars, and nothing valuable that was hard won and then surrendered. I could be ensnared in several things that could be metaphorically interpreted as traps, and I hadn’t used any particular ‘asset’ to escape from the Initiation dreamscape either taking the Initiation or in the Labyrinth, unless you counted orienteering skills, and ‘you can escape your trap with orienteering skills’ didn’t feel like the right read on the situation.

You’d think that getting advice from something that could tell the future would make things easier. You’d think that if such a thing could communicate better, its advice would be clearer.

I felt like the damn thing made more sense when all it could do was prophesy death.