The maze was quiet in a different way after the teleport.
Not empty. Not safe. Just wrong.
A second ago I had at least possessed the comfort of familiar confusion, one stretch of shifting corridors, one growing sense of how the walls liked to move, one rough understanding of the kind of place trying to kill me. Now even that was gone. The teleport trap had ripped me out of one part of the test and dropped me somewhere else without asking whether I wanted the favor.
I stood still for a few seconds, one hand braced against the pale stone beside me, forcing myself not to turn in a full circle like an idiot.
The corridor I had landed in was narrower than the one I'd come from. The walls rose higher, smoother, less broken by openings to the sky. The light felt dimmer here too, not darker exactly, but more enclosed, as if it had been filtered through layers of stone before reaching me. Even the air had changed. Colder. Drier. Somehow more sealed-off than the rest of the maze had been.
This is bad.
That was my first clear thought.
Not because I saw a monster. Not because there was blood on the walls or some obvious sign of danger. Because places did not feel like this unless they had been designed to keep you from orienting yourself.
I pushed off the wall and took one cautious breath through my nose.
No smoke.
No immediate blood.
No sound except my own breathing and the faint, occasional grind of distant walls shifting somewhere farther in.
"Do not rush," Finn said.
I stared down the corridor ahead. "I wasn't planning to."
"Yes, you were."
That irritated me enough to be useful.
He was right, of course. Some hot, frustrated part of me wanted to start moving immediately just to reclaim the feeling of progress. I had already lost direction, lost ground, maybe lost time too, and the instinct to compensate for that by moving faster was strong and stupid.
So I stayed still a little longer.
Listened.
Nothing.
Then I began walking.
Slowly.
The new section of maze did not reward confidence. The corridor ahead split once, then narrowed into a passage barely wide enough for two people to stand shoulder to shoulder. The walls here had fewer visible seams, which somehow made them worse. In the earlier sections, I had at least been able to imagine where the stone might shift from. Here it looked like the whole corridor could decide to become another shape at any second and I would never see the mechanism happen.
My feet made too much noise.
Not objectively. Just in my own head. Every step seemed to land harder in the silence than it should have.
I kept my sword loose in my right hand and moved one careful intersection at a time, looking for signs of other candidates, recent movement, anything useful.
There were clues.
A scuff mark on the floor where someone had pivoted too hard.
A broken strip of cloth caught on a corner of stone.
One dark smear on the wall that I hoped was old monster blood and knew could just as easily have belonged to a person.
The maze still held others.
That mattered.
It meant I was not in some sealed trial made only for me. It meant the exam continued around me, large and indifferent and full of people trying just as hard not to fail.
A corridor to my left emitted a faint scrape of movement.
I paused.
Nothing followed.
No howl. No voice. No impact.
I moved on.
The next turn opened into a broader chamber shaped like a crooked square, with four possible exits and a central raised platform that looked decorative until I realized the stone on top of it was etched with lines I did not trust at all. Trapwork, probably. Or some academy version of art that might as well have been a trap.
I gave it a wide berth and took the far-right corridor instead.
"Still trying to preserve yourself, I see," Finn said.
"Should I stop?"
"No. It would be disappointing if you died before something interesting happened."
"That almost sounded supportive."
"It was not."
A few more turns. Another long corridor. Two moving wall-shifts I waited out from a safe distance instead of gambling on timing. The maze seemed less eager to attack directly here and more interested in fostering mistakes.
Which meant the next sound felt wrong immediately.
Footsteps.
Human footsteps.
Fast.
Not the controlled pace of someone navigating carefully. Not the measured movement of a candidate who thought he had things under control.
These were desperate.
They struck the stone hard and uneven, scattering down a side corridor ahead of me with ragged breathing tangled into them. Whoever it was wasn't just running.
He was fleeing.
I stopped at once, sword rising instinctively.
The footsteps got louder.
"Someone's coming," I muttered.
Finn's answer came immediately. "Yes."
"Very helpful."
"Be ready."
The runner hit the corridor opening a second later.
A boy, my age, maybe a little older. Road-worn but not poor-looking, dressed in torn dark clothing that had probably once fit better and looked more expensive before the maze and whatever else had happened to him got involved. One sleeve was ripped almost to the shoulder. Blood ran down the side of his neck from a shallow cut, and there was a harder wildness in his eyes than simple exertion alone would have put there.
He saw me and nearly stumbled in surprise.
For one second, we both froze.
Then he sprinted harder.
Straight toward me.
I shifted my weight at once, ready to move aside or cut if I had to. He didn't look like he wanted a fight, but panic made people stupid, and I had no intention of being trampled just because someone else had lost control of his route.
"What happened?" I snapped.
He didn't answer.
He barely seemed to hear me. His breathing was too hard, too fast. Sweat and blood streaked his face. There was real fear there, not acted, not calculated. Whatever had him running was not small.
For a heartbeat I assumed it was just another trap. Some shifting wall behind him. An illusion gone wrong. The academy's monster released on a narrow corridor.
Then I heard the sound behind him.
A growl.
No.
Not just a growl.
A low, ripping, murderous vibration that seemed to drag itself through the stone and make the air thinner in the process.
The contestant didn't slow. Didn't warn me. Didn't do anything except keep running.
Then the thing chasing him hit the corridor opening behind him.
A Rendwolf.
That was the first shape my mind reached for. It was technically correct and completely insufficient.
The beast was bigger than any real wolf had a right to be, its shoulders nearly level with the boy's chest even while running low. Its body was all brutal momentum, cords of dark muscle moving under a hide that looked half fur, half raw scar tissue stitched together by something that hated natural balance. Its coat was a sick gray-black mottled with darker streaks along the spine, but whole sections of it gave way to exposed flesh armored in hard ridged plates like old wounds turned metallic. One eye burned a pale, unnatural silver. The other was yellow and scar-lined, set deeper behind a ridge of jagged bone. Its jaws were wrong too, too broad, too long, lined with teeth meant not just for tearing but for gripping and crushing. Saliva flew from them in ropes as it ran, hissing where it struck the stone.
And it was fast.
Not beginner-class fast. Not the kind of speed that felt dangerous only because I was tired.
This thing moved like a predator built specifically for corridors like these, claws striking just enough purchase from the stone to launch the rest of its body forward again without wasting even a fraction of its weight.
Its eyes were fixed on the contestant.
Or so I thought.
The boy saw the thing I hadn't noticed immediately, his own chance.
His gaze snapped to me.
Something changed in his face.
Not fear. Not quite. Fear was still there, yes, but now it shared space with something colder. Calculation. Recognition. A decision made fast and without conscience.
Then I saw the pack.
Small, strapped across his back and tucked high against one shoulder. I had barely registered it before because I'd been too busy looking at the blood and panic all over him. Now, in a single savage motion that did not slow him nearly enough, he tore open the flap and shoved one hand inside.
A flash of malice crossed his face.
Real malice.
Sharp, ugly, and immediate.
I knew I was being used a fraction of a second before it happened.
He ripped something from the pack and threw it at me.
It was small enough that I caught it on instinct before I even wanted to.
An egg.
Warm.
Smooth-shelled and pale under a marbled pattern of darker silver-blue lines, almost like veins trapped under the surface. It fit in one hand but with awkward weight, fragile in the most dangerous possible way. The moment my fingers closed around it, something almost like a pulse moved through the shell into my palm.
I stared at it for one stupid heartbeat.
Not just warm.
Alive.
And beneath that, fainter, stranger, a tug. Not a bond. Not even close. Just the slightest brushing sense of connection, like touching the edge of a thread before knowing where it led.
The contestant was already past me.
He didn't even look back properly. Just twisted enough to make sure I had caught it, then poured the rest of his speed into the corridor beyond me.
"You fucking bastard!" I shouted.
He vanished around the next turn without answering.
Of course he did.
The Rendwolf hit the center of the intersection and stopped so abruptly its claws screeched against stone.
Its head snapped toward me.
No, not me.
The egg.
"Oh shit!"
Its nostrils flared once.
Then its whole body changed.