Kieran's breath hitched as the floor below him gave way, his scream swallowed by the ravenous void that dragged him down. Wind tore past him, rushing in a deafening roar that pressed his eyes shut and froze his thoughts. His arms flailed, grasping at the emptiness, but there was nothing to hold onto, no anchor, no salvation. For a moment that felt like a lifetime, he seemed suspended between worlds. Then, with brutal finality, the fall ended.
The impact knocked the air from his lungs, pain radiating through his back, hips, and shoulders as his body slammed into the cold, unyielding ground. He lay there, stunned and gasping, the echoes of the fall thrumming through his rattled limbs. Every breath burned his chest, his body stiff with shock and disorientation. Slowly, he registered the sharpness biting into his palms as he grasped the coarse, sticky surface beneath him.
He shifted, groaning, and forced himself into a hunched sitting position. His ribs ached, his arms trembled, but somehow, he could still move. That was when he noticed it. The floor was damp and jagged beneath his fingers, slick in places, and colder than ice. Looking down, he realized his hands were stained dark with something thick that left a metallic tang lingering in the air.
Kieran swallowed hard, his stomach twisting violently, and dragged his gaze upward. His surroundings came into focus, glowing dimly in the eerie light around him. The chamber sprawled endlessly, veined with strange, pulsing streaks of crimson and gold coursing through the jagged walls. They throbbed irregularly, more like the faint flicker of dying breath than the steadfast rhythm of a heartbeat. The light painted his shadow in distorted, writhing shapes that rippled unnaturally across the floor.
The walls themselves loomed tall and jagged, reaching upward into a darkness too vast to comprehend. The faint murmur of his horrified breaths was the only sound, broken occasionally by a distant, rhythmic drip of water. It was as though the place swallowed all noise, imposing its deep, oppressive silence on everything.
For a long moment, he sat frozen, his mind struggling to piece together what was happening. This wasn't just a test; this was survival. The yawning vastness of the chamber pressed against him with a crushing weight, but what scared Kieran most wasn't the alien surroundings or the stillness. It was what he saw scattered across the floor.
Bones.
They lay everywhere. Bleached fragments stripped bare, cracked and splintered, but unmistakably, they were bones. Some human, some just… wrong, curved at impossible angles, with sharp fragments that didn't belong to any anatomy he recognized from textbooks or fictions. He stumbled to his knees, his chest constricting, as his eyes caught sight of an intact skull, its hollow sockets staring back accusingly. A ribcage clawed its way out of the damp earth, gnarled and shattered.
His stomach twisted violently. The academy hadn't just put him here. They'd put him in a nightmare where others had clearly come before him and failed.
His throat tightened as he forced himself to stand, his legs trembling beneath him. What was this place? He'd spent years dreaming about Shademire Academy, everything it might be, every hero who had triumphed within its walls. But this? This was nowhere in the stories. Not in any of the vibrant descriptions of the academy's noble architecture, its rigid hierarchy, or even its infamous trials. Even A Star Beyond the Veil, the story he knew like the back of his hand, barely had a whisper of the Fourth Rank's trials. A single chapter, more speculation than explanation, and the few murky details it had revealed hadn't prepared him for this hellscape.
Kieran staggered back from the bones, his hands clenching into fists. The protagonist of A Star Beyond the Veil had never walked these floors. They'd been chosen for the First Rank, the true beginning of the story's glory-filled ascent. The Fourth? It hadn't even been part of the narrative until a throwaway mention of it as the lowest level, a rank where failure was almost guaranteed. Characters thrown here rarely made it more than a few fleeting months. Why hadn't he remembered that until now? His brain scrambled for more, for some answer buried in the chapters he'd read again and again, but the facts refused to settle.
Why would they place him here? He thought of his mother's smile, Aya's playful squeals as she mimicked the book's protagonists, and Amara's promise about tomorrow. They hadn't sent him into this new life for him to fail. Had they?
A sound cut through the heavy silence, low and guttural. Kieran froze, his breath halting in his chest as he strained against the weight of his surroundings to hear it. It rumbled softly, vibrated against the cold stone beneath his feet. He whipped his head toward the far corner of the chamber, where the pulsing veins of light dimmed erratically, giving way to a deeper, more menacing darkness.
There it was again. A growl, faint but unmistakable. His pulse spiked, each beat pounding against his ribs, forcing him to stagger back. The noise came again, louder this time, pulling his wide eyes toward the rippling shadows. At first, he thought his mind was playing tricks on him, the flickers of dim light casting strange shapes across the ground. But then he saw it. Movement. Slow, jerking, and wrong. Too fluid and serpentine to be human but too tangible to be a trick of the light.
Kieran's stomach clenched, panic digging into the edges of his mind. The figure crawled out from the shadows with deliberate sluggishness, its twisted frame emerging fully from the gloom. It was tall and unnervingly gaunt, with translucent skin stretched too tightly over angular bones. Its spine arched unnaturally, jointed limbs ending in jagged claws that dragged across the ground. Twin pinpricks of light glowed in its hollow eye sockets, locking on to Kieran with unrelenting hunger.
He stumbled back, his chest tightening as the growl built into a low, rumbling snarl. The creature tilted its head, watching him with the cold calculation of a predator. Then, with a sharp screech, it lunged.
Kieran's body obeyed before his mind could catch up. He threw himself to the side, hitting the ground hard as the creature's claws raked through the air where he had been standing. He scrambled to his feet, the jagged surface cutting into his hands, and staggered away, his eyes darting frantically for some way out.
Then he saw it. A shard of stone, its jagged edge catching the faint light. It was no sword or weapon, but it was sharp enough. He darted toward it as the creature lunged again, its claws slicing into his arm. Pain seared up the limb, hot and immediate, but adrenaline pulled him forward. He grabbed the shard and turned, swinging wildly with every ounce of strength he could muster.
The stone connected with a sickening crunch, snapping the creature's head back. It screeched, its glowing eyes narrowing to blazing slits, but Kieran didn't stop. He struck again and again, terror fueling every blow. Finally, the creature collapsed to the ground, its frail body twitching for a moment before going utterly still.
Kieran staggered back, his chest heaving, the shard slipping from his bloodied grip. His vision blurred as exhaustion and shock took hold, but then another sound reached him. Again, the growl.
Only this time, it wasn't alone.
From deeper within the chamber, shapes slithered, shadows pulling themselves into solid forms. Kieran stumbled back toward the jagged wall, his heart pounding as the painful truth burned into his mind.
This wasn't the test described in stories. This was something far worse.
And it wasn't over.