The Maze pt. 1

A glance upwards while walking through the portal and I see black so deep and dark I need to blink my eyes when my vision also fills with starlight. The stars seem to have shifted, or perhaps the glimpse I am provided is too brief, too meager of a bite to be able to actually savor the sight before me. A sensation I can't put a name to, pulls my gaze to a cluster of stars that hum with an energy that thrums inside my veins. A drum that sounds in tune with my heartbeat for a moment before I pass through the other side.

Distracted by the vast breadth of the cosmos and feeling smaller than before, a drastic drop in humidity and a staggering rise in temperature halts my breath and overwhelms my senses. My feet stumble and I come to a shaky halt along the edge of a steep ravine that has nothing but rock over three hundred feet straight below me. The small rocks that I shook loose beneath my feet careen off the cliff before me and tumble down the bare and red-washed rock face.

"Son of a -" I say on a gasp, shuffling my feet backwards towards safety. The clinking of glass at the side of me pulls my attention from the unexpected drop to where Morwenna is waving me to follow her. Her teeth pulling off the top of the bottle and pouring herself another shot of liquor as she walks.

"Where are we?" I ask her, my nose twitching with the dry air.

"The Maze," she answers. "Utah."

I stop walking and look at the red rocks smattered with browns, yellows and tans. The colors are layered, the vegetation is sparse and the dirt is dry - but that doesn't deter from the beautiful chromatic landscape that gives a unique sense of serenity.

I blow out a breath and scratch my head. "Why are we in Utah, exactly?"

"It's a sanctuary of sorts, known to only a few select individuals. Wards have been placed around the center, which muddies the minds of humans who stray too close and convinces them to steer away from the area. It leads them to take certain paths and to avoid areas protected by magic. Hence the name, the Maze," Morwenna says as sits down and hangs her legs off the side of the ledge of the rock. "That, and the circular pattern of rock that forms the outer boundaries of this area," she adds as an afterthought.

My eyes track the ring of uplifted rocks she mentioned, the edges towering hundreds of feet over the winding patterns formed by fissures within earth it surrounds. A labyrinth of sandstone that have footpaths at the bottom of the ravines, weaving in and out of the expanse of the canyonlands.

I take a seat next to her, and she pours me a small amount of liquor and hands it to me. I suppose that's what the second glass was for. I am surprised my Headmistress isn't balking at the idea of a student drinking - with her, no less - but, this academy has been anything but conventional. So I take the opportunity to unwind and sip on the drink she offered me.

"How often do you come here?" I ask her. We are high enough that I can see most of the expanse of rock around me and I note that there is not another soul in sight. There's a break in the ring of rock that slopes downwards and the remnants of a patch of wildflowers catch my eye. For there to still be some wildflowers in bloom tells me that the desert has had a long monsoon season.

"Probably just a few times a year," Morwenna pulls out another glass ball from her pocket, one of the portal bombs, and tosses it in the air before catching it in her palm and pocketing it once more. "When you can make portals on a whim, you'll find less limits than there was once before. The expanse of the earth turns secondary and distances become immaterial. There is one catch though - a confinement of the spellwork that magic has not yet been able to find a loophole to. You had to have been to your destination at least once before you could properly summon a portal to its location. Somewhere your essence has reached before, lest you become lost amongst the boundless nighttime sky."

My body lurches backwards in surprise. "Are you serious?" I ask, with my voice much higher than I meant it to be.

She lets out a tired, long sigh. "Yup," she says with a pop of her lips. She has let her brown hair down, a color that is twin to my own. She looks as beautiful as always, but her usual calm and collected demeanor is nowhere in sight. All I see is someone who is burdened with the constraints of her position and exasperated with troubles that are unknown to me.

I'm not really sure how to handle it when she looks this way.

"You seem to be bothered by something," I say with a low voice, giving a pause so she will hopefully pick up the conversation that I am not sure if I should start. When she doesn't answer, I clear my throat and try again. "Usually you are the one with the words of wisdom, but is there something I can help with?" I ask with my eyes on the rocky and untamed landscape before us both. The afternoon sun has started to make its way down, letting me know that dusk is near approaching.

She deigns not to answer, letting silence stretch between us for several minutes while she continues to drink her alcohol. I am comfortable with the calm, especially since there haven't been many moments in the past week where I have been left to my own thoughts and the quiet. Whereas before being bitten, I spent most of my time out in the fresh air and immersed myself in the outdoors. Nowadays it's been training session after training session, with my classes in between.

Morwenna reaches an arm to me and when I turn towards her I see that she is handing me another pour of the liquor. "Drink up," she tells me. I sip on the drink, starting to feel the warmth settle in my stomach. She slowly stands and in the corner of my eye I can see that she brushes the dirt from her pants and starts to take off her pair of high heels.

When I take the last sip of the drink, Morwenna reaches out her hand to take the empty glass from me and I hear her speak again.

"There is something you can help with," she says, taking a step back out of my line of vision. "Try not to scream too loudly," she adds.

"Wha-" I start to ask as I turn towards her. A blank look has crossed her face, and with my focus on that, I don't see her movements before it's too late. One of her powerful legs launches towards me and strikes me in the back.

I fall off the ledge, falling through the air and a scream ripping from my throat at the sight of the perilous rock floor that is approaching too quickly. What was assuredly a fatal fall, ends with me hovering over the ground. My screams cease in my confusion, and the gravity that had momentarily left returns suddenly and my body continues the last foot of the drop onto the ground, knocking the rest of the breath from my body.

Thoughts have long since flown from my head and nothing but an unnatural silence remains, so I lay there with wide eyes and try to calm my racing heart. I take a large inhale of breath, but dust enters my throat from the dirt that went airborne when I landed on the ground.

With a groan, I turn over and lay on my back while looking up at the rock ledge I just feel from. Correction - the rock ledge I was pushed from.

What. The. Hell.

A familiar head with dark brown hair peers over the edge and gives me a small wave. "Now, start the hike back up here," Morwenna yells down to me. "It will be dark soon, so make haste."

Unbelievable. I narrow my eyes at her and give her my middle finger, my mouth feeling too dry from the dust to want to scream all of the names I want to call her.

I push myself up from the ground and glance at the rocks around me, looking for a path that heads to the direction I need. I eye a path that seems to be the trail I should take, following it with my eyes for a moment to make sure that it follows the incline of the ravine. It seems like the best choice, so I start walking it after only a few seconds of deliberation.

Morwenna mentioned there is magic protecting this place, but nowhere did she say that it would protect me from dying. Did she know? I really hope so. I don't see any choice but to believe she did, considering I am out in the middle of nowhere and need her to get back to the academy. In this case, the devil I know seems better than the one I don't.

After a mile of hiking between two walls of rock, the path becomes narrower and my hip catches on a piece of rock that juts out from the surface. I wedge myself between them, but as the space becomes even smaller, I use my leg to lift myself up and prop my feet on one wall, while leaning my body back onto the other. I shuffle my hands behind me and my feet in front of me to move between the two walls of rock.

There are lines gouged into the rock on both sides, and I note that it looks like claw marks from multiple animals that have passed through here. Each set of scratch marks has four parallel lines, and I use what I have learned from my parents to guess that the animal is a large canine. Perhaps I'm not the only werewolf to have passed through here, but I might be one of the few to have done so in their human form.

My sneakers have enough traction, so it is not too difficult to continue making my way up the rocks and back to the ledge where Morwenna awaits. The passageway widens once more, and I dust my hands off and continue to trek on the slightly worn path before me.

The face of the rock starts to smooth out, and the layers of colors become more pronounced with the stark contrast between the red rock and the whiter layers.

After a few more turns and twists, I feel the temperature drop a few degrees and feel humidity in the air. I hasten my footsteps, cocking my head to the side to listen to the ambient sounds around me, picking up on a small trickling sound. I swallow at the noise, my dry throat feeling a lot more uncomfortable than before. So even though I would need to stray from my current path, I climb over a few rocks to follow the source of the sound.

Now a little higher than I was before, I see that the canyon opens up and there are a few small trees growing at the bottom of a sheer face of rock. I walk closer to it, knowing there is a source of water that is allowing the trees to thrive in a barren environment. My efforts pay off, because after a few minutes of looking, I find a small trickle of water flowing down inside of a dark fracture of the rock wall. Towards the bottom, where I can reach, I cup my hand under it and take a few small sips of the cool water.

The rain season may have been longer than normal, but that doesn't mean it was recent. The water is moving too slow and I'd rather not continue to drink the water when I don't have a filter for it, so I continue on so that this hike will end sooner rather than later.