The air inside the maze had thickened into something alive. It didn't just hold heat—it remembered it. Each step Alden took pressed the world into silence, his boots whispering over soot and dew. The smell of scorched earth was a warning before the light came.
Ahead, something growled—a metallic exhale that trembled through the hedges. He paused. Not in hesitation, but in patience.
The clearing opened like a wound. A Blast-Ended Skrewt, easily ten feet long, dragged itself across the burnt soil. Its plating had blackened and fused from its own heat; arcs of steam hissed through its joints. The tail-nozzle churned, trying to catch ignition, coughing embers like a dying forge.
Alden regarded it the way a scholar might regard an unfinished equation. He turned his wrist slightly, the ebony wand glinting once in the blue-white light.
"You burn too hot," he murmured. "And forget what for."
The Skrewt shrieked and fired—an eruption of fire that turned the clearing into a furnace. The heat rippled over him, bending the air. Alden didn't move until the flame reached him. Then, one quiet breath:
"Pelagus Velo."
The space before him caved. The fire folded inward with a soft implosion, snuffed to ash by its own vacuum. The backlash of pressure whipped his cloak against his legs.
The Skrewt stumbled, screeching, disoriented. Alden stepped through the fading heat, eyes half-lidded, expression composed.
A flick of his wand, a whisper:
"Gelum Filum."
A silver line drew itself through the air—thin as breath, cold as intent. It touched the hinge of the creature's fore-plate, and the frost bloomed instantly, crawling through its joints. The Skrewt convulsed once, twice, then toppled with a dull, final clang.
Alive. Contained.Not a victory—an inevitability.
Alden watched its steam fade into the mist and said nothing. He brushed a flake of soot from his sleeve as if tidying the margin of a page. The maze's walls rustled faintly, leaves trembling in what might have been approval.
"Mercy through efficiency," the whisper came, threading through the roots. "The cold sun learns to temper itself."
He didn't answer. The boy's expression didn't shift, but something in his gaze hardened—resolve compacted into focus. He moved past the fallen creature, every step measured, posture still regal despite the ruined earth around him.
His mind wasn't on triumph. It was calibration—how much energy he'd spent, how the flame folded, how the hedge reacted to pressure. It was all an exercise in control.
As the mist swallowed him again, the light from his wand dimmed to a cold blue. The silence returned, but it wasn't empty; it followed him, listening.
The mist thickened until the world seemed to shrink around him. Every breath Alden drew came back cold, like the air had teeth. The metallic tang clung to his tongue—old blood, old fear. Somewhere ahead, something moved with the slow, deliberate grace of despair.
The first sound wasn't a growl or a hiss. It was the faint rattle of air being stolen .Then came the cold.
A cloaked figure glided out of the fog, black robes trailing like oil across the ground. It didn't rush him; it approached, savoring the inevitability. Frost licked up the walls where it passed. The torches that flickered faintly within the hedges sputtered out, one by one, until only the light of Alden's wand remained—a pale sphere trembling against the dark.
He stopped, studying it. The creature's movements were too perfect, too rehearsed.
"Too predictable," he murmured.
The Dementor drew closer, the sound of its breath scraping hollow and wet. A lesser mind would have already felt it: the pull at the chest, the sickening drag of despair. Alden simply watched. His eyes were still, assessing the glide, the faint distortion of the mist around it. A boggart dressed for drama.
When it lunged, he didn't flinch. His wand flicked once, the movement clean and economical.
"Ridiculum."
No force, no flourish—just correction.
The Dementor fractured midair, bursting into a cloud of silver moths. They fluttered upward, the sound of their wings delicate, like snowfall made audible. Their light shimmered off Alden's face for a moment before fading into the mist.
He almost kept walking—almost. But one remained.
A single moth hovered where the creature had died, trembling. Its wings slowed, folding back until it wasn't a moth at all anymore. The smoke reassembled, shaping limbs, a torso, a face.
His face.
Older. Paler.The same silver-white hair, but dull now, as though bleached by regret. The eyes were empty, fixed on something far away. He sat on a throne of blackened stone, the edges carved with runes that bled frost. No crown. No sound. Just stillness—the kind of stillness that swallowed worlds.
Alden's wand didn't waver, but his pulse slowed to match the figure's breath. He recognized that silence. It wasn't power. It was the aftermath.
The maze held its breath. The hedges seemed to bow inward, the air compressing around the two of them—boy and echo.
Alden's voice was quiet when he finally spoke, low enough that it almost blended with the fog.
"That's your choice," he said. "Not my fear."
The older version of him blinked once, and the sound it made wasn't human—it was the crack of glass fracturing under ice. The throne split down the middle, the reflection splintering into a thousand shards that turned to ash before they hit the ground.
The fog swallowed the sound whole.
For a moment, only the echo of his footsteps existed. Then the maze exhaled—a whisper rippling through leaves and stone, softer than prayer, older than pity.
"A king without kingdom…a crown without warmth…"
Alden didn't look back. He adjusted the grip on his wand, straightened the cuff of his sleeve, and kept walking. The frost on the hedge melted as he passed, the path before him clearing, as though the maze itself had taken his silence for an answer.
Moonlight pooled over the fork in the path like spilled mercury, too still, too bright. Alden slowed when he saw her—motionless and magnificent, as though carved out of the dark itself.
The Sphinx sat at the center of the crossroad, her tail coiled like a question mark, claws folded neatly before her. Her fur was the color of deep dusk, shifting between bronze and shadow with every slow breath. Eyes like molten gold followed his every step, unblinking, ancient, patient.
When she spoke, her voice rolled through the air—low thunder wrapped in silk.
"You've walked through teeth and smoke," she said. "And still you move as if the maze serves you. Tell me—what drives the child who refuses to stop?"
Alden's wand lowered a fraction, though his guard didn't.
"Curiosity," he said simply.
Her lips curled into something that wasn't quite a smile.
"No, little serpent. Curiosity asks. You demand."
She rose then—an immense, fluid motion. The air seemed to bend beneath her as she stood, wings unfolding like tapestries of night. When she looked down at him, her gaze wasn't hostile—it was judicial.
"So," she said softly, "let us see if you understand what you chase."
She began to circle him, paws silent on the dirt, each word falling like a weight.
"I am the law that does not bind, The hand that frees and breaks. I turn a weapon into wind, and truth to what it takes.
Name me—be warned—if you agree, you'll choose the path of mastery."
The silence that followed was almost reverent. The maze itself seemed to pause, its whispers curling inward, listening.
Alden didn't answer immediately. He watched her pace, his eyes tracing the ripple of muscle beneath her fur, the faint shimmer of runes inscribed across the stones beneath her paws—wards old enough to hum with recognition. He wasn't trying to solve her. He was understanding her.
"It isn't about wordplay," he murmured finally. "You're asking if I understand what magic is."
The Sphinx stilled, golden eyes narrowing to slits. "And do you?"
His reply came with the kind of calm certainty that made people listen before they even understood.
"Intention."
For a moment, there was nothing—no sound, no wind, just the echo of the word reverberating through the maze's living walls. Then she smiled, slow and sharp, revealing teeth like carved ivory.
"Then pass," she whispered. "And own the price."
Alden stepped forward, and as he passed her shadow, her head bowed—not submission, but recognition. Her tail brushed the earth, stirring a thin cloud of dust that glowed faintly silver.
Her voice followed him, now softer, carrying through the air like the end of a prophecy.
"Mastery asks only that you never stop paying."
The words sank beneath his skin like a spell, into the hollow beneath his ribs where conviction and something colder lived side by side. He didn't flinch, didn't slow. He simply adjusted his grip on his wand and kept walking.
Behind him, the Sphinx settled back into stillness, her eyes dimming. And though she said nothing more, the faintest curl of amusement touched her lips, as if she, too, could see the shadow of the throne waiting for him at the end of the path.
The air grew heavier the deeper he went, pressing close to his skin, thick enough to taste. The mist no longer drifted — it breathed, exhaling from the earth in cold, rhythmic waves. The walls themselves were no longer hedges but pulsating barriers of vine and root, threaded with veins of green light that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
Alden slowed. His compass burned faintly in his palm, the needle trembling toward the heart of the labyrinth. The closer he came, the more alive the maze became — as though it had realized who walked inside it.
The first shift was subtle: a wall moving, not sliding, but growing, tendrils thickening to block his way. The path behind sealed itself shut with a sigh. The compass flickered red for an instant, disoriented, then realigned, pointing into a corridor that hadn't existed a moment before.
"So," he murmured under his breath, "it adapts."
The mist parted. A shape crawled out — too many limbs, half skeletal, half chitin. The smell of rot rolled ahead of it. Its eyes glowed faintly green, reflections of the veins that lined the walls.
Alden didn't pause. His wand tilted slightly as he whispered,
"Gravemora."
The creature didn't fall; it collapsed — its body folding inward, bones groaning, flesh drawn into itself like wet parchment. It vanished into a crater of steaming earth.
He didn't stop to watch it finish dying. His boots carried him forward, silent except for the whisper of frost that followed each step.
From the fog ahead, another figure lurched forward — taller, faster, its claws dragging sparks from the stone. Alden turned his wrist, the motion calm, surgical.
"Frigus Corpus Secunda."
The air shuddered. A line of cold traced across the creature's chest, light bending around it. It froze mid-lunge, suspended in place, its face twisted in eternal motionless agony. The frost spread up its limbs, fracturing it with delicate cracks until it shattered, scattering like glass dust.
The maze moaned. The vines recoiled from him, curling inward like serpents retreating from fire. The mist thickened again, now laced with faint whispers that weren't quite sound.
"He kills without anger…""He walks without mercy…""He bears no chains but his own…"
The voices wove through the air, half awe, half lamentation. They came from everywhere — the roots, the fog, even the ground beneath him — and yet Alden didn't slow, didn't acknowledge them. His eyes were fixed ahead, on the faint shimmer that pulsed in the distance like a heartbeat behind the mist.
The compass's needle quivered violently, spinning and steadying, pointing straight ahead. The glow it emitted was no longer steady silver — it had taken on the same hue as the veins in the maze walls: living green.
Alden's fingers tightened around it. His breath came slow, deliberate.
"You're not going to stop me," he said quietly, voice even.
The maze responded with another shift — not just a movement this time, but a pulse. The ground rippled under his feet like a living thing. The path ahead began to close, vines reaching down like jaws. Alden stepped forward anyway. The roots hesitated, as if uncertain, as if listening.
Then they split apart, folding back into the earth.
He kept walking, eyes forward, until the mist parted just enough to reveal a faint glimmer ahead — silver and blue, flickering like starlight trapped in glass.
The Cup was close now. He could feel it.
And still, the maze whispered after him — softer, distant, the tone almost reverent now:
"He bears the will of ruin, and the mercy of frost."
Alden didn't hear it. Or if he did, he gave no sign. His wand burned cold in his hand, and the light of the Cup pulsed faintly through the fog — close enough to touch, but not yet his.
Alden moved through the twisting corridors like a shadow that had decided to take shape. The fog parted around him in thin ribbons, stirred by nothing but his passing. His breath misted faintly in the cold, each exhale measured, a pulse of white in the half-dark. The maze whispered around him — low, rhythmic, as though it were speaking in a language only the ground understood.
Then, from somewhere ahead and to the left, came the first sound that wasn't his own.
A flash of red lit the mist — quick, bright, and violent. A scream followed, piercing and brief, and then the light bloomed again. Veela fire — elegant, fatal, the kind of beauty that killed before it burned out. It flared once above the hedge, swirling into a crown of gold before collapsing inward to ash.
And then silence.
Alden stopped walking. His wand hung loosely at his side, its tip still glowing with that pale, spectral blue. He didn't speak at first; he only turned his head slightly toward the dying light, eyes narrowing as the sound faded.
The air smelled faintly of ozone and lilies — the last trace of Fleur's magic before the maze devoured it.
"One down," he said softly.
No satisfaction. No sorrow. Just acknowledgment.
He crouched briefly, running his fingertips along the frost that had begun to creep up the hedge at his side, feeling the way it vibrated under his skin. There was a rhythm to the maze now — a pulse. Every time a light went out, the walls shifted minutely, as though the entire labyrinth were exhaling. He could feel it adjusting, trying to balance itself, trying to close around him.
He rose, eyes tracing the faint afterglow still clinging to the air.The angle of the sparks, the distance between echoes — he calculated the direction without a word. He turned smoothly, setting off through the next passage.
His steps were soundless, but the air moved differently now — more alive, as if aware that it had failed to stop him. Each wall he passed trembled with faint green veins, the roots pulling subtly away from his presence.
The maze whispered again.
"Every light that dies sharpens the survivor…"
The words came from everywhere — from the earth, from the leaves, from the spaces between his footsteps. This time, he didn't pretend not to hear.
His jaw tightened slightly.
"Then keep sharpening me," he murmured.
The mist stirred, uncertain — or perhaps afraid.
As he disappeared into the next corridor, the frost followed, spreading across the hedges like living glass. Branches wilted under its touch, the dark green hardening into white. The temperature dropped with every step he took, until even the air seemed to hold its breath.
And when the fog swallowed him completely, the maze stilled, its endless whisper breaking into a shiver of silence — as though it, too, finally understood what walked within it.
Not a boy.Not a champion. But it's equal.