The moss-cloaked stone stretched endlessly, roots twisting like the veins of some slumbering leviathan. Twilight clung to the air, thick and honeyed, as if time itself had slowed to savor the moment. At the heart of it all stood the wolf—a creature of winter and wildfire, its fur white as bone yet shimmering faintly, as though dusted with starlight. Five feet tall at the shoulder, its molten gold eyes held the weight of centuries, pupils slit like a dragon’s. It did not snarl. Did not stalk. It simply existed, a king in a kingdom of shadows.
Ben’s mug materialized in his grip, steaming with phantom coffee that smelled of burnt oak and nostalgia, “Finally. A fight worth—”
The clay screamed.
Cracks spiderwebbed across its surface as the handle elongated, molten steel bleeding from the fissures. Heat rippled outward, warping the air as the mug dissolved into liquid fire that coiled around Ben’s fist. The molten metal solidified, birthing Dragonsdeathbringer—a blade longer than Ben was tall, its obsidian core etched with stormclouds that churned and roiled across the steel. Lightning danced along the edge, humming a dirge of forgotten skies.
Jenny staggered back, gauntleted hand raised against the sword’s aura. Her armor—a masterwork of ancient runes—shivered and hissed, its enchantments recoiling. “What is that?”
Ben flexed his grip, the blade’s hilt fitting his palm like a lover’s whisper. “Told you I kept the mug for a reason.”
Jenny’s breath fogged in the sudden cold radiating from the sword. “Was that your… mug?”
The wolf tilted its head, unafraid. Its breath fogged the air—sweet, like pine sap and summer rain—and it padded forward, each step silent despite its size. Nostrils flared as it sniffed the blade’s edge, then yawned, revealing teeth like ivory daggers.
Jenny gripped her own sword, its pale flame guttering in Dragonsdeathbringer’s shadow. “The beast won’t strike first. Kill it. Bypass it. Your choice. But choose quickly.”
Ben frowned. The wolf’s gaze held no malice—only curiosity, tinged with something darker. Loneliness, perhaps. Or recognition.
“You want me to slaughter this?” Ben’s blade dipped, its lightning dimming. “For glory?”
“For survival,” Jenny snapped. The chamber’s roots creaked as if agreeing. “The Tower rewards pragmatism, not poetry. Kill it, or sneak past. Those are the rules.”
The wolf nudged Dragonsdeathbringer with its muzzle. A spark leapt from the blade, dancing across its fur, and the beast sneezed—a sound like a rockslide.
Ben laughed, the sword’s hum harmonizing with his voice. “Look at him! He’s playing.”
Jenny’s gauntlet tightened on her hilt, “That ‘pup’ tore out the throat of the last climber who hesitated.”
The wolf circled Ben, tail swaying like a banner. A scar glinted beneath its ear—a jagged thing, too precise to be natural. A blade’s kiss, Ben realized.
“You’ve been here too long, haven’t you?” Ben murmured, sheathing Dragonsdeathbringer across his back. The wolf froze, ears pricked. “Guarding a door no one thanks you for. Fighting fools too scared to meet your eye.”
Jenny lunged forward. “Ben, don’t—”
The wolf lunged—not at Ben’s throat, but his outstretched hand. Its teeth closed gently around his wrist, cold as moonlit steel, and tugged him toward the exit.
Jenny’s blade faltered. “Impossible.”
Ben grinned, scratching the beast’s chin. “You’re just a big softie, aren’t you?”
The wolf’s tail thumped once, shaking the moss beneath them. Then it released Ben, flopped onto its back, and pawed at the air, tongue lolling.
Jenny’s voice cracked. “No one tames the Trial. They survive it. They endure it.”
Ben knelt, running a hand through the wolf’s star-flecked fur. “Maybe no one asked it to dance first.”
Above them, the chamber’s runes flared—not in warning, but approval. The wolf—Whitebane—rolled to its feet and bounded to the exit, pausing to glance back, eyes gleaming with something like laughter.
Jenny stared at the moss where the wolf had lain. A single white fur clung to her armor, glowing faintly. “Chad slew a goblin,” she whispered. “Tore out its heart. And you… you befriended a wolf.”
Ben shrugged, following Whitebane into the gloom. “Dragons are nothing to me, Sir Benginold the Strong, Slayer of Vyrathis the Devourer, Vanquisher of Villains, Wymarc of the Iron Sword and my blade,” he held up his sword. “DRAGONSDEATHBRINGER!”
“That didn’t tell me anything,” Jenny said, palm on her face.
Ben pat Whitebane, rubbing the beast ear, “I wrote a dissertation on Comparative Ethology of Apex Predator Entities of the Ante-Diluvian Megafauna, its was on my Resume.”
The Path of Shifting Stones
The archway’s threshold dissolved like smoke, hurling them into the oppressive belly of a cavernous maze forged of living stone. Before them, walls of jagged granite arched upward like the ribs of a long-forgotten titan, their surfaces alive with pulsing veins of molten amber that threw a hellish glow across every crevice. The air was thick with the tang of scorched earth and the metallic bite of ancient iron; every labored breath left Ben’s tongue tasting as if dipped in a searing forge.
With every step, the labyrinth shuddered—stones grinding like colossal, tectonic teeth and corridors twisting and contorting as if guided by some unseen, primordial will. The Tower’s inner sanctum was not a mere structure but a living beast, its very bowels reshaping in time with a silent, terrible heartbeat.
In the midst of this quaking chaos, Jenny’s blade sprang to life. Its pale flame flickered uncertainly against the suffocating dark, casting jittering shadows on the heaving stone. “Stay close,” she barked, her voice taut as a drawn wire. “The maze changes. Hesitate for a second and it’ll trap you in a tomb even Chad couldn’t crack.”
Ben, ever the cavalier, strode ahead with arms crossed and a devil-may-care grin, his boots crushing gravel into fine, drifting dust. “If I hesitate, I’ll miss lunch. Whitebane?”
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At his call, the wolf padded forward. Whitebane’s tail wagged in defiant cheer. His nose skimming the uneven floor, while his claws clicked rhythmically against the stone—each measured step scattering tiny sparks that danced briefly along the amber filigree of the walls.
“Ben!” Jenny hissed in alarm, her tone slicing through the murmur of shifting stone. “You can’t just—walk—”
Before she could finish, the maze answered with a roar: from the floor erupted a wall of pitted granite, a sudden barrier crowned with teeth-like protrusions that clawed at the air. Ten feet of solid stone rushed upward with brutal inevitability. Ben, however, never slowed his stride.
“Ben, stop—!”
He barreled straight into the granite mass with a force that made the very air shudder. A thunderous crack rent the heavy silence. In an explosion of splintering stone and shrapnel, the wall burst outward, debris cascading around him like a hailstorm of ancient rubble. Dust billowed thickly, stinging Jenny’s eyes as she raised her blade defensively. When the particulate storm finally cleared, Ben stood untouched—his shadow-forged cloak already speckled with fine remnants of shattered rock. Whitebane, ever the nimble guardian, bounded through the newly carved gap, pausing only to sneeze and shake stone chips from his mottled fur.
Jenny’s breath hitched as she stared at the ruin. “You… broke it.”
“Broke what?” Ben replied, squinting at the scattered rubble. He kicked a stray shard, sending it skittering into the gloom with a clatter that defied the laws of physics. “It’s an illusion. Mostly.”
“No.” Jenny’s tone hardened as she drove her blade into a fallen slab. A metallic shriek erupted—a discord of sparks and shrill tones echoing off the walls. “Solid. Chad lost three men here. Crushed beneath this unforgiving weight. Their armor looked like foil, barely clinging to life.”
Ben offered only a shrug in response, “Maybe they didn’t hit it hard enough.”
At that, the maze itself groaned in response. Another wall surged upward behind them, sealing their retreat. The amber veins along its surface flared a furious crimson, throbbing like enraged arteries struggling to contain an ancient, boiling blood. Jenny wheeled on him, blade raised in urgent alarm. “We’re trapped—”
But before she could finish, Ben slammed his palm against the new barrier. A shockwave rippled outward, carving fissures that snaked across the stone’s face. For a suspended heartbeat, the very rock seemed to scream—a sound akin to grinding glaciers—and then, as if succumbing to an unstoppable force, it disintegrated into a cascade of gravel. Whitebane lunged through the opening, kicking up a storm of dust as he vanished into the maze’s shifting, labyrinthine guts.
Jenny’s gaze fixed on Ben’s hand—unscarred, steady, as if mocking the chaos around them. “That’s… not how the Trial works. You’re supposed to adapt. To solve—”
“I am solving it.” Ben crouched beside a section of the floor where a faint glyph was etched—a spiral that mirrored the scar etched along Whitebane’s flank. The stone hummed beneath his touch, a resonant murmur that echoed the low growl of stormclouds churning in the ominous gleam of Dragonsdeathbringer’s blade. “This place… I’ve seen it before. Not here, exactly, but somewhere… older. Far older.”
Jenny’s gauntleted hand seized his shoulder, her eyes blazing with equal parts fear and determination. “The Tower pulls from your memory. It’s lying to you.”
Ben shook her off with a dismissive force. “No. It’s reminding me.”
The maze convulsed again, this time with a violent shudder. Walls folded inward like closing fists, sealing off the path behind them as if erasing their past. Ahead, a new corridor yawed open—a chasm of darkness whose ceiling bristled with quartz stalactites, each one as sharp and merciless as a guillotine’s blade.
Whitebane whimpered, his paw tapping insistently against Ben’s boot.
“He’s right,” Ben murmured, his eyes narrowing as he surveyed the labyrinth’s shifting geometry. “This suit’s rubbish here.” With a fluid motion, he shrugged off Greg’s tattered blazer, letting it crumple and tumble to the cold stone floor. “I need a cloak. Something with… verve.”
Jenny scoffed at his levity even as the weight of their predicament pressed in around them. “You’re in a death maze, not a tailor’s—”
Before she could finish, the Tower answered its own riddle. Threads of shadow began to peel from the very walls, twisting and writhing like living serpents drawn to an unseen master. They slithered toward Ben, coiling around his shoulders with deliberate purpose. In moments, they wove themselves into a cloak darker than the void, its edges hungrily devouring the amber light that dared to touch them. The fabric clung to him as if alive—a sentient shroud whose jagged collar rose like a crown of blades framing his resolute jaw.
Whitebane’s howl split the oppressive silence—a cry that shook loose stones from the high ceiling and sent tremors rippling through the floor. Jenny staggered back, disbelief mingling with dread. “That’s… not possible. The Tower doesn’t gift. It takes.”
Ben flexed his fingers, and the cloak billowed around him without a whisper of wind. “Maybe it’s finally met someone worth dressing.” He offered a wry nod toward the wolf. “Which way?”
Whitebane, as if in silent command, lunged down the quartz-studded corridor. Without a moment’s hesitation, Ben followed, the maze’s walls shattering before him as if compelled to make way—a cascade of glass-like fragments splintering under the force of his momentum.
Behind them, Jenny lingered a moment longer, her eyes catching on Greg’s abandoned blazer. As she knelt to retrieve it, a faded sticky note detached and fluttered to the floor in a mocking whisper:
“Ben—Dry Clean Only!! —Greg”
