Mira did not file a route.
She left a single line for Kael—borrowing back what I should have earned years ago—and slipped west where the marsh holds the sky down and the reeds gossip in the wind. The labyrinth waited where bog met birch, not as a ruin but as a body that had learned the habit of stone.
Cold breathed from its mouth. Beneath the cold, a buried ember pulsed. Sound went thin. Every step Mira took sent echoes skittering down corridors that refused to exist until she insisted on them.
"Not a duel," she told herself, winding leather tight around her wrists. "A conversation I failed to finish."
She stepped in with small magic, not grandeur: a cooling film over slick flagstones; a flicker of heat to lift a curl of mist; a whisper of green coaxing hairline roots from the cracks so the floor would remember where she stood. Fire—motive. Water—turn. Ice—interface. Grass—anchor. She repeated the litany until breath and thought agreed.
The first passage answered with teeth.
Heat bled from seams in the stone, then snapped off to brittle cold; the labyrinth was baiting her into picking one side and dying by the other. Mira didn't take the bait. She layered pulses—"Thermal Weave"—gentle warmth, quick chill, gentle warmth—until the vents misread her and went quiet. Water condensed along the wall; she palmed it into a mirror-smooth disk—"Hydro Mirror"—and used its reflection to look around the corner without offering her throat.
A scrawl of runes rolled awake and vomited snakes.
They hit in pairs: Scald Vipers that struck from hot stone, Rime Mites that surfed rime to gum up joints. Mira let heat skim her right ring—"Steam Lash"—and snapped a white-hot ribbon across the first viper's eyes, driving it blind into a wall. She dropped her stance, tapped three points along the floor with the left ring—"Cold Pin"—freezing hinges in the swarm's motion without locking the whole world in rime. The mites lost their glide. A twist of her wrist woke a breath of green; briars crept like stitching from the cracks—"Briar Spindle"—and laid a low net. The floor took their momentum and kept it.
She moved.
The corridor turned mean. Panels flipped, angles lied, the air itself leaned the wrong direction. Mira made herself smaller and faster. When the ceiling spat a web of needle-thin ice, she answered with a palm-down sweep—"Cinder Veil"—a low, dim curtain of embers that didn't burn so much as confuse sightlines. She sidestepped through the flicker and slid, boot edges biting on a centimeter of melt she'd placed there for exactly that purpose.
The labyrinth learned. It stopped wasting tricks and tried to break her balance.
The floor pulsed a ripple. Mira timed her step to it and let it throw her forward instead of down. A gout of superheated mist roared from the wall; she set a quick row of toothy frost at shin height—"Glacier Break"—not a barricade, just a comb to tear heat into harmless strands. When a ceiling plate dropped to crush her, she didn't hold it up with strength she didn't have; she huffed warmth into the hinge, breathed a lick of cold along the face, seized the metal's temper, and made it stick halfway down. She slid under before it remembered how to fall.
"Not stronger," she told the corridor, because speaking helped keep panic domesticated. "Truer."
A long hall opened and then tried to close. Pillars of heat rose at irregular intervals; the gaps between were freezing and slick. In her first youth here, she had tried to blaze through and eaten the floor. In her second, she had overcorrected and locked the whole place in ice until the ceiling sheared. Now she took the third road: she made a map the labyrinth couldn't read.
Right ring forward, left ring back: a soft cross-current of air carried a skin of cool where she wanted it. She kissed the hottest pillar with a pinprick of cold at its base so its plume curled left, not right. "Thermal Weave." She scratched a faint green arc along her own path so her feet would find it when her eyes lied. The hall sulked and let her pass.
She was sweating, not because of the heat but because of the math. Every choice had to be the exact size of the problem; anything larger woke the labyrinth's immune system and turned ingenuity into alarm.
The next chamber didn't try to trick her. It tried to drown her.
Water rose from the floor without ripples. A pressure lens formed, inverted and hungry. Mira threw "Hydro Mirror" down flat and stepped onto it as if onto black glass. The water*—her water—*took her weight and spread it into the lens, confusing the pool about the existence of surfaces. She rode the slow, treacherous rise like a barge at a lock, guiding with breath and palm. When a vortex's mouth reached for her, she flicked steam into its teeth—"Steam Lash"—and taught it to leave her alone.
A door waited on the other side. She pressed her hand to the stone; it pressed back. No hinge. No seam. Only a certainty that she was on the wrong side of a question. She drew the left ring along the shape of where a seam would want to be and the right ring along the idea of a hinge. Light answered—a thin, stubborn line. She breathed a thread of green into the threshold so her intent would root. The door remembered how to be a door and opened.
The room beyond was quiet in the way that makes prayer uncomfortable.
At first glance, it was empty. Second glance found motion: a slow rotation in the air at chest height, too precise to be a draft, too soft to be a trap. Mira stood at the threshold and let her pulse slow until she could feel where the room's was. There. The beat lived in the walls, not the center. The center was a held breath.
She did not step into it yet.
A last corridor tried to change her mind. It snapped down a grate of ice and lit the floor with a lace of burn. Mira took the lattice's measure, set her left palm to its cold, right palm to its heat, and coaxed both a half-step toward each other without letting them meet. The grate lost interest in being brittle; the floor's anger bled into a manageable sulk. She walked through.
Back in the quiet room, she crossed the threshold.
The air thickened. Some architectures like manners. She gave it hers.
No grand summons, no shouted names. She raised the Twin Arcs and let their rings hum until the hum matched the low sound in the walls. "Hydro Mirror," not as shield but as invitation: a flat disk of water hung in front of her at heart height, reflecting not her face but her posture—weight forward, intent clean. A breath of warmth traced the rim; a breath of cold traced the center. The mirror held both without boiling or freezing. Grass woke under her boots, the tiniest knot of green stitching her stance to the floor.
The room accepted the terms.
Something inside the turning air decided to be visible. Two rings stepped out of it—concentric, counter-rotating—edges feathered by emberlight and slow frost. Water beaded on their rims and did not fall. They were not hers.
Not yet.
Mira lowered the arcs and did not reach. She spoke instead, as if to a skittish animal or a very old friend.
"I'm not here to win against you," she said to the rings and the room and the memory of her former arrogance. "I'm here to finish the work I failed."
The hum shifted—approval or curiosity, she couldn't tell. The labyrinth, which was also listening, eased a muscle she hadn't seen.
Mira took one step closer and stopped where the air said stop. The Twin Arcs warmed in her hands, not with heat but with willingness. She held her place, held her breath, and waited for the next move that wasn't hers.
It came as a voice from inside the turn—not words yet, only the shape of them.
She smiled, small and real. "I hear you."