Page 139 of House Ignis

Ava Pyreson & Asher Maddox.

Ember gasped so hard I thought she might actually swallow her muffin whole. "Are you fucking kidding me?" she whisper-yelled.

I didn't even blink. I just looked up across the expanse of the arena.

There he was. Arms folded, that familiar, infuriatingly smug look already forming on his face. Gods, that smirk.

I was going to wipe it off his face or die trying.

•••

Once the final pairings were announced, we were dismissed to change into our issued Trials training leathers.

Designed by human techs, the suits were surprisingly sleek, all matte black with silver-threaded runework woven directly into the reinforced hide.

Each line pulsed with a low-level protective enchantment designed to absorb the worst of a spell's kinetic impact. It was meant to ensure we didn't actually die during the trials.

Comforting. Kind of.

I pulled mine on, the leathers adjusting seamlessly to my body and temperature.

Beside me, Ember was muttering a string of creative curses at her boots. I glanced at the updated board and smirked. Ezra. She'd been paired with Ezra.

"Anything to say, Em?" I asked, arching a brow.

She looked at me with pure death in her eyes. "If I die, bury me in sarcasm."

"Noted."

We reassembled by quadrant, the arena shimmering under fresh enchantments as the professors activated the next phase.

This wasn't just sparring anymore. This was preparation for the Trials. And the real thing? A different beast entirely. divided into five brutal phases designed to weed out the weak.

First came the Pit, a nightmare of shifting platforms and rising walls.

You and your partner were dropped into a mechanical deathtrap filled with creatures like trolls, bone-wolves, or whatever else the Academy had captured, and you had to fight your way to the exit before the timer ran out.

Then came the middle stretch: separate elemental phases known as the Labyrinth.

The catch was that you didn't know which one you were getting or in what order until you stepped into them.

It could be the drowning depths of a water trial, the suffocating heights of an air climb, or the crushing weight of the earth.

It was designed to test your adaptability and ensure no team could over-prepare.

Finally, the Veylaith Survival Trial serves as the finale: three to five days in the heart of the Veylaith Forest, beyond the safety of the wall, where the forest whispers in the dark and doesn't leave bones behind.

To reach the end, you and your partner have to survive every phase together. If one falls, the other is disqualified.

But there's a twist: once you reach the very end, the partnership dissolves.

You have to turn on each other in one final one-on-one match.

The one left standing is crowned the Aegos Trials Champion, earning House glory and a guaranteed place in the Astral Guard.

This round was brutal, a battlefield of constantly shifting platforms, elemental traps firing from enchanted walls, and unpredictable terrain that forced you to move, think, and strike without a second's pause.

I rolled my shoulders back, adjusted the runes on my gauntlets, and stepped into the sand.