NINETY-EIGHT | BEYOND

Samyak was waiting for me outside the pack house, and his eyebrows shot up as I neared him.

The walk back from the river field had been slow and arduous, and each step had felt as though I was heaving lead bricks through the grass. I’d felt the familiar heat of tears prickling at my eyes, and my throat had formed a lump that became impossible to swallow.

I’d initially been elated, after discovering that I was, indeed, a Pronghorn. I’d been filled with a surging kind of pride; one that had created delicate tingles in the tips of my fingers. But once I’d turned away from the Candle Dragon, the nightmarish visions I’d experienced came flooding back.

If that was what was within me, there was no way to escape it. I wondered if everyone’s fifth trial had been so brutal, though I knew instinctively that they had not. Mine had been flooded with dark imagery, and seething words of promises long