Reynardine had walked in silence with the others, her ghostly white form slipping between trees and undergrowth on their journey. It was her first time assisting in this ceremony- and she hadn't witnessed one with her mother- so all she had to go off of was legend and a few vague hints she'd gotten from Charlotte.

The shaman's split gaze flitted between the crystal and her great-uncle, concealing her own awe and nervousness well. "You need to make contact with the crystal. Touch it with your nose. After that, it'll be your own journey to take." It was more of a guess as to how it worked, but Rey thought she sounded pretty confident.

“Bermondsey,” she greeted in a cold, deep voice; it wasn’t long after he had attacked their son, they hadn’t properly talked, and she still hadn’t forgiven him. But a moment later, her face split open in a grin. “Dramatic, huh?” Whatever was between them, whatever unspoken tension there was crackling away, she could put it away for the night Ber became Nemesis.

Or — maybe she just knew that when he came out the other side of this challenge, he wouldn’t be the same. Whether he liked it or not, their family was to be at its core. And with it, his terror.

It was time to confront what he had been running from all his life. It was time for all the grief to bubble to the surface.

Plus, there was the small matter of she was so proud of him she felt she was going to burst into tears at any moment. Whatever she felt for him beyond this hazy plane, in here, there was only incredible… love.

Eshek didn’t beckon him closer, just waited for him to get there on his own. She stood looking down at him, chin raised, from atop a great, towering hedge, its leaves dark and impenetrable. From one horizon to the next stretched an impossible maze, mist snaking at its base. There was nothing else in this world but the strip of dead, barren earth behind him, the bleak grey sky, and this vast creature. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance, the air cold and heavy and still. It felt like magic and danger, like waiting, like if they were here for too long, the world would swallow them whole. But she wasn’t afraid. As much as she wanted to, Eshek didn’t jump down to press their heads together, didn’t say anything about how proud she was, or how stupid he looked, or what an amazing Nemesis he was going to be; for the first time in her life, if only for the dignity of the role she had to play in her best friend’s ceremony, and if only for the feelings about how he’d treated their son still aching in her chest, she refrained. She’d loved two Nemeses, been to both their lives ceremonies, even if she hadn’t played a part such as this in the first one. But standing there looking down at Bermondsey as he padded closer, at his icy determination that almost, in this gloomy place, looked like childish fear, she almost couldn’t remember the ache of love she’d felt for Funk.

When he was standing beneath her, Eshek began the speech she’d prepared, her throat only closing up slightly around the depth of her emotions. “Your family legacy is a source of great pain, Bermondsey. You have hurt yourself. You have hurt your children. You have hurt your own future. This curse is all that stands between you and your destiny. If you can overcome it, you will be one of the greatest Nemeses the League has ever known. But if you can’t, you will condemn us to the same torment you yourself have suffered under. By hiding from the monsters in your past, you may cause the downfall of the League itself.” A tear suddenly slipped down Eshek’s cheek and she hurried to wipe it away, her breath shuddering slightly. “Oh, screw this,” she laughed tearfully, metaphorically throwing aside the script, “I’m ditching the speech. Point is, Ber, you’re gonna be the most bomb-diggity-ass Nemesis in the whole freakin’ world, even if I think it’s a total fluke Regulus ever chose you in the first place.” She grinned down at him, shaky and tearful. “But first, you gotta put to rest once and for all the only thing that’s ever gonna stand in your way. You’re not your mother. You’re not you’re father. You’re you, Ber. The League — just as much as ours, they’ve always been your children. And it’s time to protect them.”

As Eshek stepped back, the maze suddenly rumbled, and from a sheer wall of leaves opened an entrance. Mist swirled from it, stretching away deep, deep into the maze. The first, long passage seemed to stretch on forever; a stone statue of a knight with a sword was only just visible in the far distance, wreathed in slow, grey fog. Eshek’s voice, amid all the cold, sprawling danger, was close and familiar. Grounding. “At the centre is the thing you care most about in the world. I don’t know what it will be — this maze has a way of reading your heart’s greatest desires, so it could be anything. Don’t be freaky. The first task you must overcome is to find it, and save it. Oh — and, Ber?” Crouching down, she peered over the edge of the hedge, giving him an encouraging smile filled with all the love she couldn’t say. The love that had been on that cold, black beach on that terrible night; the love that had been on that silver rooftop; the love that had been there every night they’d curled up in the warmth of each other and their kits. “I’ll be here the whole time.” Maybe that was the point, the twist, the true decider of whether he had passed or not: if he leaned on her, if he dared to ask for help when he was lost, perhaps that was how he would get to the centre. He didn’t have to do everything on his own. He didn’t have to be alone. Stepping back from the edge and disappearing, she called down to him in a singsong voice that echoed eerily in the cold, swirling mist and the dark, towering hedges on either side of him, “don’t screw uuuuup! This is only all that stands between you and your crown. No pressure!”

Eshek prowled along above him, watching him from high over his head. She never left him as the maze moved, as it changed and reordered itself, as the mist swallowed and freed him, as the stone statues turned their heads to gaze after him. She was always there, silent and unchanging. When he stopped trying to think his way through the maze and instead focused on the feeling of it, the hedge rows began to open and order themselves for him, and she let out a triumphant, celebratory bark of laughter. "Now you're getting it!" she called down to him. "Maybe we'll make a Nemesis of you yet."

As he progressed further into the dark, twisting maze, mist curling and drifting around his paws, the hedges ceased to twist and instead opened into a long, stretching pathway. On either side, hung upon the hedges that towered high above, were thousands of mirrors, the glass old and stained with dark specks. They overlapped, all of different sizes, different shapes; ornate floral frames and simple frames and frames with long since snuffed-out candles stuck to them by the dried wax. "Oh," Eshek murmured, stopping above Bermondsey and gazing out into the long stretch of maze. The distant clearing was almost too far away to see, just a vague idea of some end to this quest. "I should've mentioned this part."

She didn't need to explain what it was: it was clear enough from the glimpses of movement flashing in the mirrors. It was scenes of Bermondsey's life. Each mirror held one, and sometimes the memories would leave the constraints of one frame and flee into another, unstoppable and silent. All the murder, all the fear, all the madness; his mother when he was little, and his mother when he wasn't; his father, his brother. All his life, the good and the bad, the peaceful and the terrible, the things he might have pushed down and forgotten - they were all there, alive in colour. He hadn't seen his mother's face in years, and now there she was. The red queen and her charming mate, there for Bermondsey to see, to touch the cold glass of. If he could make it through this, he would reach the final trial held in the clearing beyond.

Eshek watched him with quiet, unspoken pain, looking down at the tom she silently loved. It was a lot to ask of him. Her chest ached with it, with the cruelty of it, but she stayed quiet. He had to do it.

She needed him to do it.

Eshek leaned forward over the edge of the hedge, her claws digging in as she watched with a tight expression, anxiety thrumming in her chest. What Bermondsey was seeing wasn't as clear to her as it was to him — from up there, she heard the overlapping, confusing sounds, distorted and loud as rusty nails screeching on a porcelain plate, the screams and shouts and cackling laughter, but the words bubbled over each other; she caught glimpses of little Ber staring up at his older self, and suddenly she saw how drawn he truly looked, how haggard and thin he had always looked — but the rest were just scraps, flashes of gold and wisps of silver. She'd never questioned Ber's appearance, had always thought he was as pretty as could be past the dull eyes and the stress lines, but now, seeing him compared to what he had been... She realised how broken he'd been the entire time she'd known him. She wanted to weep; she wanted to go to him.

When he disappeared from view, concealed by the lives and memories swirling around him like ghosts, the proxy scrabbled her forepaws slightly down the hedge, watching desperately, searching for glimpses of him, ready to leap down and go drag him back. If he didn't make it back, if he got lost in there, if he gave into his memories... Terror suddenly consumed her, so strong it felt like her lungs were full of water.

And then, finally, he reappeared, stepping back from the mirror world. Eshek let out a loud, gasping sob of laughter, pushing herself back up from where she was half-hanging over the edge of the hedge. "Family reunion was nice?" she asked, padding along beside him once again from the top of the hedge, her voice full of her tearful grin. "Glad I finally got to meet your mom and dad — they seemed real fancypants." She wanted more than anything to leap down now and go to him, but she refrained. He had one more stage to get through. Guiding him to an empty stone doorway at the end of the hedge path, she stopped beside it. "Almost there, Ber E'tan," she told him, and her voice was as close to solemn as it could get. Then it was broken by a crooked, slightly sorrowful smile. It was filled with worry. "You didn't let it draw you back," she jerked her head back towards the mirrors. "Now ya gotta lay it to rest once and for all."

The second she was done speaking, a high-pitched scream ripped through the air in front of them, beyond the archway. Eshek's brows drew together in pain, her face pinching as she turned her head to look. Even though she knew it wasn't real, it was just an illusion of the maze, it didn't make hearing it any easier. It was Matilde's scream. In the centre of the paved clearing beyond the archway, surrounded on all sides by a circle of hedges, the mist parted just enough to show their kits, trapped and wailing. Crying. Begging. "Go save them," she told Ber, scraping her eyes away to look back down at him, her voice hushed with pain. The monster he was to save them from was unclear to her — it was a black, hateful cloud; then it was a silver tom dropping down from the darkness to prowl around the kits; then it was a greyer tom, one she knew far more intimately, one she loved. All his greatest fears — his family, his curse, himself — tossed together into one final monster.

It would only take its final form for Bermondsey. And if he vanquished it, then he had passed his trial. Looking down at him, Eshek gave him a faint, wide smile, her eyes glistening with sadness.