She was running again.

The girl sprinted down the twisting corridor, her breath ragged, the hem of her dress damp with dew and Labyrinth dust. Her shadow darted ahead of her, stretching long and sharp beneath the moonless sky, cast not by any light she could see, but by him.

Thalorien followed without footsteps.

He moved through the bones of the Labyrinth like smoke, passing between folds in space that shifted and opened at his whim. The walls knew her name now. They whispered it. They remembered the soft sound of her defiance and the shape of her footsteps. And still, she fled.

He tilted his head as she took a wrong turn—then corrected herself. Again. Clever thing. She learned too quickly. She was solving his riddles. She was nearing the Heart.

And she had not yet asked for him. Not once.

Thalorien stepped into the curling shadows of a narrow alleyway where a stone gargoyle blinked to life at his presence and bowed its horned head.

Three days she had wandered his realm. Three days he had waited, watched, spoken to her in riddles, sung her dreams into being—and still she reached for the door, not the throne.

He raised his voice, not to her, but to the Labyrinth itself.

“She thinks this place a prison,” he whispered, voice curling through the air like incense. “But I built it for her.”

The wind stirred at his words. Ivy recoiled. The stones shuddered, reshaping the corridor just behind her. She didn’t notice. Not yet.