“This tournament will continue until there is only one man left standing. The rest will lay dead at his feet.”

There were varying degrees of reactions from the men gathered in the first arena. Esen was frozen. It felt as though his consciousness had detached itself from his body and he watched the commotion around him from somewhere high, entirely removed from the situation. He gasped a breath once he realized that he’d stopped breathing. He couldn’t get enough air. He couldn’t breathe.

He stumbled back one step, then two, entire body jerking away when he bumped into someone behind him. He tried stuttering out an apology but his tongue was thick and heavy in his mouth. 

Chaos errupted around him as the contestants ran about the arena. He thought he might have been able to hear the crowd roaring in excitement — or was it terror? It was quickly drowned out by the pounding of his own heart. He turned towards the balcony where his parents would be seated, but he couldn’t focus. His vision swam. His head spun. Black dots flickered into the corners of his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe.

He grasped at the fabric of his shirt. Why couldn’t he breathe? He couldn’t— He couldn’t—

His legs gave out from under him. His field of vision kept growing smaller. Everything was shaking, like the ground was ready to split open beneath his feet. And he still couldn’t breathe.

Sound came rushing back all at once as he was yanked up from the ground. 

“SNAP OUT OF IT WE’VE GOTTA MOVE!”

Zaire’s face — usually smiling — was drawn taught with worry, the fear paralyzing Esen’s own lungs reflected in his eyes. He jumped, narrowly avoiding a crack that formed in the ground beneath his feet. The earth was still rumbling. Esen realized, then, as his vision finally came back into focus, his panic momentarily receding, that the ground really was splitting open.

“We need to get up there,” Zaire shouted, pointing to the sky, open and bright, uncaring of what was going on just beneath its canopy of sunlight. 

“I— I— can’t.” Esen could hardly force the words out over his stuttering breaths, each gasp more painful than the last. Tears, unbidden, rolled down his cheeks. He hadn’t even realized that he’d been crying in the first place. 

The ground rumbled again. They were almost pitched to the floor as a piece of the ground broke off, steadily rising into the air. Already unsteady on his legs, Esen had to reach out and grip Zaire’s arm to keep himself upright. What was happening?

He glanced around, watching as the crack that had split the arena in half grew larger and larger and pieces of the ground broke off to add to the width of the chasm. It ran deep — so deep that the pit appeared like a bottomless abyss, not a single ray of glaring sunlight piercing through the thick, oppressive darkness. 

These bits of earth continued to rise higher into the sky, chipping away at the ground of the arena until there was nothing less but a bottomless pit beneath them. Esen swallowed thickly, the cold numbness of his panic sliced through by the adrenaline his racing heart pumped into his bloodstream. They were all high up in the air, some standing, some crouched, some clinging to the rock holding them up like it was their mother. If it hadn’t been for Zaire’s steady presence beside him, Esen was pretty sure he would have ended up like that, too. 

“This is our first game.” Esen nearly jumped out of his own skin when the Empress’s voice rang out through the arena again. “An obstacle course, if you will.” Up ahead, all the way across the arena where all of the competitors had somehow ended up, a bright flag was propped up on the last of the rocks. “This is a test of speed. The last one to reach the end will perish.”

Esen’s heartrate skittered at the reminder that these weren’t just games, despite how desperately he wished they were. The crowd roared as if they were. Their lives were on the line. How could anybody be enjoying this? None of them had signed up for this. Esen wasn’t ready to die—

A horn blew, startling him even further. The competitors glanced around in a daze for a moment, before someone shot out ahead of them — white clothing flapping. A Wind Clan competitor. It was if a switch had been flipped within all of them as they all started forward. Esen and Zaire jumped from rock to rock. They wobbled under their weight, and Esen stumbled precariously close to the edge.

He couldn’t focus on where the other competitors were, or where in the lineup he was. He kept Zaire’s back ahead of him as his focal point. If he could just keep calm, and follow Zaire, it would all be fine. 

Before he could step onto the rock that Zaire had been on mere moments before, it cracked open and crumbled to dust. Esen gasped as his foot met empty air. He somehow managed to lurch sideways at the last second before he plummetted. He clutched onto his new solace. It didn’t last long. His eyes widened as it began to crack beneath him, too. 

He forced himself to keep moving, to not lose momentum, even as his terror mounted to a peak. The quickest way to beat this was to use his magic — the other Wind Clan competitors had already done so, flying in the air ahead of everyone — but he was too rattled. He couldn’t control his breathing. If he couldn’t control his breathing, there was no way he could control the air. He had to be able to focus. He had to be able to bend the wind, wild and free, to his own will. And, even on a good day, his control of magic was mediocre, at best. 

Breathe. It was like a command that he tried to force onto himself. Breathe. But the more he thought it, the more he focused on the tightness of his lungs and the very real possibility that he would die here, the harder it was to draw air into his lungs. He stumbled once, twice, nearly falling over the edge. He couldn’t stop to find surer footing. If he stopped, he was dead.

Tears built in his eyes, blurring his vision. He forced them away. Tried to, anyway. He’d lost Zaire in the madness. He didn’t know where to focus, didn’t know how to keep himself steady long enough to find one step ahead of the other. He slipped. He managed to grab hold of the rock in front of him. Was that the crowd cheering, or was someone screaming as they plummeted to their death below? Had anyone fallen yet? They had to have. He clambered to his feet.

Another competitor pulled up nearby. He didn’t have enough presence of mind to focus on who it was, or what clan they were from. He found the flag, and he kept it in his sights. That was the goal. If he could make it there, he would be fine. Everything would be fine. 

His foot landed wrong on the next rock. He tipped sideways. No, he realized, a moment too late, as his body fell into open air. He hadn’t slipped. 

He stared with wide eyes into the terrified face of the other competitor, and the hand that had reached out to push him.