The candles nearest me flickered.
Then, far down the hall, one flame flared brighter.
A single sconce, halfway down on the right, burned taller, yellow instead of blue, its light spilling out across the carpet.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
I walked toward it.
The sconce hung beside yet another door. This one looked no different from the others at first glance, with the same dark wood and the same iron latch. The only distinction was a carving near the top: a small circle of thorns.
The priestess’s sigil.
I touched the latch.
It didn’t move.
Locked.
Of course.
I sighed, rested my forehead briefly against the cool wood, then straightened.
“Gideon?” I called, louder now, pressing my shoulder against the door. “If you can hear me, be cliché. Rattle something.”
Nothing.
No scraping, no clink.
Silence.
My throat tightened.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Plan B.”
I stepped back and looked around the narrow hall.
Bookshelves lined the opposite wall from the door, crammed full of volumes whose spines bore titles in languages I recognized and others I didn’t. Some were bound in cracked leather, others in something that looked disturbingly like pale, hairless skin.
A small table sat nearby with a single book open on it, its pages covered in cramped handwriting. A quill lay beside it in a dried-up inkwell. The scene looked abandoned mid-thought, as if my grandmother had gotten up in the middle of a sentence and never come back.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Books,” I said. “Of course. Because nothing says secret prison like an ominous reading nook.”
I walked over to the shelf, running my fingers along the spines as I muttered to myself.
“Binding Rituals, nope. Commentary on the Eighth Path, hard pass.”
My hand brushed a small, nondescript volume.
No title on the spine. No fancy binding. Just a plain, dark cover, worn at the corners.
Nothing obvious happened.
I moved to the next.
A faint click sounded behind me.
