The door drinks her.
One heartbeat she’s there, the next she’s gone, swallowed without a ripple. My thread jerks taut, biting into me like hooked wire. I brace, planting my feet on cold stone that remembers too many endings.
The pull tries to rip my arm off. I dig in and let the wraith-light spool out of me in a white-hot line. The obsidian frame hums, hungry. It wants to keep what it’s taken.
Dreven’s power closes in at my shoulder. “Voren?—”
“I’ve got her.” I don’t, not yet. But I won’t let go. I shove more of myself through the tether, cold threading into her like a second spine. “Nyssa,” I say, pitching my voice along the line. “Tell me what you see.”
A crackle, like frost fracturing glass. Then her voice, thin and far away. “Doors. Hundreds. All mine.”
Of course. A memory ward. I grit my teeth. “Don’t open anything.”
“That’s… not how doors work, Voren.”
Dastian huffs behind me. “If she says bacon, I’m yanking.”
“You’ll yank nothing.” I take a breath I don’t need and step into the obsidian.
It swallows. Cold punches through me, complete andclean, followed by that old familiar dread that comes when new dead realise what’s happened to them. Voices brush past my ears, a tide of whispers trying to burrow under my skin. The tether jerks again. I follow it.
Light bleeds in. Not light—memory. The corridor around me is a spine of shadow with doors like vertebrae, each carved with scenes that twitch when I look at them too long. Her first blade. The Order’s training hall. A broken tooth and a grin. Rynna’s hand, small and sticky with jam, holding hers. They crowd me, greedy.
She stands halfway down the hall, blade up, jaw set, eyes on a door with a sigil I recognise: the Firsts’ mark. The ward wants a tithe.
“Don’t touch it,” I say, closing the distance. My hand finds her shoulder. She shudders at the chill and leans into it for a heartbeat she’ll deny later.
“It wants something,” she says. “It won’t let me through unless I pay.”
“Memories,” I confirm. “It feeds to shape you to its liking.”
“Great. And by great, I mean I hate it.” Her gaze flicks to another door. The smell of sea-salt and panic rolls off it. “If I give it something I don’t want, will that work?”
“It will take whatever you offer,” I say, lowering my voice. “But it prefers what hurts.”
“Of course it does,” she mutters. “Sick little crown foreplay.”
“It’s getting impatient,” I murmur. The sigil pulses, drinking in the heat of her indecision. “Pick carefully. Give it something you don’t want used against you later.”
Her jaw ticks. “Helpful as ever.”
“The first blade,” I nod at a door where a child’s hand grips steel too big for it. “That made you. Don’t touch it.The jam-sticky hand? That anchors you. Don’t touch that either. The training hall…” I tilt my head, listening to the quiet grief humming behind the wood. “That one is poison.”
She snorts. “Which narrows it down to everything hurts.”
“It wants leverage, slayer. So hand it the leash.” I gesture to a narrow door half-hidden in shadow. Her parents.
“Don’t,” she grits out before I can say anything. “Don’t even think of them.”
“It’s not me who has to. I didn’t know them. I don’t know why they left.”
“Who says they left?” she spits.
“They aren’t dead. That would be a big flashing sign.”
“Damn you,” she mutters.
I take the hit and back off the door with the weight of her parents behind it. Pushing there will only make her dig in and bleed on the wrong altar.
