The hunger inside him clawed at his chest.
He needed to be close.
His being was sick of just seeing her from afar.
The medallion had to go.
Soon.
She was the end and the beginning of everything he’d waited for. And nothing, not gods, not curses, not her protectors, was going to keep her from him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SANORA
My head was a second from cracking like an old porcelain.
If I crammed one more theory or watched one more documentary from five decades ago, my brain would spill out through my ears. I’d been cooped up inside for three days straight. Three days of ignoring sunlight, living off poorly cooked food, and following the invisible thread that kept pulling at my chest. A thread that always pointed in one direction.
The Crater.
I’d torn through the internet like a madwoman, clicking link after link until my browser started glitching. Obscure blogs, geo-mapping forums, scanned journal entries from archives. If someone had written “The Crater” on a website, I found it. I’d watched edited drone clips with terrible synth music, downloaded grainy images, watched a ten-part series in a foreign language with captions so bad I had to guess half the time. I even sat through an eleven-minute video of a guy just screaming into The Crater from his drone, and I saved it. I’d exhausted three notebooks, printed enough documents to be sued, and bookmarked more tabs than I did during all years of college combined.
I was one red string away from being admitted into the psych ward.
And still, nothing. I’d heard all this before, years ago, but something in me still thought—maybe. Just maybe I’d see something different. Maybe I’d survive it.
How stupidly optimistic of me.
Just like Weeny Man said, no one had dared go near it. At least, not and come back with something legible. The closest any drone got was the ring of mountains around it. Thing was, if any object got too close to the mountain walls surrounding The Crater, it shattered into pieces. The footage cut out just before it did. Always. Every time. Just like that. Poof. Nothing ever made it past the rim. A mountain with a no-fly zone enforced by...physics? Magic? Vibes?
That alone should’ve been enough for me to call it quits.
And yet, I sat cross-legged on my bed, drowning in chaos I’d created. Papers—some printed, others handwritten—were scattered around me like I was summoning an academic demon. Near the door, my portable printer sat humming softly, still plugged into the wall, the box I’d carried it in left open like everything else. All four of my moving boxes had exploded across the room—books tumbling out, half-read articles peeking from between socks. Even the dishes I was too tired to take back to the kitchen sat abandoned at the foot of my bed.
The room was a war zone with the smell of printed ink, and I didn’t mind. This mess felt more honest than anything else in the world.
My mum’s voice echoed from my phone on speaker, somehow louder than my headache.
“That’s the end of your research, right? Just take the next train home.”
“It’s not the end,” I muttered, flipping a sheet of paper over. “I’m probably missing a clue or something.”
“Sanora, darling, if your research is dangerous—like you just said—why...?” She paused, and then her voice did that sharp rise italways did when she was trying not to scream “You’re not still thinking about that tarot reading, are you? It’s fake.”
I snorted. “No. This has nothing to do with the cards. I’m doing this because I need to.”
“No one’s forcing you, y’know.”
I nodded instinctively, even though she couldn’t see me. My eyes moved over the mountain of scattered paper again. Some were just maps, others scribbles that looked unhinged even to me.
“Just come home when you’re done with it. Alive, okay?”
“You’re not going to prod me to come now?”
“You always do your thing at the end of the day. I gave up fighting you long ago.”
A small laugh broke from my lips. “Fair enough.”
