I had no better options. Violet needed help, and she needed it now. Whatever lay beyond that door could not be worse than leaving her to suffer. I followed Jules through the massive doorway, and the world changed.
The air shifted first—pressure equalizing with a pop that made my ears ring. Then came the wind, an impossible yet constant wind, carrying scents from a thousand different places. Jasmine and motor oil. Sea salt and woodsmoke. Fresh bread and copper blood. The olfactory chaos gave me a headache.
We stood in a vast corridor that defied every law of architecture and physics I understood. Doors lined both walls as far as I could see in eitherdirection, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, stretching into infinity. Each door was unique, crafted from different materials, in different colors, and of different styles. Some looked ancient, iron-banded and weathered. Others appeared modern, sleek steel and frosted glass. A few seemed to shift as I looked at them, their surfaces rippling like water.
Between each door, jutting up from black iron sconces, were flaming torches of bright blue fire. They gave off neither smoke nor heat, only a clean blue-white light to illuminate the long hallways. The lack of smoke choking the hallways—the lack of even thescentof smoke—was unnerving.
With my enhanced hearing, I expected to be assaulted by sounds from behind the doors. Soundproofed or not, my hearing was supernaturally exceptional. I was preparing to be bombarded by muffled voices, laughing, screaming, the unmistakable rhythm of sex. I waited for the cacophony of music to bleed through—jazz and metal and classical and techno, layered atop each other in a discordant fury.
But there was silence. Nearly absolute and utter silence.
I heard the heartbeats of Jules and Violet and the ever constant rustling of the wind as it rushed down the corridors. . . but that was all.It’s as if we’re the only three alive in all the world. It was beyond unnerving. I would have preferred the noise.
Jules moved through the corridor with confidence, navigating the endless doors with the ease of long familiarity. She walked for what felt like several minutes, but could have been seconds or hours. Time felt slippery in that place, unmoored from its usual progression.
Finally, she stopped before a door that stood out among its neighbors.
It was painted hot pink, the color so vibrant it almost hurt to look at. Stars had been painted across its surface in what looked like a child’s hand—simple five-pointed shapes in yellow and white and silver, scattered with no discernible pattern. At the center of the door was a portrait of three figures, and despite its crude execution, I recognized one of the figures immediately.
Three women holding hands, with Jules in the center. Her platinum hair was unmistakable, even rendered in simple brushstrokes. To her left and right were two other women I did not know. From their feet, the night sky spilled downward, stars and galaxies bleeding into the worldthey stood above, as if they were goddesses looking down upon creation itself.
She placed her palm against the door, and I felt power surge through me—not the electric crackle of Celine’s Warlock magic, but something even older. Gentler. It was the feeling of the first warm day after a long winter.
“This is my door,” she said, glancing back at me over her shoulder. Her blue eyes caught the corridor’s impossible light, reflecting colors that should not exist. “If you think of your apartment—visualize it clearly, every detail you can remember—you'll arrive there when you step through.”
Realization dawned on me then, but words escaped me. My brain struggled to process what she was offering, what this implied about the nature of reality and the magic woven through it. And about Jules herself. Who was she? What was she?
She must have read the shock on my face because she offered a small, sad smile. “Go, Rowan. You clearly know more about what lies beyond the veil than most mortals. We can ask each other questions another time. Please. Go. Violet needs you now.”
Jules opened the door, and I looked through to the other side.
Nothing. An absolute void. A darkness so total and complete it seemed to have weight and texture, pressing against my eyes like a physical force.Look upon me, that absence screamed,look upon me and tremble.
Under normal circumstances, I would have been more cautious. I would have asked more questions. I would have considered the implications of stepping through a door that bent the very fabric of space.
But these were not normal circumstances.
Violet shivered in my arms, her body wracked with tremors that seemed to originate from her very bones. Her breath came in small, pained gasps. She whispered something I couldn’t make out, her lips moving against my neck. I knew that I did not have the luxury of caution.
I thought of my apartment and stepped through the door.
The sensation defied description. It was not walking, not falling, not flying. For a fraction of a second, I existed everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. I felt the weight of infinite space pressing in from alldirections, felt myself stretched thin across impossible distances, felt Violet’s body in my arms as the only solid thing in a universe of unreality.
I opened my mouth to speak—to tell Violet we would be okay, to apologize to her for not protecting her, to confess a thousand things—but there was no sound in that place.
Then came the pull—a hook behind my navel, yanking me forward with force that should have torn me apart but instead compressed me back into a singular existence.
The space around me suddenly felt alive. Crystalline walls formed, appearing to be made of compressed starlight. They pulsed with colors I had no names for, hues that existed outside normal human perception but which I could somehow see. The floor beneath my feet glowed, but it felt wrong—as if I walked on the surface tension of reality itself.
Sound rushed in. The familiar hum of my apartment’s air conditioning, the distant traffic from the street below, the whisper of wind against windows. Then the eldritch light and otherworldly colors dimmed, being replaced by the soft amber glow from my bedroom’s recessed lighting. Next came sensation—solid floor beneath my feet and cool air against my face.
I stood in my bedroom.
I turned, half-expecting to see Jules’s concerned face, the hot pink door, the impossible corridor beyond. Instead, I saw only my bed with its crisp white linens undisturbed, exactly as I had left it.
The door I’d stepped through did not exist. There was only the familiar wall, exposed brick, and empty space.
The experience reminded me—suddenly and violently—of being reborn, but I didn’t have time to dwell on the similarities. Violet shivered in my arms, a violent tremor that ran through her entire body. Her skin burned against mine, fever-hot and getting worse.
