But the air felt heavy, as if it were aware. The shadows leaned toward me, and the sigils brightened as I passed. The mark on my palm warmed until it matched the rhythm beneath my feet, heartbeat to heartbeat.
It didn’t feel like I was alone.
It felt like the castle was listening, and that somewhere inside its walls, he was too.
I stopped, unsure if it was fear or curiosity that rooted me in place. The silence pressed close, and for a moment I thought I could feel the echo of his presence again. Faint like a memory whispered back through the walls. I shouldn’t have come outhere. Every time I tried to forget, the Court found new ways to remind me. The mark on my palm, the way the air bent around me, it was all the same language, and I didn’t know how to stop hearing it.
Maybe that was the worst part. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I pressed my hand against the wall. Warm. Alive.
“What do you want from me?” I whispered.
The sigils gave a faint pulse, like a heartbeat beneath the stone.
That was when I heard her voice behind me.
“Restless nights already?”
I turned, pulse still thrumming in my ears. Maren stood a few steps away, clam as always, her expression caught between amusement and concern.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “The Court feels… awake.”
Maren’s gaze flicked to the sigils. “It feels you, more likely.”
“The Storm Court remembers,” she said, voice gentle and kind. “It does not forget the ones who touch its heart.”
“I haven’t —” I started, but she only smiled, like she’d heard this argument before.
“You will.”
Maren’s footsteps faded until only the hum of the walls remained.
I stood there a while longer; fingers pressed to the smooth curve of the nearest sigil. The warmth it gave off was faint but steady, comforting almost.
The Court remembers.
The phrase clung to me as I walked. Every corridor I turned into looked the same, gray stone veined with light, but somehow, I always felt as though I was being led, not lost. The air thickened the deeper I went, carrying a scent of rain even though the windows were shut.
I thought about Atlas, about the way he’d looked at me before everything fractured. Like I was something he meant to save even if it broke him to do it. The memory cut deeper than I wanted to admit, searing through the distance I kept trying to build between us.
I told myself I was foolish to keep chasing ghosts through a sleeping castle, but the truth was simpler. I needed to understand why this place felt alive when I touched it. Why I felt alive when I did.
The corridors narrowed, ceilings dropping lower until I had to lower my head to pass beneath an archway carved with sigils so old the stone had begun to swallow them. My mark flared once, a subtle warmth spreading throughout my body.
“I’m not yours,” I whispered to the empty air.
A low hum rippled through the corridor. Not anger, not welcome…just recognition. As if the Court disagreed, but politely.
That was when I saw it.
A door unlike the others, sealed and forgotten, its surface smooth as obsidian and webbed with dormant light. The sigils along the seams glowed faintly when I approached, a shiver of blue tracing their pattern before fading again.
I hesitated, every instinct telling me to turn back. But the longer I stood there, the more the silence seemed to press forward, asking.
I reached out, my fingertips brushing against the cold stone, and the sigils flared. Not violently, not loud, but in a slow, deliberate pulse. The sound was like thunder from far away, the kind that rumbles right before a storm breaks. The mark on my palm answered, bright and sure, and for one impossible moment, I felt something move beneath the surface of the door. I stepped back, breath unsteady, and whispered to no one, “What are you?”
The glow faded, and for a heartbeat the air seemed to turn inward, listening. When the stillness settled again, I wasn’t sure whether the sound echoing in my chest was mine or the Court’s.
