He waited.
"Look at your mother," he said. "And imagine it isn't her."
I didn't look at my mother.
I looked at him. I held his gaze and I held the blankness and I threw every wall up that I had?—
"That's the wrong choice," he said.
My mother went down.
The shadows took her knees—not all the way, not to the floor, but to the exact angle where the cage's geometry became its own cruelty. Suspended between standing and falling, her bad handgroping instinctively for something to hold onto and finding nothing, the sound she made?—
I looked at my mother's face.
And then I did the thing I had been refusing to do.
Just for a second. Just a fragment—gold eyes and warmth and the sound of laughter in a library—before I slammed every door shut and buried it back down under six feet of nothing.
But he saw it.
Of course he saw it. That was the whole point of the exercise.
His expression didn't change. But something in the room did—a subtle shift, a pressure that hadn't been there a moment before.
"There she is," he said softly.
"Stop." The word came out already broken. "Stop. I understand. I understand what you're showing me.Stop."
He looked at me for a moment longer.
Then he let my mother go.
She buckled the instant the shadows released her—not a fall but a controlled collapse, hands and knees on the obsidian floor, her body finally allowed the relief it had been fighting toward for hours. The sound she made when her knees hit the stone, the way her broken fingers curled against the floor?—
The barrier dissolved.
I crossed the distance in three steps and went down beside her and she pressed her face into my chest and held onto my shirt with her good hand and I held her and said nothing. There wasnothing to say. Every word I could form was inadequate to the room we were sitting in.
Erlik stood above us and said nothing for a while. He let us have this — whatever this was. He'd already gotten everything he came for.
"The memory," I said, eventually. My voice came out wrecked and I didn't try to fix it. "Give her something she can live with."
He looked down at the two of us with an expression that passed through his face too briefly to name.
"She carried enough," I said. "Two hundred years of it. She doesn't need this too."
A pause.
"As you like," he said.
He crouched and pressed two fingers to my mother's temple, and I held her and watched her face as the horror left it—not torn away but lowered, like a flame turned down degree by degree. The lines around her eyes released. The catch in her breathing eased. The rigid set of her jaw softened. She became, slowly and quietly, someone waking from an unremarkable sleep.
When she opened her eyes they were clear. Confused, but clear.
"Human realms," Erlik said, folding the words in quietly. "The portal scattered you. You sheltered somewhere dull. The food was terrible."
My mother frowned with the minor indignation of someone recalling an inconvenience. "I remember the food being terrible."
