Flash after flash of door after door races across my mind and I stumble back, pressing the heels of my hands into my temples.
“Fuck.”
In seconds, I’m surrounded, but I slam my eyes shut until the dizziness eases enough that I can breathe.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I whisper.
“What?” everyone shouts.
My eyes lock on Kyzen’s and his concern fades to confusion.
“My nightmare. The last one I had.”
“The green eyes and the doors?”
“Yeah,” I mumble. “It wasn’t a nightmare at all.”
Realization dawns on him and his gaze widens.
“They were messages.”
I nod.
“The Messenger was warning me about Mellcom and showed me that door. Over and over again.”
All of us turn our focus back on the book. As one, we rush over to it.
“I don’t get it,” Lambrit says. “It’s just a door.”
He and Amick rapidly read over the page beside the picture. I assume they find nothing of importance because they flip the page and move on to the next one. Then the next.
“Wait, stop,” Kyzen says, blocking them from turning again.
“It’s just another angle of the same door,” Amick says, and his eyes whip up to Kyzen when he refuses to move his hand.
“No, it isn’t. Look at the corner of that picture frame.” We follow his finger where a portrait is nearly cut off, but you can see the bottom of what looks to be a painting of a landscape. “That’s on the wall in the Sanctum by the locked hall.”
“The locked hall?” I ask.
“The hall isn’t really locked. All the doors are,” he says.
“Remember on our tour, you wanted to try and open one of them,” Yemi says, elbowing me.
“Oh my gods, that’s right. There are eleven locked doors in the Sanctum. Two lead to the rooms with the Volreen and the Gods Veil. It’s rumored seven belonged to the Beginning Gods once upon a time and we don’t know about the other two.”
“One has to be where the Gods Binding is,” Lambrit says.
“You’d think that, and everyone’s always assumed that, but we’ve scoured that hall. There is no greater sense of power surrounding those doors. You can feel the energy of the Beginning Gods, but now that we’ve been around a replica, even that amount of energy isn’t felt down that hall,” Amick says.
“There still has to be some sort of significance to it, though. If there are pictures of it in this book, and I’m getting messages from the Messenger about it…” I trail off, giving Amick a really think about this kind of look.
“You’re right,” he says, glancing down at the text. “Kyzen, how long have we been at this?”
“Two hours in here, six out there.”
“So we have approximately two more out there until the Godsdawn starts waking up. Everyone, start cleaning up while I copy this. Then we’re going to pay the Sanctum a quick visit.”
Everyone gets moving without a single argument.
