Page 42 of Mating Her Dragon

The explanation took another few minutes to fully land. Once it did, Garrett understood exactly what had put that look on Sydney’s face, and he wished, briefly and fervently, that he didn't.

The scar wasn't currently an open doorway. Ginnie had been right about that from the beginning. It was closer to an address—a fixed Magical coordinate keyed not to geography, but to the beings on either end. It remembered Garrett. And it remembered where Leviathan had gone.

That was why the black thread had found it in New Mexico. It hadn't simply recognized damage, the way Garrett had assumed. It had recognized an address it already knew how to call.

And if enough power ever activated the threshold– a completed Mating, theoretically, given the scale of Magic involved– the old path could become traversable again. But roads, the Council's records apparently insisted, did not inherently run in only one direction. If Leviathan could use the scar to reach toward Sydney, then Sydney, in theory, could use that same scar to reach the place Leviathan occupied.

"Absolutely not," Garrett said, before anyone had finished the thought out loud.

"Garrett."

"No."

"We haven't even discussed…"

"No."

"Would you like to hear the idea before rejecting it?"

"I heard the idea yesterday."

"You heard approximately eleven percent of the idea."

"That percentage does not reassure me, Sydney."

A few seconds later, Carrick and Ginnie said their goodbyes, promising to be in touch when they learned anything new. Garrett was glad to have some time to digest all he had just learned.

After a little while, Sydney asked if she could look again. Not open the Mating Bond– she was careful to make that distinction clear, and Garrett felt something in his chest ease slightly at hearing her say it. Simply examining the scar itself, now that they knew Keevandrie might have built something deliberate around it, made sense.

Garrett consented.

Sydney opened her sight, and this time, watching her face, he could tell she knew exactly what she was looking for.

Scar. Braid. Doors. All of it, same as the day before.

Then her expression changed.

"There's a lattice," she said slowly. "Around the outside edge. Almost fused into the rest of the structure. I nearly missed it entirely." She paused, her eyes tracking something he couldn't see. "It's elegant. Old. Elven."

She went very still.

"Keevandrie," she said.

Not maybe this time. "I saw this same style at the Realm seam, and the Council confirmed it. This was the same construction, wrapped carefully, deliberately, around the edges of your wound."

Keevandrie hadn't simply left damage behind when Leviathan finally released his grip. She had engineered it.

"But the black thread's different," Sydney said, frowning, examining something else entirely now. "The signature that reacted yesterday– that's not Keevandrie's handwriting. It's a different hand completely."

"Leviathan," Garrett said.

"Probably." Sydney caught herself immediately. "Isn't proof, though. We need an example of his Magical writing."

Garrett exhaled something that wasn't quite a laugh. "I dislike how responsible you're becoming."

"Growth is terrible," Sydney agreed with a snort of laughter. Then she found the rest of it, and Garrett watched the color shift slightly in her face.

"It's directional," she said slowly. "I thought at first it just pointed inward– toward you, toward the wound. But that's not right." Her eyes narrowed, tracking something with real focus now. "It's built to find its original destination. Like a compass. Like a Portal keyed to home."