Page 43 of Mating Her Dragon

Garrett felt his stomach drop.

Keevandrie hadn't simply left a hole behind.

She'd left an enchanted return address.

Every threshold remembers both shores. The line stopped being poetry and became, in the space of a single breath, literal Magical architecture– a road with a memory, built to know exactly where it led on both ends, regardless of which direction anything eventually traveled it.

Sydney reached toward the architecture, tentative, careful not to activate anything, simply tracing the shape of it with her sight.

And for one instant, she went somewhere else.

Garrett felt it through the Mating Bond before he saw it on her face. It had not pulled, not the way the Realm seam had pulled at her in the desert. She was disoriented. Unmoored. As if, for one fraction of a second, she couldn't tell which direction was here.

He gripped her hand. Instantly, he felt her settle. Ocean. Airstream. Garrett. Earth. Home.

Sydney blinked, refocused, and looked at him with something like wonder. "That's what you do," she said.

"What?"

"You tell me which side is home."

Garrett didn't have a response for that, not immediately. Something too large to name moved through his chest, something that had nothing to do with tactics or Councils or ancient Elven architecture, and everything to do with the simple, staggering fact that his presence– not his sword, not his strength, not anything he'd ever considered useful before her– was apparently enough to anchor Sydney Kavanaugh to the entire physical world.

He wasn't only steadying her.

He was giving her a fixed coordinate in the Magical structure itself. If she ever followed that road anywhere, toward anything, he might be the one thing that could bring her back.

Garrett did not love this discovery. Sydney, predictably, did.

"Stop looking pleased," he said.

"I'm not pleased."

"Your eyes are sparkling."

"That is my thinking face."

"Your thinking face terrifies me."

Carrick called back to 'check in,' then stayed on the line long enough to deliver the Council's actual warning. It sobered both him and Sydney considerably.

Even if the route could theoretically run both directions, Sydney could not simply walk into Hell. Abyssal thresholds did not behave like ordinary Portals. A traveler crossing without a proper anchor risked losing orientation. Identity. Connection to their own Realm entirely. Not because the Abyss stole souls automatically, but because once a person stood between Realms, direction itself stopped being a fixed, physical fact and became a matter of Magic. The kind of Enchantment that could be lost, twisted, or simply worn away by the wrong kind of nothing.

Sydney looked at Garrett. They both understood, without either of them saying it aloud, exactly what she'd just learned.

He gave her direction. Without him, there might not be a way back at all.

Garrett understood what she was considering before she found the words for it. It terrified him in a way little else had in thousands of years of terrifying things.

Not because he doubted her. He would never doubt her– not her judgment, not her power, not the fierce, careful conscience she'd already proven a dozen times over since New Mexico.

Because he had been where that road led. He knew Leviathan, knew the Abyss, knew precisely what it felt like to have nowhere solid to stand, no direction that meant anything, nothing beneath him but a hundred years of nothing. He had spent every scrap of will he possessed clawing his way back out of exactly the place Sydney was now quietly, methodically considering walking into.

"I will not watch you go where I spent a hundred years trying to get out of," Garrett said, low and rough.

Sydney didn't joke. Didn't soften it. Didn't try to make it smaller than it was.

"Then don't watch me go," she said.