Elior woke with the taste of thunder still crackling in his teeth.

  The aether-root had dissolved completely, leaving behind a ghost of ozone and copper that made his tongue feel too large for his mouth. He lay on the floor of the shack—not the soft bed he’d imagined, but rough planks covered in glass-dust that glimmered like powdered stars in the dim light filtering through the cracks.

  He sat up too fast. The room spun, but the bone-deep exhaustion was gone, replaced by vitality that hummed in his muscles like a plucked string. His arm ached dully. The Umbrix thread beneath his skin had quieted to a whisper, but it was still there—a second pulse synchronized with his heartbeat, fainter now, suppressed.

  “You’re awake.”

  Twilight sat by the window, her silhouette framed by the infected twilight outside. She hadn’t slept. Her violet-ringed eyes tracked him with the unblinking attention of a predator, but her hands were steady, wrapping a strip of shadow-wool around her knuckles.

  “The root gave you four hours,” she said. “No more. It borrows from tomorrow’s strength.”

  Elior touched his sleeve where the wolf’s mark waited beneath the fabric. “The thread… it’s quieter.”

  “I suppressed it.” She didn’t look at him. “Temporary. Like putting a lid on a boiling pot.”

  Outside, the clicking had stopped. The silence was worse.

  Elior dragged himself to the window. The settlement of shacks stood empty, the glass-sand dunes undisturbed. But in the sky, the wound still wept that gangrene light. “Where are they?”

  “Waiting.” Twilight stood, her cloak of shadows rippling. “They know you’re here. They can taste the thread in your arm—it’s calling them like a beacon.”

  She turned to him, and for the first time, her composure cracked. Not with fear, but with something sharper. Their eyes locked, and hers softened—if only for a second. “Your eyes. The silver in them. It’s the same frequency as his.”

  “Whose?”

  “The last Warden who walked here.” Her jaw tightened. “K?l. He was… louder. More controlled. But the color, the intensity—is identical.”

  Elior wondered how she had met K?l—the name he knew all too well now, his uncle’s son, his cousin.

  Before Elior could ask more, the silver cord in the air—the one that had guided them to the settlement—flared.

  It had been a faint thread, barely visible to his Runesight. Now it was a whip of light, lashing wildly against the sky-wound, bright enough to burn afterimages into his retinas. The air pressure dropped. Elior’s ears popped.

  “That could only be Auren,” Twilight said. “Unless there are other Wardens here with you?”

  Elior shook his head.

  Twilight continued: “He’s holding a threshold open. He’s probably bleeding memory to keep it alive—it’s acting as both signal and beacon for you to find him. But you won’t be the only one who answers.”

  “We need to go.” Elior reached for the dagger at his belt. The handle felt warm, expectant.

  Twilight shook her head. “They’ll swarm if we move together. I’ll draw the pack away. You follow the thread alone. Can you do that?”

  “That’s n—”

  “Not a debate.” She gripped his shoulder, her fingers cold but grounding. The numbness around his wound receded further when she touched him. “The thread leads northeast. Run when you see the light go wild. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”

  She moved to the door, her shadow-blade appearing in her hand. “And Warden? That dagger is Umbrix-forged. It learns, adapts, grows. Let it teach you.”

  Then, with one glance—locking eyes with him again, as if she had more to say but decided against it—she nodded and was gone, dissolving into the shadows beneath the doorframe.

  Elior waited, counting his heartbeats. One. Two. Three… silence… Four. Five. Six.

  A hollow scream came from the woods—almost tribalistic, not the sound of prey but a blood-call, an inhuman bellow that seemed to summon the pack. The glass-sand trembled as eight shadows detached from the darkness and flowed toward the voice.

  The clicking started, excited, moving further away—but didn’t fade completely.

  One remained.

  Elior hesitated to move. The beast wasn’t retreating. It was getting closer.

  He held his breath, heart hammering as the clicking seemed to settle right outside the door, his arm pulsing, the mark trying to reach out. The clicking stopped. So did Elior’s breathing—the sound of his own heartbeat in his head against dead silence was deafening. He forced himself to breathe slowly, in and out, stepped closer to the wall, trying to see out the window, trying to see the beast.

  He felt the air in the shack change. The rise in pressure. The weight of the silence. The door bulged inward, almost in slow motion—

  The door exploded inward—not splintered, but unmade, the wood forgetting it had ever been solid. The beast that filled the doorway was a boar, but wrong—tusks of crystallized scream, shoulders too broad, legs bending backward like the der-beast before it. It had no eyes, but it had his scent; it sniffed the air wildly. It had found its prey.

  Elior raised the pendant. The light flared, and the boar recoiled—but not for long. It shifted its weight upward, closed its eyeless sockets, and charged, hunting by vibration, sound, and smell.

  Elior barely managed to dodge as the creature barreled into the wall. As he stood, the dagger came free of its sheath, humming.

  The runes shifted: ????. Learn.

  He looked from blade to boar and back again. What’s it want me to do?

  The blade began to change in his hand. He gripped tighter as the metal extended another six inches, serrated teeth appearing along the edge, a hook curving backward from the tip. It was adapting to the new foe. For a moment, Elior thought: that hook would catch those tusks nicely, and the serrated teeth would hack through the beast’s hide to reach the core.

  While he was admiring the blade’s new features, the boar had come around for a second pass—and had him cornered.

  The boar hit him like a carriage crash. Elior slammed against the wall, breath gone, but the dagger was already moving, pulling him with a mind of its own. It hooked the left tusk, twisted, and the crystal material screamed as it shattered. Black sap sprayed across Elior’s face. He twisted, drove the blade up into the soft palate beneath the snout, letting the serrations do all the work, and the beast dissolved into a sound like wet paper tearing, becoming a pool of sap on the ground.

  Elior looked at the dagger. It had pushed him in the right direction mid-fight—not taking over, but careful suggestion, allowing his body to react as if it felt natural.

  His hand stung as if bitten by a spider. Elior almost dropped the weapon. The dagger drank a drop of his blood through the hilt, and he could feel it—the bond with the weapon was now complete. He couldn’t explain it, but this weapon was now his, almost as if it had accepted him.

  Elior didn’t wait. He ran, dashing out of what was left of the shack, down the path and toward the whipping light of the thread, knowing that Auren was waiting at the end.

  The silver cord lashed in the air before him, a beacon of madness. He followed it through the glass trees, past the screaming dunes, until his lungs burned with the taste of copper and decay.

  The clearing opened suddenly—a wound within the wound. Auren stood in the center, the brass compass spinning wildly in his outstretched hand, its needle a blur. His scar bled silver light that ran down his temple and evaporated before it hit his jaw. Around him, the air tore—a threshold trying to birth itself into being, held open by sheer will.

  And the Umbrix were closing in. Auren dispatched them one-handed with his sword while maintaining his ritual.

  “Elior!” Auren’s voice was ragged. “The light—use it!”

  Elior raised the pendant. The amber blazed, and the perimeter of sunlight expanded, pushing back the shadows that pressed in from the tree line. Dozens of Umbrix clicked in the dark—husks of wolves, deer, things that had never been animals. They crowded the edge of the light, testing it.

  “They’re massing,” Auren gasped. “I can’t hold this much longer. The toll—”

  The threshold flickered. Through the tear, Elior glimpsed the courtyard of Wyrden Manor, impossibly far away.

  Then the shadows rippled.

  Twilight didn’t come from the trees. She came from within the shadows of the Umbrix themselves—stepping out of their own darkness, her blade flashing silver and smoke. She severed three threads before the beasts knew she was there. It was beautiful and terrifying, a dance of murder and efficiency, cold calculated grace.

  She carved a path through beast after beast until she stood at their sides.

  “You?” Auren started.

  She held up a hand to stop him. “One would think you, of all people, would know time and place, Auren Wyrden.”

  Auren’s face hardened, but he let it go. “We will have words,” he assured her.

  Auren sheathed his sword and turned his full attention to the threshold he was tearing. Elior had never seen Auren flustered. It was unnerving.

  Together, he and Twilight held back the tide of shadows. Between bursts of amber light and slashes of shadow, they held the line for what seemed like hours—until finally they heard Auren: “We must go. Now.”

  “Go!” Twilight shouted, kicking a husk back into the dark. “I’ll hold the line!”

  “No!” Auren yelled. “You are coming with us, Riven—and you will answer my questions.”

  Elior looked from Auren to Twilight. Why did he know her? And what was that he’d called her? Elior needed answers, not to be left in the dark; everyone’s constant secrecy was starting to get to him.

  “It will not bring the peace you seek,” Twilight said, sadness creeping into her normally cold, calculated tone, “nor will it bring him back.”

  “I don’t care what you think. I care only for my answers.” Auren threw the words back harshly and grabbed her arm, pulling her toward the threshold.

  Elior had never seen this side of Auren—cold, unlike his uncle—and it made him pause, too stunned to weigh in or interrupt.

  “Elior, get through the threshold—now!” Auren commanded.

  Elior backed up slowly, using the pendant like a shield of light. As he drew close to Twilight, Auren, and the threshold, he felt the pull of their world.

  He spoke up, grabbing Auren’s hand as they entered: “Is this about K?l, Uncle?”

  Auren’s face broke. His mark seared, and he dropped Elior’s hand and Twilight’s arm both, falling to his knees.

  “No—I can’t get distracted until we are through…”

  The world went sideways. Elior felt the threshold snap shut behind them, and the shudder from the closing sent the three of them spinning through, hitting the ground on the other side. But when Elior looked up, he wasn’t greeted by the courtyard, or the Manor, but by a grove more desolate than anything they’d seen in the infected world so far.

  The glass-sand here had hardened into compressed ash—white as bone, soft as snow, tasting of ozone and old libraries. The twilight sky became a canopy of white branches overhead, stretching not up but through, piercing geometries that hurt Elior’s new sight. They had arrived at what looked like Kvalvika, a beach he had grown up going to, but wrong: winter when it should be summer, twilight when dawn should break.

  The petrified forest loomed above the beach, trees bleached clean as paper before ink, weeping silver sap that fell upward into the branches. The air smelled of iron and something heavier.

  Auren went rigid. His hand trembled on his sword’s hilt. “No,” he whispered. “Not here. I carried him out of here.”

  Elior’s eyes searched for whatever had frozen Auren.

  Twilight muttered under her breath: “K?l… why a Stain?”

  Elior’s eyes found it.

  The Stain manifested—not as a beast of shadow and tooth, but as a silence that swallowed the screaming of the glass-sand. It coalesced from the white ash at the tree line, taking shape not in flesh but in the negative space of memory. It wore no face, but it had a voice.

  It spoke with a calm, confident male voice—and judging by Auren and Twilight’s reactions, it was K?l’s voice.

  “You left the door open, Father.”

  The words came from the roots, the sky, the spaces between Elior’s thoughts. They were not an accusation, but a fact delivered with the weight of water running downhill.

  Auren faltered. He took a step toward the white trees, his scar flaring silver-hot, bleeding light that matched the sap. His hand reached out for a ghost. “I can close it,” he breathed. “I can fix it. Just… stay.” He stumbled to his knees, still reaching.

  The Stain turned to show him K?l’s face in the white bark—laughing, then screaming, then still. It offered him the memory of his son’s last breath, cut off mid-sentence. This was how they took you—not with force, but by giving you what you couldn’t let go.

  Then it turned to Twilight.

  The silence shifted, and the voice came again, but softer, intimate, crawling into the hollow places where her guilt lived: “You let him go alone. You could have held the threshold. You could have been enough.”

  It showed her K?l’s body—the silver threads in his eyes burnt out, ash-black. It showed her the moment Auren wouldn’t let her see him at the end, the door closed, the wailing sealed behind wood and runes. Finally, in K?l’s voice, the Stain gestured to her: “Riven, I thought you would come for me.”

  Her shadow-blade dropped. Her violet eyes widened, not with fear, but with terrible recognition. For a heartbeat, she leaned toward the voice, toward the promise that she could have changed it, could have been there—

  Then she snarled.

  “You’re not his memory,” she spat, her voice cracking like a whip in the silence. “You’re the thing that killed him.”

  The Stain turned its attention to Elior.

  It tried to wear his mother’s face. It tried to speak with her voice—warm, safe, the cadence of autumn afternoons. But Elior was too new, too raw. He had no years of grief for it to feast upon, no threshold he had failed to hold. He had only the pendant, cold against his chest, and the certainty that his mother was gone—not waiting in white trees, not whispering from corrupted ash.

  He stepped forward, not back.

  “You can’t have them,” he said.

  The pendant flared—not with the warm affirmation of sunlight remembered, but with white-hot ash, the color of lightning before thunder. It was not a weapon. It was a denial. A boundary drawn in light.

  The Stain screamed.

  The sound was not audible; it was the memory of a scream, vibrating through the white sand, cracking the petrified bark. The face of K?l shattered like glass. The white ground sighed beneath their feet, releasing the weight of veiled truths it had carried for years.

  The silence broke.

  Auren snapped out of his trance, falling forward to his hands in the ash, weeping silver. Twilight stood over him, her retrieved blade raised not against the Stain, but against the trees themselves, ready to cut down the whole grove if it tried to speak again.

  Elior stood alone, the pendant pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat, the silver threads in his eyes blazing. He had not banished the Stain—such things are not banished, only postponed—but he had refused its offer.

  Behind them, the way back began to close. The threshold-anchor Auren had tried to hold was bleeding out. They had to move, or the Grove would keep them forever, feeding on the grief they had almost given it.

  “Run,” Twilight whispered, hauling Auren to his feet. “Now.”

  But they were all stopped by a sound: erythematic ticking.

  Umbrix beasts slowly formed themselves up from the ground. They had found them, and were closing in.

  Suddenly the Stain bellowed.

  It began as the absence of sound—a pressure so total that Elior’s eardrums bowed inward, not from noise, but from the vacuum of its approach. The air crystallized. The glass-sand beneath his boots stopped whispering. Even his own heartbeat became a distant, muffled throb, as if his blood had forgotten how to carry vibration.

  The Umbrix stopped.

  The clicking synchronized—one beat, one breath. They stopped advancing. They stopped moving. Then, as one, they flowed together toward the Stain.

  Black threads of memory-sap wove through the air like spider silk drawn by a thousand hands. The shadows braided, overlapping, compounding. The Stain-world itself seemed to recoil, the glass trees cracking in protest.

  The thing that rose from the amalgamation was tall—at least eight feet—anthropomorphic, antlered, eyeless, with too many joints and limbs that fractured into smaller mouths. It was composed of overlapping shadows, and within those shadows, Elior saw glimpses of faces it had un-made—mouths open in silent screams.

  The air pressure plummeted. Elior’s blood tried to crawl backward through his veins.

  Then it opened its mouth.

  The scream did not travel through the air; it unraveled it. It was the sound of a thousand frozen screams in the glass-sand thawing simultaneously, of memory being torn out by the root. It manifested first as a subsonic pulse that hit Elior’s chest like a physical blow, staggering him. His Runesight flared in agony—silver threads in his vision fracturing, bleeding light.

  The frequency dropped lower, below hearing, into the infrasonic realm where the body believes it is dying. His lungs spasmed, forgetting how to expand. His teeth ached in their sockets, resonating with a pitch that existed only in the negative space between notes.

  Then the overtone hit—the actual scream.

  It was not a single voice but a braided chord of every voice the Umbrix had ever un-made. Layer upon layer of final moments: a mother’s last lullaby twisted into a death rattle, a warrior’s battle-cry corroded into a whimper, K?l’s voice (or a perfect memory of it) screaming “Close the door!”—all collapsed into one sustained, hollow note.

  The sound had taste—copper and decay, the metallic tang of a filling ripped from a tooth, the sweet rot of funeral lilies left in stagnant water. It had color—a visible distortion that warped the infected twilight into bruise-purples and gangrene-greens, reality itself recoiling from the frequency.

  As the scream peaked, it became tactile. Elior felt it sliding under his eyelids, pressing against the silver threads of his Veilmark, trying to unspool them like yarn. It carried intent: forget you are Elior. Forget you have a name. Become the hunger. Become the silence.

  The glass trees shattered—not from volume, but from resonance. They vibrated at the exact frequency of their own structural memory and simply ceased to hold their shape, collapsing into sparkling dust that hung suspended, unable to fall.

  When the scream finally broke, it didn’t fade. It inverted, leaving behind a ringing silence that was louder than the noise had been—a hollow so deep Elior could hear his own synapses firing, could hear the Umbrix thread in his arm singing back in harmony, welcoming the monster’s voice as kin.

  The echo lasted seven heartbeats. During each one, Elior saw a flash of something he’d never experienced: K?l’s final moments, Twilight’s guilt, her mother’s funeral. The scream was a syringe, injecting foreign trauma directly into the cortex, trying to overwrite his identity with the collective un-memory of the Umbrix.

  When it ended, the world was permanently altered. The ground where the Stain stood had turned to void—not black, but the color of deleted text, of pages torn from a book and burned. The air smelled of ozone and old libraries, but sharper, as if the smell itself had been cut with a blade.

  Twilight was on her knees, bleeding from her ears, her violet eyes wide and unseeing, mouthing words in a language that had never been spoken by human tongues. Even she was not immune to the call—the perfect, hungry silence.

  It was the sound of a world ending, remembered backward.

  Elior stood there, dazed in horror at the creature before them.

  Auren’s grief had turned to disgust. His hand steadied around his hilt as he drew his sword. He muttered under his breath: “Not my K?l.”

  But it was Twilight who attacked first. Elior barely saw her move.

  She shadow-stepped silently and directly into its chest, two shadow blades now screaming silently in unison, one finding its way into the creature’s chest—but the creature seemed not to notice. She raised the other to follow, but the beast was faster than thought. A limb stretched out with an extra arm, twisted at wrong angles, its palm like black glass with teeth where fingers should have been. It swung like a snapping whip, backhanding her. She hit a glass tree twenty feet away, the crack of her skull against the trunk echoing like a gunshot. She slumped, violet eyes rolling back, blood pouring from her scalp.

  The sound shook Elior to his core. He had seen Twilight take on dozens of these beasts with ease, but this creature was somehow the embodiment of guilt, fear, and despair itself. Elior steadied his hold on the pendant, placing his hand on his dagger, but he hesitated to draw it. Was it fear? Guilt at being the reason they were even in this hell? Elior didn’t know, but Twilight had saved him when he was lost, treated him as a stranger, and he wouldn’t let that count for nothing. Fear or not, he readied himself.

  “No!” Auren yelled, seeing Elior tense up. Reading his body language, Auren knew what his nephew was doing; he also knew, by the look in his eyes, that telling him not to was pointless. He would lose no more family.

  Auren backed to the threshold, calling to the beast, letting his wounded soul open just a little: “K?l! Son, I came back for you! I… I never gave up.”

  The threshold wavered. Auren’s guilt caught the beast’s attention, and he slowly led it, step by step, to the edge of the grove, coaxing it with all his anguish and grief.

  Elior dashed forward, running to Twilight. He knew what Auren wanted. Grabbing her cloak collar, dragging her backward through the sand toward the wavering threshold, Elior saw the blood all over her face and felt guilt—she wouldn’t be in this mess if not for him. He dragged her to the edge of the threshold, struggling not because she was heavy, but because his body was becoming weak. The aether-root’s time must have run out. Elior slumped to his knees in front of her and breathed raggedly.

  “Twilight? Hey, wake up—we need you with us… please.” He reached out with both hands, on either side of her head, gently assessing the woman.

  Her eyes were lucid but sluggish, dragging as if trying to follow his but unable to track him fully. She stirred; a fresh wave of blood ran over Elior’s hand. She sluggishly reached for his face, eyes fighting to focus, and slurred, almost in a drunken stupor: “Ka… Kaaael… p… pl… ease… g… go, l… ive… S… Sorr… y.” Whatever consciousness she had was slipping, and she slumped down again.

  Guilt, rage, and a desperate sense of something came flooding into Elior. He could not run. He wouldn’t.

  Auren’s voice cut through his thoughts, like a sound rising back from the depths. He was still luring the beast, but his time was running out.

  Elior turned and dashed at the creature. He knew it was stupid, but he had an idea. Gripping his pendant tighter, he fought back the fear and launched himself at the beast’s back.

  The few seconds in the air felt like minutes. Elior readied himself, pendant in hand. He was going to see how the creature felt about direct light.

  Auren came into view over the beast’s shoulder. His eyes slowly found Elior and widened in disbelief.

  Elior hit the beast from behind, wrapping his arms around its neck as the impact knocked the wind out of him, his body screaming in pain, but he refused to let go. He pressed the pendant to the beast’s neck and locked his arms in.

  The beast screamed—not its dual-noted predatory announcement, but a scream of rage that pierced Elior’s very being. His teeth shook. The air wavered around them, and the beast thrashed and stumbled, attempting to throw Elior off.

  “Uncle!” Elior yelled between the beast’s thrashing and his own breaths. “Twilight is at the threshold—get her out while I’ve got it! I can’t drag her any further!”

  Auren, still stunned in disbelief, seemed to pull himself back to reality. “Elior, what in the f—”

  Elior cut him off: “NOW! GO! I can’t hold it forever!”

  Auren locked eyes with him for a moment, and in that moment Elior could see him struggle with the choice. But in the end, his uncle moved, running back to the threshold, dodging around the beast, who was still attempting to fling Elior off its back. Elior, arms locked in, was hanging on for dear life—when he noticed something. The beast had stopped thrashing and was moving toward a large rock. It shifted its back toward the rock, and Elior felt its legs tense beneath him.

  He knew what was coming. And if he didn’t let go now, it wouldn’t be good.

  Elior released the beast’s neck and kicked away hard, hitting the ground and rolling to the side.

  Pain shot up his side. A smaller rock he’d landed on had cut his side open; blood began to soak through his sweater. Not good, thought Elior.

  Fear—true, primal fear—seized Elior as the Stained beast turned to him. And it had eyes now—hundreds of them, opening in its chest like blooming flowers made of polished obsidian. It recognized the thread in his arm. It recognized him as kin.

  It gave a curious head tilt and a low rumbling hum that echoed inside Elior’s head.

  Elior stumbled back, looking for the threshold. Seeing Auren drag Twilight’s body through, slowly disappearing, he heard Auren yell before vanishing:

  “Elior! Quick—RUN!”

  Elior turned to follow his uncle, stumbling with his new injury, but—

  The beast pinned his leg with a foot that weighed as much as a tombstone, causing Elior to fall face-down. He flailed around with the pendant, and the weight receded enough that he could turn to face the beast.

  It lowered its head—antlers dripping with un-light—and met his eyes.

  There was no malice in that gaze. Only curiosity. The curiosity of a child pulling wings off flies to see how they work.

  Elior screamed, not in terror, but in rage. He reached for anything—something. There had to be something that could help him.

  Elior noticed it then: a hilt, sticking out of the beast’s chest, wrapped in wire that appeared to be spun shadow-thread. Twilight’s dagger, still where she’d left it.

  “Please,” he begged.

  Reaching for it. It was just out of reach.

  “I need you,” Elior begged again, desperate.

  His arm pulsed hard—the last of the aether-root finally wearing off.

  The blade pulsed back.

  And it came to him.

  Not thrown. Not called. It flew from where it was, ripping itself out of the beast’s chest, drawn by the Umbrix bond in his veins, his arm yearning for the connection, striking the Stain-beast’s head on the way through without stopping, with a sound like hollow silence over a snow-laden plain.

  Elior grabbed the hilt.

  The blade sang, pulsing to him.

  Not with sound, but with recognition. The runes blazed: ??????. Accept.

  Elior’s hand moved before he thought, severing the beast’s hand at the wrist where it had been reaching for him. Black sap came like a geyser, covering Elior. Coughing and sputtering, he rolled. The beast roared—a hollow, terrifying bellow that shook the fabric of the Veil itself. The threshold behind Elior cracked wider.

  Elior shoved the pendant into the beast’s chest.

  The light exploded, pure and searing, but the beast was too vast, too braided—it had adapted. It recoiled but did not fall back. It reached for Elior’s head with its remaining hand, fingers unfolding into too many joints—

  Inches from his face.

  Suddenly the ground trembled—low and deep, a sound that made the beast’s roar akin to a kitten’s purr. The world—no, existence—shook. Elior covered his ears, fearing he may go deaf, or be torn apart from sound alone. Roots burst from the ground.

  Not the glass-sand that had been there. Not Stain-world soil. Real roots—ash roots, dirt and soil, like from his world—thick and white and pulsing with a familiar ancient heartbeat. They wrapped Elior’s wrists, his arm, his waist. Then angrily yanked, dragging Elior across the ground toward the threshold. Elior screamed, pain exploding from his side, but the roots did not stop.

  It continued to drag Elior—struggling, confused, screaming—backwards through the threshold that was collapsing.

  Through the threshold, Elior could see the beast writhing, trying to reach him, but the roots held it back, yanking it away just far enough that it could not reach.

  The threshold shuddered and began to collapse around him, but he hadn’t made it through yet. Elior panicked, flailing to move faster, but the threshold was collapsing too fast.

  The world stretched, twisted, compressed. He felt himself pulled through earth and stone, root and grave-dirt, his being elongated to a thread thinner than the Umbrix silk—like thread. Elior couldn’t breathe suddenly.

  His body compressed. Pain in his side was unimaginable. He fought, feeling his strength waning.

  The roots were fingers around his throat.

  Elior choked on dirt, his mouth packed with the taste of iron and worm-castings, his nose crushed flat by the weight of a thousand tons of earth. He had been dragged backward through the threshold not as a passenger, but as a seed expelled—compressed, suffocated, buried alive in the transit.

  He clawed. Fingernails split against stone foundations, against the calcified knuckles of the Ash Tree’s root-system, against the compacted clay that filled his ears with a roaring silence. He couldn’t scream; there was no air to scream with, only wet, black earth grinding between his teeth. The Umbrix thread in his arm pulsed in frantic synchronization with his heart, as if even the infection feared being entombed.

  Then—pressure.

  The roots tightened, jerked, and yanked.

  He shot upward through layers, past the ash-bed, stones and the frost-line, his shoulders dislocating in the vice of the soil, his ribs compressing until he felt his own heartbeat against his spine. Darkness absolute. The smell of root-rot and cold stone.

  Until finally—his fist broke the surface.

  Air hit his face like a slap. Elior gasped, convulsing, clawing with both hands at the cobblestones of the courtyard, hauling his torso out of the earth with the last bit of his strength as if escaping a coffin. Dirt avalanched from his hair, his eyes, his mouth. He retched everything from his stomach—which wasn’t much but dirt and some water—a fresh wave of pain shooting through his side again, almost welcome with the knowledge that he was alive. He rolled onto his back, retching more soil and silver sap, his lungs burning as they remembered how to expand.

  Above him, the sky was blue.

  Real, impossible, safe blue.

  The threshold sealed with a sound like a thunderclap.

  Auren collapsed against the Ash Tree, his hand leaving a bloody silver print on the bark. He was bloodied, his shirt torn, but upright.

  Across the courtyard, Twilight slumped against the manor wall, her cloak torn, blood running from a gash above her ear. She was dazed and out, but her chest rose and fell.

  Elior tried to stand. His legs wouldn’t obey. He crawled to her instead, dragging himself across the cobblestones, determined to check her pulse, to thank her, to—

  Auren’s hand found his shoulder. “Rest, Elior—we need to tend to you too, please just… rest.”

  But Elior ignored Auren, clawing his way over to Twilight.

  The sun was shining. Real sunlight, warm and golden, cutting through the clouds in stark contrast to the infected twilight they’d escaped. Elior lay back, gasping, the dagger still clutched in his white-knuckled grip.

  Twilight stirred. Her eyes fluttered open—violet and confused. She focused on Elior with difficulty.

  “The… b… beast,” she whispered. “Di… d… y-you… s-s-see… its… eyes?”

  Elior nodded, exhausted.

  She managed a faint, bitter smile. “Then you know what waits in the dark.”

  She gestured weakly to the dagger still in his hand. “It… t… ch… ch-chose… y… y-you.”

  Elior shook his head and pressed the blade into her palm. “It’s yours. You saved my life.”

  She closed her fingers around the hilt, too weak to argue.

  They sat in silence, the three of them, battered and bleeding in the courtyard. The Ash Tree above creaked—not in warning, but in acknowledgment. The roots that had dragged Elior home had left trails of dark soil across the cobblestones, marking him as the House’s own.

  Footsteps crunched on gravel.

  Soren stepped out from the east wing, nose buried in the Halvik Journal, muttering as he cross-referenced a footnote about threshold tolls. He walked three paces into the courtyard before his boots struck the patch of disturbed earth where Elior had emerged.

  He stopped dead.

  Slowly, he looked back at the house—specifically at the study window, still sealed tight, the wood knotted like a clenched fist. Then he looked back at the three of them: Elior covered in dirt and black sap, Auren bleeding silver from his scar against the Ash Tree, and Twilight slumped against the wall looking like she’d been dragged through a war.

  Soren closed the Journal with a sharp snap. The leather cover seemed to sigh.

  “The Halvik Journal,” he said, his voice dry as dust, “just filled three pages describing your heroic demise in exhaustive detail. It even noted the flavor of the dirt in your graves.” He adjusted his spectacles, eyeing the soil still clinging to Elior’s hair.

  He stepped forward, offering Elior a hand up—not with urgency, but with the precise, practiced motion of a librarian retrieving a book from a high shelf.

  “Welcome back,” Soren said. “I trust the scenic route was educational?”

  “Ah—and this must be Riven,” he gestured to Twilight.

  But Twilight was already unconscious again.

  Soren looked her over, like he was cataloguing a rare book collection, but after a few moments he stopped, as if snapping out of a trance.

  “I suppose this is hardly the time for academic questions and curiosities.”

  Soren turned back to Elior, hauling him to his feet, and looked him over. “We will need to get that wound of yours cleaned and taken care of.” He took Elior’s arm and started him toward the Manor, whose door had already opened for them.

  Elior looked back to see Auren picking up Twilight. Their eyes met, and Auren nodded. “Worry not, Elior—I will get her the medical attention she needs. We both owe her.”

  Elior turned back to the manor, inviting them in with open arms, warm and inviting. But Elior knew better now. The manor had a plan. It had wants, it had goals, and it had memory—but what it had that made it dangerous to them all was pride, and more power than Elior could imagine. His body shuddered as he remembered the roots grabbing him, pulling him, and he could swear he heard it: the house chuckled.

  The bridge had been baptized.