“Feel him,” Zepharion says softly, and I do. I feel Deimos’s anger like a heat against my ribs. It’s corrective, hard, a promise of fire if I will only return to him. “And feel how small it is.”He gestures, and the vision tightens like a fist. Deimos’s thread whimpers. My chest freezes.
Zepharion’s face is close then, the way a predator leans in to whisper at the moment of the kill. “If you step through,” he tells me, “they stay. If you don’t—if you run home to your wolves—you’ll carry the memory of this instead. You’ll sleep, and you’ll wake with the stench of ash in your mouth. You will be safe, petal, and you will be empty.”
He says the word safe as if it were a caress. He says empty like it is a gift.
I do not move. I am hollow and full at once: full of the taste of their blood and hollow with a thing like cold steel lodged beneath my sternum. I press my hands to my chest and I can feel Cassiel’s white thread, flicking. I think of the practice chamber and the way he taught me to cradle small holiness like a bird. I think of Bastion’s plates, the way they felt like a borrowed shell. I think of Deimos’ silence and the way he taught me to be a hole in the world.
I try to pull on them, not outward but in, the ember that lies under my hunger. I reach for that inner light and call their names.
It’s a small thing at first, a needle of warmth. Deimos answers, not with the full force of his rage, but with the small, steady heat that used to keep me from freezing in the dark. Bastion’s armor hums like iron in the back of my throat. Cassiel’s thread sings a single clear note.
For a second, one single bright, blinding, impossible second, the dream wavers.
Zepharion taps his chin as if I had entertained him. He smiles a slow, satisfied smile. The red door fans wider and the steam rises. The hands that hold the three men tighten. The thread that is Deimos in the dream sighs and thins. It is almost like hope, for a heartbeat. Then it is not.
My tether hits a silence that tastes of metal. The chord between us snaps. Deimos’s face, just then, is shattered with something worse than fear: impotent fury. He yells my name and his voice is thick with smoke.
I lunge for him, for the sound, for the thread… and the dream flips me.
I awake with a gasp that tastes like brimstone. My hands claw at the blanket; my mouth makes a sound I don’t recognize, half-sob, half-bark. The bed is too steady beneath me. The fortress is too near. For one blessed second I think he’s there, that Deimos is at my shoulder, fingers on my neck, pulling me home.
I open my eyes.
Deimos is across the room, standing in the dark, palms pressed together at his chest like a man who is trying not to rip out his own throat. His jaw is tight; his eyes are molten and raw. When he sees me awake, something breaks open on his face and he hurries to my side as if he could still reach the seam I dreamed across.
“You were screaming,” he says, voice a low thing that could have been a prayer or a threat. He reaches for my hand and when his fingers close around mine the world tilts toward rightness for an instant. The bond hums faintly beneath my skin, not as loud as it had in the dream, but enough.
“Zepharion put the door in front of me,” I whisper, the words scraping out. “He showed me… you.”
Deimos's thumb strokes my palm, slow. “We saw.” His voice is small. “We felt him. We felt it. He’s playing with you. With us.”
My throat tightens. I can still taste ash.
“I’ll go,” I say, because the door in the dream has already begun to feel like a promise I am meant to keep. “I have to?—”
“No.” His hand clamps around mine, fierce, sudden. “You can’t.”
But even as he pulls me closer, his fingers are trembling. And in the hollow of my ribs the echo of Zepharion’s smile lingers, and the image of that red door burns like a brand.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Iteach her silence.
“You must be a hole in the world,” I tell her once, because words are the scaffolding she needs. “A spot with nothing to echo back.”
My hands draw sigils in the air—quick arcs, a thumb that drags a circle—and the stone answers with a low, hungry hum. It’s not magic like fireworks; it’s a folding, precise, the kind you do with a surgeon’s hand. I show her how to fold the dark until it becomes a corridor: a breath, a flick of the wrist, and a crescent of absence yawns open where you step and reappears somewhere else. The first time I do it for her the aperture smells like cold pennies and the first wet after rain.
We practice small jumps. Step, inhale, fold. Step, exhale, land. I teach her to move like a ghost tight with purpose—to be nothing so the darkness has something to swallow. Her first portal is clumsy. She folds it too wide, thinking the seam will swallow more of her than it should, and the seam hiccups. It spits her back five heartbeats later with the world rushing in her ears like ocean surf. The motion leaves her staggered, breath shaking, and she looks at me with that fierce, fragile thing in her eyes that I both admire and want to throttle.
“Again,” I say, steady. I lower my voice so the room itself leans in. “Breathe to the count. Let the dark carry you. Don’t shove.”
I guide her through the cadence—the inhale the seam wants, the half-beat of stillness inside the fold, the soft surrender that makes the void do the work. She finds the rhythm. Two in a row come easier than I expect: step, step, gone—then reappeared, breathing, the thrill humming along her spine like a live wire.
But the aperture is thin. The dark is honest: it will take you, but it will chew at what doesn’t belong to it. Light behaves like a jealous animal in shadow; it is ragged at the edges when pushed through a seam. I tell her this, flat, and she tries anyway.
She reaches for Cassiel’s thread—that silver line that runs from his chest to hers—and pushes it through the fold, eyes closed, lips parting. The thread answers, eager at first, and then the shadow does what shadows do: it nibbles. The holy light frays at the edges until it becomes static, a hiss that sparks and then dies. The seam spits the remainder back like an insult.
I watch her face for the moment she understands what happened. Anger, humiliation—they flash across her features, quick as a storm. I could scold. I could tell her she’s failed. Instead I fold my hands and watch the stone settle.
