The Voice That Came Through

The path narrowed before we had gone far enough to see the guide clearly. Its light ran along the roots, then broke where gray soil showed through. Rellin crouched and pressed his thumb to the exposed wood. The root trembled under his hand.

“Something’s pulling the path from the other side,” he said. “We can keep going, but not quickly.”

Behind us, the Hollow of Return had already shrunk to a ring of pale light. Orivane rested against my palm. It had gone quiet since we left the basin, and I could feel the faint pulse of its signal in the back of my thoughts—the other path, still recorded, still beyond our reach.

Pellune flew ahead and came back at once. “The guide is there. The dark is there too. It’s making a very poor attempt at being a fern.”

A fern-shaped shadow grew from the cracked earth. Its fronds curled in the wrong direction, following the path toward us. When it reached the nearest root, a small patch of blue light shivered beneath it.

Aunt Seli moved beside me. “We stay together.”

The shadow fern repeated her voice. “We stay together.”

It sounded almost right. The words came in her gentle tone, but the last syllable stretched and thinned, like a thread pulled too far. I looked at Aunt Seli’s hand. She had set it against the rough bark of the root bridge she had helped mend, fingers resting in the old notch where a branch had split.

I knew that notch. When I was little, I had hidden there during a game, and Aunt Seli had found me by following the moss on my sleeve. The bridge had been wet with dew. She had made me hold the lantern while she bound the crack, and let me tie the final knot.

I told the others. The memory came out small and ordinary, with the sound of the cord scraping bark and Pellune’s laugh from somewhere above us.

Rellin kept one hand on the root. “That’s ours,” he said. “The path can’t use it.”

The shadow fronds folded inward. Their edges blurred, then sank into the earth. The blue light showed again, farther up the path, where the roots gathered around a narrow opening.

We continued. Vaust walked near the back, watching the cracked ground rather than the images it tried to raise. When a patch of pale light formed the outline of a door, he stopped. The door had a brass latch and a smear of red clay at its base.

“I know that place,” he said.

No one asked him to describe it. He took one step around the image and followed Rellin. The door vanished behind him.

At the opening, the path ended at a curtain of wavering blue. Beyond it, the guide stood with one hand pressed against a dark seam. Its outline was clearer than before, though the seam kept drawing thin strands from its shoulders and arms. The guide held the strands in place. Each time one broke loose, the curtain flickered.