The silence after Ezra's light was a predator. It didn't just exist; it stalked. It had claws of thick, muffled air and teeth made of the echoes of their own frantic breaths, now stolen. The only sound left was the soft, rhythmic plink… plink… plink… of petrified water hitting stone. It was a taunt. A tiny, dripping metronome measuring out the last moments before their minds snapped.
The Weeping Door wasn't a door. It was a blasphemy. A vertical scar in the cliff-face, weeping slow, calcified grief. Before it, the shrine to the Maiden of Longing was a silent engine of agony. You didn't hear its power. You felt it in the fillings of your teeth, a low, bone-deep hum. The air tasted of ozone and cold iron, undercut by a scent—like the memory of lilacs left to rot in a sealed room. It promised. It made your heart ache for a home you'd never had.
They were a cohort in name only. Now, they were just raw nerves bundled in skin.
Rowan stood locked in place, every muscle a bowstring drawn to breaking. He was breathing through the ghost of a scent—jasmine soap, sun-warmed linen, and beneath it, the sweet, wet scent of turned earth. Her scent. Cassian was a sculpture of pure, frozen contempt, his gaze fixed on an internal horizon, listening to a precise, disdainful tsk that had carved the grooves of his soul. Kiva had folded into a small, shuddering ball, drowning in sorrows that belonged to dead strangers. Nora burned beside her, a contained supernova of rage, compressing it all into a single, diamond-sharp point of purpose.
Milo's lips fluttered in silent, frantic calculus. Rin's knuckles were bloodless bone against the dark wood of her silent flute. Atlas stared into the abyss behind his own eyes, a single, perfect thread of crimson escaping his nostril, tracing the seam of his lip—the toll exacted for a vision he would not, or could not, share.
And then, the anchors. The mundane.
They clung together, a small island of human fear in a sea of cosmic dysfunction. Torin was a monument of scarred muscle and worn leather, his heavy short sword not raised in threat, but held like a cornerstone—something foundational. Elara leaned on her gnarled staff, her body a map of old pains, but her eyes were live flint, missing nothing. Between these two grim bulwarks, the children—Lyn with her unraveling braid, Dav trying to make his thin shoulders a wall—clutched at rough-spun tunics. Their fear was pure. It was the fear of the dark under the bed, of shadows that moved. It was almost wholesome.
Mara pressed her palms flat to the gravel, eyes shut. Her tremorsense, which painted the world in vibrations of life and movement, was blind here. This place was a tomb. But she could feel pressure. A deep, resonant wrongness. "The Door is the eye," she murmured, her voice a clinical lifeline. "The only calm. The field… it's a resonator. It takes what's inside you—a doubt, a memory, a want—and turns the volume to breaking. It makes whispers into shrieks."
Soren's laugh was the sound of something dry snapping. "So we smash the speakers." He took a heavy step toward the jade maiden, the air around his gauntlets shivering with unstable, violent light.
"Fool."
Varik's voice was a dry leaf scraping over tombstone. He leaned against a statue frozen in a rictus of joy, part of the garden's furniture. "Shatter a mirror, and you do not kill the reflection. You merely multiply it. Now you must face a thousand splinters of your own wretched face, each screaming the same truth you sought to escape." Soren halted, fists smoking. He despised the ghost, but in this place, metaphor was merely a prettier kind of trap.
"We cross," Rowan stated. It was the only line left in their ledger. The sum of all their suffering: forward.
No one moved. The shrine's hum deepened. The plink of the Door counted their cowardice.
It was Atlas who broke. He didn't choose to move; he was reeled forward, a fish on the hook of his own cursed sight. As he passed the altar, the air above the golden-veined nightshade twisted. His eyes, already wide, went vacant. He saw—
—a sun, not of fire, but of splintered crystal, screaming soundlessly as it was consumed by a vast, stone throat—
—Ezra, not in prayer, but in dissolution, his gentle light not radiating out, but being inverted, siphoned away into a silent, ravenous maw—
He stumbled back with a choked, wet sound, clapping a hand over his face. Fresh blood, shockingly red, welled between his fingers. "The price…" he gasped. "It is not paid here. We are merely… signing the contract. The debt collector comes later." His words hung in the thick air, each one a nail.
"Form up," Rowan growled, the command a lash of sound that pulled them from private hells. "Phalanx. Torin, anchor the right. Elara, the left. Non-resonants in the center. Mara, point. Move."
They shuffled into a pathetic, trembling knot—a bundle of exposed nerves inching into a psychic hurricane.
The crossing was an autopsy of the soul.
For the resonants, it was a personalized theater of torment.
For Rowan, the ghost-scent became a warm breath on his neck. A solid hand, fingers splayed possessively over his shoulder. 'You can run, my wolf,' a voice sighed, not in his ear, but in the hollows of his bones. 'But your chain is tied to my wrist. You only ever run in circles.' A full-body tremor locked him in place, a low, animal whine trapped behind his teeth.
For Cassian, the tsk crystallized into perfect, damning diction, emanating from the stone maiden's smiling lips. «Look at you. Tracked in mud and failure. You pollute this sacred silence with your very presence. You are a flaw in the pattern.» He became a statue of pure defiance, refusing to even blink, as if stillness could negate the truth. His control was a glacier over a volcanic sea, and the garden was a rising sun.
For the non-resonants, the assault was less specific, more visceral.
Lyn didn't hear words. She was submerged in the emotional residue of longing—a despair so profound it hollowed out her chest, leaving a cold, dusty cavity where her heart should be. Silent tears carved clean tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
Dav was bombarded by a need for safety so desperate it felt like fingers clawing at his own throat. He shook, his small hands fisted in Torin's tunic, holding on to keep from flying apart.
Elara's tactical mind found no enemy to engage, and that was its own terror. The foe was the atmosphere itself. The old spear-wound in her thigh, earned decades ago against a mortal foe, throbbed with a fierce, familiar pain. She clung to it. A real pain in a world of ghosts. "Steady, girl," she grunted to Lyn, her voice the sound of grinding millstones. "It's a poison mist. Don't inhale it. Short breaths. Feet solid." She was fighting a psychic plague with infantry drills. It was all she had.
Torin said nothing. He simply… expanded. He shifted his monumental bulk, a bastion of scarred flesh and resilience, placing himself squarely between the direction of the shrine's pull and the two children. He absorbed the psychic onslaught as he would a physical charge—with a slight settling of his weight, a tightening of his jaw, and a silence that was its own form of defiance.
Then, Kiva shattered.
The empath, her senses forever wide open and unguarded, stood directly in the focus of the Maiden's essence.
It wasn't an echo.
It was a transfusion.
Her spine arched backward, tendons standing in stark relief. A silent, gaping scream stretched her mouth before sound erupted—a raw, jagged noise that was less a scream and more the sonic shape of absolute, empathetic despair. She didn't fall; she poured onto the gravel, her body convulsing as if every nerve-ending were being fused by sorrow.
"She's—! She's in me!" Kiva sobbed, raking her own collarbone with ragged nails, drawing bright beads of blood. "It's a hole! An endless, starving hole! She wants to fill it… wants to swallow everything!"
Her eyes, luminous with spilled tears and alien awareness, swept over the group. They passed over Rowan's rage, Cassian's frost, Nora's fire… and landed on Ezra.
To her annihilated perception, Ezra was not a boy. He was a sun in human skin. A quiet, self-contained furnace of peace. He was not want. He was satiation. He was the answer to the unanswerable question, the end of the infinite hunger.
"You," she exhaled, the word a duet between her own voice and a deeper, hungrier resonance. "You are full. You have the quiet. She needs it. She needs you… let me give you to her…"
She took a lurching step toward him, her hand extending not as a claw, but as a supplicant's offering. Her greatest gift—the capacity to feel for others—had been perverted into a divine poison. It was a betrayal crafted from a twisted, cosmic love.
Nora flinched as if physically struck. "Kiva! Look at me! Fight it!"
But the Kiva they knew was gone, buried under an avalanche of another's need. The fragile phalanx disintegrated. Soren snarled, torn between incinerating the shrine and tackling his friend. Milo's babbling rose in pitch, a frantic search for an empathic frequency that didn't exist. The children were statues of terror, their anchors crumbling before them.
The Weeping Door was a mere ten strides away. It might as well have been on another moon. The lock was the unraveling of their own selves.
Ezra saw it then. Their end. Not in glorious battle, but in this quiet, pathetic dissolution.
He stopped thinking. Thought was for the whole.
He moved.
He planted himself squarely in the line of sight between the hollowed-out Kiva and the ravenous shrine. He did not summon a weapon. He did not adopt a stance. He simply interposed. He became a boundary.
His light did not erupt. It swelled.
It was not a detonation, but the inevitable, gentle rise of a golden dawn within their circle of madness. A wall of pure, calm will solidified in the air—a shimmering, translucent barrier of absolute clarity. He poured his essence into it. He wrote a new, temporary law into the fabric of space within its dome: Here, memory is a phantom. Here, emotion is a feather. Here, the only truth is the breath in your lungs, the ground under your feet. The Now.
The effect was immediate, a shock of relief so profound it was vertigo.
The phantom perfume vanished, replaced by a clean, electric tang. The criticizing voice cut off mid-syllable. The crushing weight of borrowed sorrows lifted. Inside the warm, silent glow, they were just people again—exhausted, terrified, stripped to the bone—but theirs. Lyn's sobs choked into hiccupping breaths. Dav's desperate grip eased. Elara let out a long, shuddering sigh.
"The Door! NOW!" Ezra's command was a guttural, straining thing, vibrating with the colossal effort of holding a pocket of sanity together against the howling void.
They moved in a ragged, desperate scramble. Rowan and Cassian hit the petrified wood as one, a unity forged in pure desperation. They threw their weight against it. Muscles corded, boots skidding in gravel.
The Door did not groan. It did not shudder. It was a fact. A mountain's verdict.
"Sealed!" Rowan barked, the word sharp with the taste of defeat.
"VARIK!" Cassian roared, the sound raw and furious, hurled into the garden's mocking stillness. "THE PRICE! NAME IT!"
From the embrace of a laughing stone figure, the old poet's voice was the scratch of a beetle's leg. "The Door weeps. How does one dry a divine tear? Not with cloth, little embers. You offer a greater sorrow. Or a sweeter song. What melody can your cacophony of broken hearts possibly sing?"
Ezra's golden barrier flickered.
A single, hairline fracture of absolute void cracked up from its base with a sound like ice breaking over a deep lake. The pressure of the Garden was a continent settling onto his shoulders. He was a single candle in a drowning abyss. The heat was melting his bones. The light was guttering.
Across the clearing, the solitary crystal tear on the jade maiden's cheek began to glow with a sickly, mesmerizing luminescence. It pushed back against his radiance, a slow, inexorable tide of obsessive, world-eating hunger.
He could not hold.
The barrier was crumbling, gold flaking away like dying leaves.
The garden leaned in, a darkness with a smile.
And the Weeping Door waited, its stone tears falling with a slow, eternal, indifferent rhythm. Plink… plink… plink…