Trin did not have to think about the way.
He told himself he was following Garran's directions—west gate, narrow lane, up the slope—but once he passed beyond the bustle of the main street, something subtler seemed to take hold. His feet found the turns a heartbeat before his mind recalled them. His gaze caught each small marker—a crooked lamppost, a cracked stone, a leaning tree—as if he had walked this route many times before.
The town noise thinned behind him.
The lane climbed gently between smaller houses, their gardens running wild at the edges. Chickens scratched in one yard; laundry flapped on a line in another. The air grew quieter, cooler, as if the stone beneath the road had been waiting for this path to be used again.
At the top of the rise, the temple came into view.
It was not grand. A single-story stone building, weathered and sturdy, its roof of dark tiles sagging slightly at the middle. No gilded spires, no ringing bells. Just a broad wooden door and a simple symbol carved above it: a path curling into a circle, lines branching outward like stylized roads or rivers.
Old style, just as Garran had said. Older than the town around it, if Trin had to guess.
He stopped at the foot of the short steps leading to the door.
For a moment, he simply stood there.
This was not the first temple he had approached in his existence. He had walked into halls dedicated to stars he had kindled, knelt before altars built to honor his own name under a dozen titles. He had listened to prayers spoken in words he had never gifted, watched offerings burn in bowls of his own design.
It never stopped feeling…awkward.
Here, though, something was different.
This temple was not for him.
It was for her.
His hand rested briefly on the worn wood of the door. The grain under his fingers felt smooth in places, scarred in others, marked by countless palms pushing in, pulling out, steadying uncertain steps.
He drew in a slow breath.
Then he pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The interior was dim, lit by a handful of candles and a small skylight that let a shaft of pale light fall onto the central space. The air smelled faintly of wax, old incense, and stone that had known many seasons.
There were a few benches, simple and worn. Along the far wall, three alcoves held statues.
Only one figure was present in flesh.
Naera knelt before the central statue, shoulders slightly bowed, hands clasped around her pendant. Her eyes were closed, lips moving in a whisper too soft for him to catch. The lines of ink along her jaw were softened by the candlelight.
Trin's gaze shifted past her, to the stone figure she faced.
He recognized Althera at once.
Oh, the sculptor had only ever seen her in dreams or stories, certainly. The lines were idealized, the proportions slightly exaggerated for grace. But the essence was there in the tilt of the head, the gentle set of the mouth, the way the cloak flowed like a path in motion behind her.
Her hands were carved partially extended, palms angled not quite in blessing, not quite in welcome—more like a guide pointing ahead, inviting rather than commanding.
At her feet, the old path-symbol had been carved again, worn smooth by generations of fingers.
Trin's throat tightened.
For a long, still moment, he just stood, watching Naera's bowed form, the curve of Althera's stone smile.
Then, quietly, he walked forward.
His steps made almost no sound on the stone floor, but Naera's shoulders tensed for half a heartbeat as his presence reached her, then settled when she recognized it.
He came to stand beside her, just far enough not to crowd, just close enough to make his choice clear.
Then he knelt.
The motion felt strange in this context—him, kneeling in front of a statue of someone he had once chided for recklessness, someone who had once argued with him for hours over the ethics of opening a single path.
It also felt…right.
He bowed his head.
Words did not come easily.
He did not pray in the way mortals did. He did not have a litany. No memorized phrases, no inherited forms. But the quiet inside him had grown loud with unspoken things since the battlefield, since the void, since the dragon's visit and Naera's trembling whisper in the hall.
So he let the silence itself be his prayer.
*I'm here,* he thought, not shaping it fully into words. *You did it. They're trying. I'm trying.*
Beside him, Naera's fingers tightened around her pendant. Her lips moved soundlessly, whatever words she offered slipping into the same stillness.
The candles flickered.
The temple's stone seemed to exhale.
Trin lifted his head.
The temple was gone.
He was weightless again, suspended in the same limitless darkness that had greeted him twice before. No floor, no ceiling, no walls. Just endless, unbounded black. No up, no down—only the sense of existing in a place that was not place.
For a heartbeat, he thought he was alone.
Then, to his left, someone gasped.
He turned.
Naera floated there, eyes wide, hair drifting around her face as if underwater. Her staff was nowhere in sight. Her pendant, however, hung in the air between her hands, suspended on its chain, the metal the only solid-looking thing in the void.
"What—?" she started, voice small and shocked, the sound carrying strangely in the nothingness.
Trin reached out, a hand extended, not touching but steady.
"Easy," he said softly. "You are…not in danger. Not in the normal ways, at least."
She stared at him, chest heaving. "Where are we?" she demanded. "What did you do?"
"I did nothing," he said. "We *came* here. Or were brought. Again."
"Again?" Her gaze snapped around into the darkness. "This is—this is the void you talked about? The 'in-between' where you saw her?"
"Yes," Trin said. "Though last time, it was only me."
Naera looked down, expecting ground, found none, and flinched. Her hands clenched reflexively around the pendant. It did not move.
"How am I standing?" she whispered.
"You're not," he said. "You're *being*."
She shot him a look that said this was not the time for metaphysics.
He would have replied—something softer, something simpler—but the void itself changed before he could.
A light kindled above them.
It was not blinding, not at first. Just a soft, gradual illumination, like dawn filtered through fog. It spread without a visible source, turning the featureless dark into a pale, endless horizon.
Naera's breath hitched.
"Trin," she said under her breath. "If this is some kind of trick—"
"It's not," he said, though his own heart—such as it was here—beat a little faster.
The light brightened.
Then a voice, familiar and impossibly distant, flowed through the space, warm and clear.
"Raise your heads, my most devoted followers."