The gate was wrong.
It wasn't just the shape of it—an arch that curved too sharply at the crown, like a grin cutting into the stone of the Seventh Floor. It wasn't the color—black that wasn't black, but a swallowing absence that drank the torchlight and gave nothing back. It was the feeling it put in Asher's bones: the old shiver that comes when the body understands it's standing at the lip of something that wasn't made for mortals.
The Seventh Floor had always been a legend inside the Tower of Hell, but this door didn't belong to any legend he'd heard. No guards. No monsters. No puzzle to pay for passage. Just a slab of air torn open and told to be a door.
