El Como had always liked thresholds. They were honest places — decisions made visible, promises and threats hung like wet flags between one world and the next.
A threshold told you whether you were about to walk into a banquet or a graveyard, whether you needed a sword or a good hat.
Sometimes, when the bread was stale and the moon was sharp, he would stand at thresholds and imagine the rooms beyond, naming them things like Regret or A Very Bad Library. He kept a private list. It comforted him.
This gate, however, offered no small comforts. It rose from the earth like a wall of teeth: an iron arch taller than three of the tallest men you've ever met, flanked by pillars that seemed to have been hewn from some older, more obstinate night.
Black metal laced with veins of dull bronze formed an ornate lattice that swallowed light rather than reflected it.
The top of the arch cradled an inscription, letters carved deep and deliberate. Above the lintel, in an old script that tasted of salt and vows, were the words: UNTAMED ABILITY. Beneath, in harsher strokes and stamped as if in metal itself, were the characters that made El Como's mouth twitch: CODE 3.
He found himself reclining against a tree, which, in another life, might have been called "mysterious."
It was twisted like an old witch's spine, knotted with knots that could have been either sculpted grip or scars. Its bark was black and smooth as a tenor's throat, but the leaves were small, like coin discs, and they seemed to hum with a faint, hungry fluorescence whenever El Como shifted and they caught the light just so.
The tree leaned a little, more comfortable in its knotted age than any tree had a right to be, and it provided precisely the kind of shade and posture that advertised someone who had been waiting long enough to have opinions.
El Como laced his fingers behind his head and watched the gate as if it were a particularly slow play. He did not rise. He did not bugle.
He lay there, as one does in front of a particularly interesting book when one is already certain that one has read all the good parts. The shrubs that ringed the approach formed a sparse, undulating carpet, their leaves bending subtly and unnaturally — not toward the gate, not away, but in the opposite direction of where the wind would have pointed.
It was as if the air itself were being coaxed into a private choreography by something within the stone and iron.
"Very courteous of the castle to provide a wind in which no one can walk in its direction," El Como murmured, and the sound left his mouth more a habit than a noise. "How poetic."
Silence had a voice here. It was the loud, polite kind — the sort that cleared a room simply by continuing to exist. The land around the gate lay empty: no birds, no beast, not even the occasional insect unlucky enough to flit too near. The air tasted like the inside of a tomb and a library book left too long in the rain.
There were no footprints except his own — and a neat row of prints that stopped abruptly, as if a man had decided mid-step to take his life somewhere else.
El Como raised an eyebrow. He liked to keep his expressions economical; when one had the choice between grimaces and slow-burn sarcasm, one saved the grimaces for the evening. "How terribly considerate," he said, though the shrubs, being immaculately polite, did not laugh.
He pushed himself upright and propped his back against the tree. From this angle the gate looked even more eloquent — or more threatening, depending on whether you trusted your destiny or your eyesight.
The ironwork threaded into barbs and sigils, an ornamental cruelty so tasteful one suspected the artisan had been paid in souls. The pillars flanking the gate bore reliefs of beasts that were not beasts by any comfortable definition: their mouths were too wide, their eyes too knowing.
They held in their carved paws a series of small runes, the throat of each rune ringing faintly with a tune that hummed just beyond the capacity of human hearing. It was a melody of contained storms.
"Untamed Ability," he read aloud, savoring the rhythm the way a wine connoisseur would taste tannin.
He pronounced untamed with a slow, theatrical patience, as if the word itself might fidget and reveal a secret. "How modest."
Code 3. The characters might as well have been stamped with a gauntleted fist. He let the words roll around his mind, tasting them as if they were obscene bread.
There was a weight to the phrase. Codes were neat things. They favored boxes and checklists. They were bureaucratic, which was a good kind of dangerous. Code 3, however, felt less like a civic ordinance and more like the number assigned to something very old that had been waiting for someone to misfile it.
El Como smirked. There was a small, private clockwork inside his chest that ticked whenever he found a mystery slightly beneath his notice. "A castle with an inscription threatening verbosity and a code," he said, his voice dry as riverbed gravel. "My favorite sort of architectural prank."
He let the blade of his patience, sharpened by a thousand indignities, rest across the crook of his knee. The sword at his hip—an old, temperamental thing—seemed to hum in response, as if it had opinions on both gates and inscriptions. He nudged it with the toe of a boot and felt the vibration travel up his leg, right into the scabbard like a small, disgruntled animal. It was a minor reassurance: steel made commitments.
The silence, again, was not empty. It had texture. Somewhere behind the walls of the castle, something turned. Not loudly. Not even with the deliberate drama of creaturely movement. Rather, an internal apparatus shifted, like the slow rotation of gears beneath a clock face. The air carried this small cadence, and the shrubs around the gate leaned ever so slightly against that imaginary current. It was a windmill of absence, spinning some slow, invisible axis. The shrubs bent opposite it, as though they could not abide such contrivance and thus chose to perform their own little rebellion.
El Como watched. It entertained him. He considered writing a letter to the castle — a polite note asking for directions and a refund. He wondered whether the castle accepted visitors, and if so, whether it demanded introductions, sacrifices, or a brief essay on the art of being ominous. He had never been fond of passivity in architecture. That's why he preferred to peer under it.
"Not a soul for miles," he observed aloud, and the sentence folded into the air like a truant schoolboy. "Yet the place is aware. Curiously attentive for a pile of stones."
He slid down the trunk of his tree until he sat cross-legged, the gate and its inscription rising like a monolith against a sky that refused to decide whether it wished to rain or stare. His boots scuffed the earth. He could have stood and pushed the gate open by force, or coaxed it with Shaping, letting his permeability and old tricks unthread metal from metal. He could have forced his way in like a thief in a polite gathering. But there was a certain pleasure demanded by a puzzle: the moment before action, the inhalation, the study of the lock.
He let time fold over him like a blanket. He hummed a tune that was older than polite ridicule, and the tree's coin-leaves fluttered in a rhythm that matched his breath. It was absurd, he supposed, to be amused while the world around you seemed to be holding its own funeral. He was absurdity as a matter of principle.
There was something almost neat about the way silence had been enforced. It wasn't the chaplain's silence of church or the stunned hush of a town after the bell; it was crisp, enforced, as if a law had been passed and the populace complied. The shrubs bent the wrong way because the laws of the place insisted they should. Even the birds refused to be birds here; winged things, if they existed, had been seduced into stillness or banished into the castle's own hunger.
A touch of irony flitted across his face. "They've done a fine job," El Como said. "It's like a funeral, only without the inconvenient sobbing."
From deeper behind the gate, the castle's shadows pooled and redistributed themselves in patterns that suggested gargoyles had been rehearsing chess. He could see spires and towers that tilted like teeth and windows that gaped in yawns. The masonry itself seemed to be woven from a language he did not know but felt entirely. The air carried a metallic tang, not of blood but of some old, rested battery — the promise of stored power. He sniffed it like one accustomed to the scent of latent electricity.
He rose leisurely and dusted off his trousers. The tree's branches creaked in a sound that could have been disapproval or applause; he could never tell with trees. He strolled closer, boots making muffled prints on a path of stone. The gate stood higher now, a cavernous maw with iron teeth that could have been the mouth of a god who flossed occasionally. The inscription gleamed with an odd kind of intent, as if the letters themselves were aware of being read and enjoyed the choreography.
He reached up and ran a finger along the cold metal. The moment his skin touched iron, a small whisper of static prickled against his palm. He felt a suggestion of presence there — a polite, corded hold, like a glove waiting to be worn. The runes along the edge of the arch were not merely carved; they seemed to have been coaxed into being by an art both patient and deliberate. Each mark pulsed faintly, like the slow blink of an animal that knows the hunter is watching.
"Untamed," he mused, tasting the word. "Ability. Two nouns with the manners of a quarrel. I suppose one could be tamed by introducing it to an etiquette book."
He stepped back and observed the rest of the portents. A couple of low statues kneeling by the gate looked, at first glance, like supplicants; on closer inspection, they looked like something that had been kneeling so long it had forgotten the shape of rising. Their faces were smooth plains save for a single, perfectly carved eye. Each one seemed to stare not at him but through him, attending to some inner scene. He had the urge to tap them with a stick and see if they had a weak point.
Instead, he smiled. It was a small, dry thing at the corner of his mouth—his habitual expression for everything that presented itself as a drama and therefore deserved a footnote. "Hello, old stones. You're being very moody today."
There are sometimes places where humor is insolent; this gate obliged him with its quiet severity. The shrubs shivered and leaned away; the tree's coins chimed with a sound like a thousand small laughs. Somewhere in the living, breathing puzzle of the castle, something turned its head.
A taste of air brushed his lips — colder than he would have preferred, as if the world had poured its patience into a cup and then offered it around. El Como inhaled and felt for threads, for edges, for any hint of a seam where he might prod. He found a faint tremor in the architecture: a pattern of cold and warm that suggested currents within, as if the castle breathed differently than the day itself. He could not resist the thought that perhaps the castle liked visitors who both laughed at it and respected its head posture.
He sat down on the step and rested his back against a pillar, letting the inscription loom above him like some bold, inhuman eyebrow. He pulled a scrap of dried meat from his satchel and chewed slowly, letting the world watch him eat. There is a special kind of audacity in chewing when the room seems to be watching, and he indulged it. The meat was tough and close-mouthed with flavor, which only made him enjoy it more.
People who had been less accustomed to the peculiarities of such places might have felt fear or reverence. El Como felt a complicated mix: curiosity, a professional interest, and a kind of fond disdain. The castle was an enigma, but it was an enigma in need of rudeness. He liked to see whether things wilted under rudeness or blossomed into new, more interesting threats.
He moved his head to the side and squinted at the inscription. The letters glowed faintly, tiny veins of light running between their strokes. UNTAMED ABILITY — the phrase seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting like a chest in slumber. Beneath it, the CODE 3 sat like a badge, a rank of office. What it ranked was anyone's guess: perhaps a level of guardianship, perhaps a classification in some esoteric catalogue. He imagined clerks in high towers with quills tattooing the backs of scrolls: Untamed Ability — Level: Code 3. Handling notes: Hazardous, approach with caution and a strong sense of irony.
El Como made a note of that in his head and filed it under Possibly Useful, Possibly Funny. He liked lists.
He reached down and scraped his fingernail along the base of the gate. The metal tasted of dust and something older, the flavor of history when it has been boiled down to a condiment. The sound his nail made against the iron was small, but in that silence it sounded enormous, like a clock striking in a hermit's ear. And then — very slowly — there came a reply. Not a voice, not anything human, but a reverberation that traveled back up his arm and settled like a pebble against the inside of his head. It was an acknowledgment, nothing more. It suggested that the gate had noticed his touch and had marked it in a ledger.
"The manners of a stone," he said. "Heartfelt."
A thought passed through him, one softer than a blade and yet just as sharp: perhaps the castle was less a fortress and more a living ledger, an organism that recorded the nature of those who approached. It might have been an elaborate trap or simply a library with hostile architecture. Either way, it had an opinion and it was not paying for his amusement.
He tapped the inscription. It hummed. He hummed back in a quiet, small tune that could have been a greeting or an insult; it depended on the listener's emotional constitution. He imagined the castle scribbling the moment down with invisible ink: Visitor: Smug. Behavior: Inappropriate. Response: Pending.
For a long while, he sat there and did very little except watch. Watching, he had discovered over many years, is a profession with its own nest of rewards: it draws out secrets like teeth. The castle's windows blinked in the haze of distance, giving off a dull, cowed light; some of them seemed to shift hues as if they were eyes adjusting to him and then deciding he was not worth more than a glance.
He thought — because he could not help himself — about the many doors he had encountered in his life. A door is not merely an obstacle; it's a choice. Some doors demand payment. Some demand memory. Others demand blood. This gate demanded nothing of the wearer that he could see; yet it seemed to exact obedience from the shrubs and the wind. That, in itself, was a kind of request.
El Como yawned. He stood and stretched, the way a predator informs the world that it will not be rushed. He shaped his hand into a fist and felt the old, familiar hunger beneath his bones: the urge to shape, to slip through, to examine the taste of a secret with his teeth. Permeability was his trade; he pried himself open like a book and let the world read him in reverse. He could, if he wanted, weave a small path through metal and mortar — he had done stranger things with less leisure. But there was a fine art in anticipation. There was also a kind of etiquette among mysteries which he, in his particular brand of grotesque politeness, sometimes observed.
So he waited.
The shrubs continued to bend away, as if the very flora had taken sides in a quiet, botanical argument. Insects did not dare to pollinate. The very stones seemed to hum in their sleep, keeping time to some inner metronome. Occasionally, something in the castle shifted: a shadow slid, a distant clang like a bell in a tomb, a sound like pages turning in a book made of bone. Each time, El Como would tilt his head and make an appropriate comment.
"Well, aren't we dramatic?" he muttered to an empty field. "If you were a person, you'd probably carry a parasol."
This was his way. He softened the horror with a remark. It made him feel at home.
As the afternoon stretched, the sky grew a peculiar color that is hard to name — not quite the color of dusk, not quite the weight of noon, more like the shade a bruise makes when it decides it wants to read the obituaries. The castle shifted with the hour, seeming to stretch its towers taller, as if trying to be impressive at last. The shrubs straightened an inch or two, not from courage but to improve their posture.
And then, as if to reward his patience, a sound came from the gate itself. A tiny sigh, like the opening of a great, ancient book. The iron across its seam shivered. A trickle of wind — or something like wind — passed through the archway and touched El Como's face. It smelled of rain that had never fallen and of things waiting patiently in cupboards.
He smiled. It was a small, dry expression, the kind that said, At last, a plot movement. He rose and slipped his sword free, not because he expected trouble — though the castle was certainly capable of presenting it — but because the gesture of unsheathing was, in some small way, respectful.
A single leaf detached from the tree above him and fell, spinning lazily, and landed on the gate's threshold. For a second, it lay there like a question. Then the leaf moved. Not by wind. Not by hand. It twitched and was sucked inward, as if the gate had decided to taste it.
El Como blinked. He took a breath and snorted. "How quaint," he said. "A place that eats autographs."
He took a step toward the gate. The shrubs receded a pace as if embarrassed to see him get so intimate with the architecture. The gate felt alive under his foot, a subtle vibration that spoke not in words but in a pressure that suggested either welcome or a very efficient way of greeting trespassers with long knives.
Just beyond the iron bars, within the shadow of the courtyard, a faint glow pulsed — a heartbeat, the rhythm of something that had maintenance and spite and probably a fondness for riddles. El Como leaned forward and peered into the dark. Within the courtyard, shapes moved. They were not people. They were not animals. They were things that might have once been things; they had been redesigned by boredom and tyranny into grotesque ornaments. Statues shifted their gaze, fountains lay still as if frozen mid-sob, and a host of small, mechanized things — gears and chains and something that resembled a tiny windmill crafted from bone — turned slowly in perfect counter-motion to the outside shrubs.
"Ah," he said softly, appreciation softening the sarcasm. "So it has contraptions. Flamboyantly practical."
The gate now actually opened. Not with a creak, but with the sound of a choir swallowed by an overlarge mouth. The metal parted as if it were fabric, or an eyelid parting. The courtyard beyond revealed itself like a throat: stone paving, more of the same sketches of beasts, a central tower like a finger pointing at the sky's underbelly.
As the gate widened, a figure appeared on the threshold. It was small and hunched and wrapped in a cloak of many-colored threads that seemed to be sewn from dusk. It watched him with two pinprick lights where eyes should be. It bowed slightly — an old, weary bow — and then spoke in a voice that sounded like the rustle of paper against paper.
"You may enter," it said. "Insofar as the castle permits."
El Como considered the bow thoughtfully. He returned it with a small nod, the kind of acknowledgment one gives to a doorman who has remembered to polish his buttons. "How generous of you," he said. "I had no intention of being rude, but I find that introductions make for a charming appetizer."
The cloaked figure inclined its head and melted into the courtyard's shadows. The gate, having decided its role for the moment, shut behind them with a soft, decisive click that suggested it had exhaled for the first time in centuries.
El Como walked in. He left footprints on the courtyard stones that persisted like signatures. Shrubs bent away. Statues watched. And the castle, which had been listening, now began to speak in a hundred small, mechanical murmurs.
He entered a world where humor and horror held equal measures of a cup; and he, with his dry, sarcastic observations tucked into the sleeve of his mood like contraband, was prepared to drink.
He grinned while the gate settled, feeling the faint echo of its inscription folding into the hollow of his chest: Untamed Ability. Code 3. He promised himself a closer study of both. After all, mysteries deserved not just answers but footnotes. And a man like him — who shaped, who slipped, who reveled in the unsaid — collected footnotes the way other folks collected scars.
He had come here to see what the castle had been hoarding. What he found, instead, was the beginning of something that wanted very politely to be left alone. El Como liked polite things. He liked the sort of politeness that had teeth.
He smiled then — wider, teeth showing, the sort of smile that signaled both amusement and appetite. The shrubs resumed their postures, the courtyard adjusted its breath, and the tree behind him hummed with a sound that might have been laughter. The gate's inscription, high above, watched him as if expecting commentary.
He bowed his head in thanks to the letters. "Very well met," he said. "Let us see what you hid so carefully."
And then he walked deeper into the castle, the dry edge of his laughter trailing behind him like a shadow .