The door shuts behind me and the sound runs too long, thinned into something taut until the room feels swollen with it. The echo clings to the air as if it has forgotten how to fade. Scent arrives next: lavender burned into something acrid; smoke held in cloth; paper singed at the edges; a faint taste of iron rising at the back of my throat. Light spreads without source, scattering hard across walls and floor, flaring where it shouldn't, refusing to give my eyes a steady palace to rest.
The compass shifts in my hand – not a tug, not the old hum, but the soft pressure of a grip grown slack: weak, trembling, trying not to let go.
The room disguises itself, wearing the cabin's shape. The table sits where it should, the one she worked at obsessively; the chair keeps its station with her scarf over the back, the fringe knotted and smoothed by restless fingers; the ledger lies open, pages curled and ink pressed deep. Yet something is crooked. The window that ought to open to trees is sealed with blank wall behind it. Shadows tilt the wrong direction, reaching across the floor like they mean to swallow me. The scarf shivers as if someone brushed past, though no breath of air moves.
Two doors wait on the far wall. Brass knobs gleam like small suns, polished past reason. Above them, carved into the stone deep enough for the grooves to seem to pulse when I look, the words declare: SHE WOULD HAVE FED YOU TO THE DARK. The sentence lodges low beneath my ribs.
I go to the table. The ledger smells like her – lavender oil, soured under ash. Each letter is her hand: small, exact, cut into the page as though the nib could compel obedience. Salt. Tallow. Bone-glass. Ash of oak. The same litany I've seen in other books, inscribed with the same care.
Another line sits beneath it, unhesitating: Blood of firstborn = 50. The page has buckled where the ink lies thickest. For a moment I hear the scratch of her pen in the dark—steady, steady—long after she sent me to bed.
The next line waits beneath: Child in place of vessel. The words are clear. They did not shake. Nor did my mother's hand.
My stomach knots. Memory breaks loose: me at the far end of this same table, too small to keep my feet from swinging, tracing knots in the wood while she wrote. "Don't touch that," she said without looking when my fingers drifted toward a small box. I touched it anyway when she left. My fingertip burned. I cried without sound so she wouldn't know.
Another line, darker than the rest: Her life for mine. The nib split the paper there; fibers torn, the page scarred. I rest a finger on the groove. The cut scratches against my skin, a wound that never closed.
The words blur at their edges; the ink seems to sink deeper; the page darkens. A breath glides near—soft as smoke, warm, amused.
"Steady," he says, almost admiring. "Her hand never wavered when it was you. She pressed hardest where the line carried your blood."
The compass flinches in my palm. He is close enough to savor it.
"Salt. Ash. Bone. And you." He lingers on each. "Measured… Exact. She does not falter, darling. Not for you."
Above the doors the carving hums, low and final: SHE WOULD HAVE FED YOU TO THE DARK. The compass answers with a weak jerk—a ghost of a grip.
He laughs softly, indulgent, the sound of a man enjoying a well-played hand. "It fits perfectly, doesn't it? Her life preserved, yours offered. That is the truth she left you."
The scarf slips from the chair. It folds onto the floor without sound.
I close the ledger. The clap is sharp and small for its size.
The scarf slips from the chair and folds onto the floor without sound. I close the ledger. The clap is sharp and small for its size. A cornered page lifts in the light. A different scrawl hides there—hurried, slanted, unlike her tidy hand:
Not yours. Not mine.
There is another way.
Teach the fire to breathe. ◊
The diamond mark. Our mark. A mark that has always meant for your eyes only.
Heat blooms faintly through the compass. He does not falter; he does not notice.
"Come," he croons, like silk sliding over skin. "Let the stone show you what you already know."
The sentence above the doors vibrates darker, certain: SHE WOULD HAVE FED YOU TO THE DARK. The right-hand door exhales a spoiled sweetness that brushes my cheek. TRUE glows faint and sure. FALSE sits dull beside it—silent, cold. The compass twitches, stubborn and barely alive. The compass twitches against my palm, faint, stubborn, barely alive.
My hand lifts, slow, as if it belongs to someone else.
"Of course," he murmurs, voice cool as a blade. "Look at you. Your hand already knows where it belongs."
"She didn't," I whisper. It breaks out like a plea.
"She would have." He lays the three syllables down between us and lets them settle.
TRUE hums under my skin. My palm hovers an inch away. "Do you feel it?" he asks, voice dropping rich, almost tender with cruelty. "How it waits for you? As if it were carved to fit. As if it has always been yours.
My fingers tremble. Metal seems to breathe against them. The compass spasms—sharp, frantic.
He notices; I hear the smile enter his voice. "Look at you. Even now clutching broken things as if they might love you back. Scraps of her silence, crumbs of her faith—and you gnaw at them like they're enough. Do you feel how pathetic it is? How sweet? That's why you'll always come to me, darling. Because even your denial tastes like devotion."
My chest tightens until it hurts. I want the weight to end. I want to let my hand fall and be done. The compass jolts again—a final convulsion, weak but insistent.
I tear my hand away and slam it against FALSE.
Cold bites deep in my flesh, deliberate and unforgiving. The room fractures. The scarf unravels to thread and vanishes. The ledger flies open, pages riffling in wind that does not exist. The table. The chair. Nothing holds.
His laughter follows, low and certain, the cadence of a prediction coming true. "Stubborn," he says, almost with a caress. "But scraps rot, little one. When they do, you will crawl back to the truth that waits."
The door yields.