The door closes behind me without a sound—no hinge, no echo, no goodbye. It doesn't shut so much as cease to exist. Where wood should be, air folds and softens; walls, frames, thresholds exhale into mist and unthread into the dark like milk poured into ink. The building's shape dissolves until nothing remains but breathless black and the taste of something drowned a long time ago.
I stand very still. I wait for my feet to learn the ground. They don't—perhaps they can't. There is no ground. I don't feel water, yet when I look down the dark shivers and rings widen from my ankles: circle after circle running outward into a night without edges. I lift one foot—dry, weightless—and the ripples swell anyway, as if the surface itself is determined to prove I exist.
Rot rides the air with a sick sweetness that clings to the back of my throat: moss and old wood and the memory of lilies. Silence sits heavy until a single drip rings through it like a distant bell. I try for a deep breath and the swampish air slides into my lungs thick and reluctant.
I raise the compass. It is small in my bloodied hand, its rim sticky from the cut it gave me, its light pared back to a coal's breath. It does not hum or drag. It simply insists on existing, which feels like an argument of its own.
Something passes across my shoulder—not touch, only the knowledge of being seen. I turn too quickly and the weightless depth tilts beneath me. The dark offers no edges: no trees, no stars, no horizon. Only the sensation of wetness and the whisper of a surface because it ripples where I am.
His voice does not come. I wait for the indulgent curl of him, the promise of endings dressed as mercy. Nothing. The silence has swallowed even his attention. I should be relieved. I am not. When horror leaves a room, it takes the rules with it. This place wants me wrong-footed, enemyless, undefended.
I step. Ripples run out in obedient rings. I step again. The motion repeats itself as if I am trudging, though my boots make no sound and the swamp refuses to acknowledge my crossing. The contradiction turns the mind on itself—thighs tightening with remembered burn; breath measuring effort where none exists.
Left. Right. Left. Right. I force a rhythm and the compass stirs at last—not the weak flicker from the trial, but a small, insistent pulse. The needle quivers, considers, and settles into the mist ahead. Not wandering. Not lost. There. Warmth seeps into my torn palm as if to say: This way. This is real.
I close my hand around it and, for the first time since the last door dissolved, the dark thins not merely because I will it, but because the compass does.
Suddenly, I feel a familiar fabric brush my cheek. Fabric grazes my cheek. Her scarf. I flinch and find only air. But the feeling lingers. The woven fringe that used to scratch my throat when she hugged me too hard and too briefly. Lavender soured by smoke returns so sharply I swallow tears. The swamp does not care. The darkness thickens to my right, thins to my left; ripples bend around something I cannot see. I step where the dark is thinnest and let the compass point without pulling.
A sound begins far off, not words, not music—a vibration, like a hive under wood or wind speaking through hollows. I walk toward it because I need a thing to mean something. The hum passes from the air into my skin.
A circle takes shape—not carved in earth but inscribed into the water itself. Lines of faint light coil beneath the surface, spirals knotting into sharpness my eyes cannot follow. I cross the boundary. There is no resistance, and yet a weight lifts from my chest the instant my ankles stand within the marks. Air returns. My ribs spread until they feel like mine again. The breath I draw is not sweet or clean or kind, but it is mine.
At the circle's center sits a stump—stone-gray, ringed with age, its top sanded smooth by hands that may never have touched it. Thread hangs from the lip, a braided cord with a bead shaped like a diamond. I do not sit. Chairs offer stillness; stillness here feels like bait. I keep the stump between me and the dark, a small, useless barrier that helps anyway. The compass warms, a faint pulse against my skin, as if reminding me I am not alone.
On the stump sits a book.
My throat closes. I know it before I read the title. The cloth cover is soft from handling, the green gone to winter pondwater; corners blunted, spine mended with thread. It is the book she read when her voice had gentleness and silence had not yet hardened between us. The gold stamping is almost gone.
The Boy Beneath the Mountain
I wait. When I reach for it, I move as though touching a sleeping animal. The cover opens with a sigh. A Queen stands on the first page—her face unmoving no matter the angle. Beside her a boy is drawn in soft lines: small hands, a crown too big, lantern-light filling wide eyes. Behind them the mountain rises the way a child would draw it—a triangle softened at the edges.
I turn the page. The story reads like it was written for children, yet the bones beneath are older, harder, meant for more than lullabies.
Long ago there was a Queen, wise and full of love. She bore a son, and she saw in him the shadow of the kingdom's end. His laugh carried storms. His tears cracked stone. His shadow grew longer than the mountain itself.
She could not lift her hand to strike him. Love bound her heart. So she sought another way. She shaped a lantern of bone and ash, a vessel to hold what could not be slain. Into it she placed her son, carrying him up the mountain with her own guard at her side. She spoke as she closed the vessel: Better silence than ruin. Better chains than fire.
Yet silence leaks. From the lantern's seams spilled hunger and fury. Small, but sharp. Enough to stir blood, enough to turn neighbor against neighbor. Not enough to destroy the kingdom, but enough to remind it of what slept within.
And so the Queen bound her son with more than stone. She bound him with her own soul. Season after season she came to the mountain. She gave her blood, her breath, her prayers, until the lantern's chains held fast.
The people whispered, "What mercy. What love."
But the mountain knew the truth. It was not mercy that bound him.
It was sacrifice. And only sacrifice keeps the world whole.
At the bottom corner of the last page a small diamond is drawn where a flourish might hide it. Beside it, stitched so faintly I might mistake it for damage: Once for binding. Thrice for ending.
The rhyme tastes like nonsense and knots my stomach anyway. I have seen those words somewhere else—or they have seen me. The compass warms sharply in my palm as if it noticed too. I shut the book. Stump, cord, book unravel into mist. The circle's hum fades; the swamp slides back into itself. The needle steadies and points into the dark.
I follow. Step. Step. Step. Ripples scatter, gather, vanish. Just when I decide the swamp has no end, the mist bleaches: pale as if this place occasionally remembers the sun. The quiet grows distant, no longer listening, merely waiting.
Stone rises through the haze. Curved walls—shattered and scarred—climb in broken tiers, a coliseum vast as the world, its rim lost to mist. Leaning columns hold whole what should have fallen. The compass points straight to a gate yawning at the arena's base.
I step through. The dark folds in behind me like a curtain pulled flat. Dust and old iron coat the air. My boots ring stone.
Not his voice. Another.
Power rolls through the air of the arena, but not like a blade. It settles the way soil accepts seed—authority woven with patience, a presence vast as rock and quiet as breath. "Ah," the voice sings, gentle and absolute, "I knew the dark could not keep you. The world bends until it carries you here."
Light blooms at the center. A figure resolves within it.
The Queen. From the book? Crown set firm. Shoulders squared against a fate she already knows. One hand rests on the hilt at her side. When her gaze meets mine it is not cruel; it is heavy with expectation.
Her lips part. Her voice carries clear, steady rich with command yet softened by something tender.
"Raise your blade, my knight," the Queen commands, her eyes shadowed with sorrow. "Our road is long, and it will be written in blood." Her breath trembles, then steels. "We march toward the mountain... to bind what I love most."