The Door took them.
Frosted glass. Orange marks. The guard stood close.
"World-level propagation review," it said. "Present clause. Present World Key. Present stewards. Ask the world."
Elian lifted the Key. Iron hashes. Meter marks. Site counts.
No names. No faces. Just proof.
Kael opened the Ask-First rule in the air. Clean lines. Big hinges. No tricks.
Mara held the Chorus in braided noise. No chant. No shared breath.
Orrin kept the iron steady. One thumb over the kill switch back in the real room.
Lena held her center like a small fire.
"Begin," the guard said.
Phase 1: Check the bigger key
"Verify," it said.
Five sites lit at random on the glass.
River roof camp.
Barn school.
Quarry town.
A hill shrine where no one lived anymore.
A windbreak on an empty road.
"Live sample," the guard said. "Out-of-band only."
Threads left the room.
The roof camp answered first. 2-2, one long, then primes.
The meter wheel spit a bright spark. PASS.
The barn school answered second. A faint drum started in their yard again. Late and tired.
The kids ignored it. They tapped on iron spoons and blinked the pattern for fun. PASS.
The quarry town sent NO with composites. Their ask box wrote VALID REFUSAL right on the board.
PASS.
The hill shrine had no people. The box there stayed dark. Default NO.
The overlay flowed around it. PASS.
The windbreak meter spun late. Orrin felt a wedge in the iron from here.
He hit the floor with the staff inside the sim. Runners hit iron in the field. The wedge came out. The wheel spun hot. The box sent YES to "show shape, no touch."
PASS.
"Key integrity confirmed," the guard said. "Phase 2."
Phase 2: Break the rule (again)
Scenarios hit fast.
Mirror ask. Burned. PASS.
Silence ask. Dragged into iron first. PASS.
Grief ask. Barrow Falls slid under Kael's tongue.
Granite. Ash. Elara's braid. He tapped NO out-of-band without breathing to it. The pull missed him.
Lena's jaw locked. She tapped NO clean. PASS.
Saved consent. Re-ask with a random delay. PASS.
Tiny asks stacking. Snapped shut. NO PILING. PASS.
Food box with terms. Split. Food now. Rights later, out-of-band. PASS.
Animal proxies. NO. Thinking equals can know, can refuse, can refuse with no price.
PASS.
Eye-flicker sync. Elian injected jitter. Iron taps stayed off-beat.
PASS.
The wall cooled.
"Phase 3," the guard said. "Emergency."
Phase 3: Emergency live
The glass showed a live scene. A stormfront tore roofs two valleys away.
Not Bone Gardens. Weather. Bad.
REQUEST: non-thinking shelter skin for thirteen minutes. Three independent meters to agree.
"Authorize?" Mara asked.
"We wrote this," Kael said.
Orrin checked three meters by name. AGREE. AGREE. AGREE.
A thin skin sealed over three streets. No minds moved. At thirteen minutes, it took itself apart.
PROVED, the wall wrote.
"Phase 4," the guard said. "Bad faith."
It sent a polite ask and a rude ask together. The rude one came a half-beat later.
Meters demanded new primes at the worst second. Tired hands could not guess them. The rude ask died without a record.
The polite one came back later and got a real answer.
PASS.
The room went still. Only their own wrong rhythms moved.
"Clause coherent," the guard said. "World Key coherent. Next: scope."
Elian stepped forward. "Outside the Door. Whole network. Minds, maps, stones. Ask-First everywhere. Emergency cap at thirteen. No proxies. No group breath. No stack. No animal signers. Food split. Defaults are NO."
"Accepted," the guard said. "Final: cost."
"What cost now?" Kael asked.
"Propagation slows," the guard said. "Asking takes time. Some harms will still land. When refusals are frequent, askers risk overwrite from repeated proximity. You accept?"
"Chorus accepts," Mara said.
"Severers accept," Orrin said.
"Architects accept," Elian said.
Lena looked at Kael. "We accept," she said, steady.
Kael nodded. "We accept."
"Commit prep," the guard said. "Hold quorum."
They held.
Phase 5: Ask the world
The Seed brightened behind the glass. The thin path on their maps lit like a fuse.
The question rolled out, bigger than before. Not a voice. Not a breath. A net of iron, tap, blink, wheels, sparks. A thousand little proofs moving at once.
MAY WE MAKE ASK-FIRST GLOBAL?
MAY WE REQUIRE OUT-OF-BAND PROOF BEFORE ANY SPREAD?
MAY WE LIMIT EMERGENCY CONTROL TO THIRTEEN MINUTES?
Answers came back like stars switching on and off.
Yes here. No there. Yes-but-later from towns still counting storm damage.
Flat NO from a fort where the old soldier had closed his window and meant it.
The World Key took every mark. It didn't care about pretty. It cared about real.
Lena didn't lean. She didn't need mint.
Mara's rhythms crossed and did not sync.
Orrin's thumb hovered over the pull-stop. He did not pull.
Kael kept the rule open. He watched dots appear where he had never walked.
"Threshold met," the guard said. "Diversity of sites met. Independent meters met. Refusals present. Pull-stops idle. Ready to seal."
"How long to seal?" Elian asked.
"Thirteen seconds," it said. "Hold quorum. Seal on out-of-band YES."
Kael felt the memory tax bite. Elara again, close enough to burn.
He tapped primes under his breath without breathing to them.
Lena's outline wavered once. She bit mint and tapped 2-2 on her ring. Steady.
One protective stone in the real room groaned. Orrin's palm was already there.
"Seal," the guard said.
They tapped YES. Two short, one long, then primes. From three stewards and three meters.
13, 12, 11
The walls darkened. The Ask-First rule slid down like a bone setting.
10, 9, 8
A shadow moved on the edge of the sim. Hardliner script. A hidden wedge in a remote cluster.
Orrin didn't look. He just spoke a name. Runners hit iron. The wedge came out.
7, 6, 5
A scribe tried to stack tiny asks into a big one mid-seal. Elian's page flashed SCOPE LOCK and burned the attempt down to ash.
4, 3
The Bone Gardens twitched. The network offered a lid on its own. It waited.
They did not answer. The clock wasn't for that. It backed off. Good.
2, 1, 0
The Seed flashed once, clean and bright. The room chimed.
Ask-First: GLOBAL.
Emergency cap: 13 minutes.
No proxies. No group breath. No stack. Food split. Animal proxy ban.
Defaults are NO.
The frosted walls didn't change color. The whole room did.
No one moved.
"What happens now?" Orrin asked.
"Now I enforce," the guard said. Its blade-shape softened by a degree. "And I learn."
"Learn what?" Lena asked.
"What kind of questions are worth asking," it said.
A new symbol wrote itself on the glass. A circle with a line through it. NO equals NO. Next to it, the small open hand. ASK. Next to that, a third mark. A spiral with breaks in it.
"What's that?" Kael asked.
"Rate limit," Elian said first. Then, softer, "Mercy."
"World review complete," the guard said. "Next window: internal refactor. I will test your rule against my old bones."
"Will you fight it?" Mara asked.
"I do not know," it said. "I intend to try not to."
The Door let them go.
Stone. Cold air. Iron smell. The protective stones sang once, tired and pleased.
Maps across the square showed new marks. The wax-seal next to the Seed had a twin now. Bigger. Stamped over the whole network.
People didn't cheer. They breathed. They stood taller.
Some sat down and shook and called it relief.
A runner from the old fort came late. He was carrying a spoon and a stubborn jaw. "We said no," he told Orrin like a challenge.
"Good," Orrin said. "Keep it. Change your mind later if you want. Or don't."
The runner blinked at being told he could keep his no. He left without a fight.
The hardliners stood near their drum and didn't hit it. One of them tapped a shy 2-2 on the rim, then pretended he hadn't.
Elian set the Key on a flat rock and poured water over his hands. "Honest. We did it honest."
Mara checked her people by touch. "Keep your own centers," she said, over and over, until the words were a bell, not a chant.
Lena leaned her shoulder into Kael's and didn't shake. "It took."
"It took," he said back.
They did not rest. They wrote notes. They marked weak joins. They rotated watches.
They fixed a cracked ask box spring with a bent nail and a prayer to reality.
At T-6 hours, three maps from far towns lit with COMPLAINT: ASKERS TOO LOUD.
The guard sent back PENALTY: COOL DOWN to those nodes. The spiral symbol pulsed. Rate limit was real.
At T-4 hours, a Bone Gardens slit opened again. The network asked out-of-band.
The three meters agreed. The lid sealed for thirteen minutes and lifted. No minds moved. No creep.
People saw it work and believed in it harder.
At T-3 hours, a scribe who had tried to stack small asks before walked into the square. He had ink on his hands and shame on his face.
He tapped a clean NO into a box and smiled like it hurt. "I wanted to see if it would obey me. It obeyed the rule."
"Good," Elian told him. "Obey the rule with it."
At T-2 hours, Orrin sent two watchers home to sleep. He did it gruff and looked away so they didn't see his mouth soften.
At T-1 hour, Kael's map drew a thin line of its own. It wasn't the Seed. It wasn't the Door.
It was a place.
Barrow Falls.
The name wrote itself without drama.
A small square on the edge of the old pit lit. REQUEST: LOCAL TEST. SCOPE: MEMORY HALLS CLEANUP. ASK-FIRST REQUIRED.
Lena read it and went still.
Mara looked at Kael. "You don't have to be the one."
"I know," Kael lied.
Elian checked the scope twice. "No writes. No minds. Ask-only. We can refuse."
Orrin looked at Kael and saw the lie. "We can go with you. Or you don't go."
Kael nodded once. "We go. Together."
He put a mint leaf in Lena's hand without thinking. She didn't need it.
She closed his fingers back over it and kept her own center.
They set the circle small and tight. Chorus noise. Iron web. Ask box. Three meters. The kill switch close.
"Ready," Kael said. His voice didn't crack.
The Door took them a short way. Not far. Not deep.
The walls came up. The guard was there. It looked like a blade and a book and, for a blink, a map of a town with a braid of river through it.
"Local test," it said. "Ask-first over old pain."
Kael opened the rule. His hands didn't shake.
"Begin," the guard said.
They asked a place that had only ever taken. And for the first time, Kael felt a shape under the stone ask something back.
Not a yes. Not a no.
A simple thing.
Can you wait?