They planned for it like people plan for storms: measures folded into measures, small precautions stacked until they felt like a rope. Liora would run the bead and watch the sigils; Arin would stand ready with a thin, steady ember; Kael would be the probe, the first body to feel the other air and report back. They spoke little on the walk to the river-pool; words felt too heavy for the seam between worlds.
Dawn was a cool thing that day, the kind that made breath visible and made fingers stiffer. Emberfall thinned behind them into hedges and bird-cry. At the terrace the pool lay black and polite as a closed eye. Liora set the coin-plate on a flat stone and placed the bead beside it, wiring the glass to a larger lens she had scavenged from a trader. The bead's light stuttered once when they closed the circle, as if the world were checking their names.
"Rules," Liora said, counting them on one ink-stained finger. "One: small step. Two: mark things you take. Three: if anything changes, retreat. Four: no heroics that end with us needing more friends than we have." She smiled without humor. The rules were a tool; tools were useful because they were honest.
Arin folded his hands around his ember and breathed slow. "I will be the knitting needle," he said again, and Kael saw his jaw settle. Even Arin looked like someone stepping soberly at last.
Kael knelt at the pool's rim and slid his hand into the shadow-sleeve he had practiced until the braid felt like a second skin. He shaped it into a short, stable platform and set the tip of his boot against the water's skin. For an instant the pool was only black and mirror, only reeds and a bent sky.
Then the mirror breathed.
It was not dramatic. The hinge was a small, hungry pressure underfoot and a noise like distant stones being rearranged. Kael felt his weight tilt like a scale whose pan had found a new balance. When he put a single foot across, the other world took hold of him the way a tide finds the shore: curious, patient, inexorable.
He did not step all the way through. He tested, the way a man tests a knife by the weight of its handle: one foot across, the other still Emberfall-warm. The other side's ground held him—cool, grainy, with a vibration that ran up his calf and settled under his ribs like a keyed string. The air smelled of iron and pine and an undernote like old coins.
"Report," Liora whispered.
"It's different," Kael said. His voice sounded doubled to his own ears, like someone else's reply slipped through a slit. "Thinner light. Air tastes like metal. Sound comes from other directions—like echoes that have their own steps."
The bead pulsed. Liora's pen scratched on a page. Arin tapped the ember, steady as a metronome, and the flame's reflection cut the surface into a thin, honest line. Kael let curiosity guide him and slid a hand across the seam. The shadow-sleeve contracted at the touch as if sensing other weaves, then relaxed. It answered the other air with a small, careful song.
"Try a stone," Liora said. "If the stone returns, check its edge."
Kael picked a pebble from the bank and tossed it into the pool. The stone vanished beneath the skin and reappeared a breath later floating at the rim. He plucked it out and found—true to Liora's warning—the grain had changed. Fine, hairline runes crossed the face that had been plain. The runes did not glow; they hummed faintly like a bead that had been stroked.
"Marking," Liora breathed. "Every crossing brands things. It's not theft. It's an imprint."
They widened the test. Arin sent a reed through and it returned with the same wild, thin markings. Liora's lens caught a pale luminescence along the marks; she grinned with the thin madness of someone who finds a secret algorithm.
"I want to see sound," Arin said, half to himself. He cupped his hands and sang a small note—the kind boys use to call dogs. The sound traveled over the pool and returned with an odd delay, like a phrase translated by someone who loved metaphors. Liora scribbled what the echo did to the waveform, eyes gleaming.
Then, because men who are young and hungry for knowledge do foolish things, Kael tested a second, bolder measure. He slid the shadow-sleeve forward and pressed not just a toe but the ball of his foot into the other side. The dual-ground sensation came—his ankle half here, half there—and for a moment he felt as if he wore two skins. The other side answered with pressure at his shoulders and a small, insistent pull at the base of his skull: steps, something moving far and slow.
"What is it?" Arin asked, voice too loud in the hush.
Kael did not answer right away. He had learned to keep a single narrow line of thought; his attention spread thin and the shadow flinched. Instead he felt. A depression of air, a soft path through low things, the scent of something like crushed stone and leaf rot. Then a sound—like a foot dragging through old cloth—shifted closer. The shadow at his wrist tightened like a finger finding a pulse.
On the far bank—on the other side of the pool where light lay thin and sky folded wrong—something stepped out of cover. It was not at all like the beasts that had attacked Emberfall. This thing was lean and many-jointed, as if stitched from the long limbs of river reeds and the ribs of a bird. Its skin shivered with a slate sheen. Two deep-set eyes took Kael in and held him with a curious, almost cautious brightness.
Kael's heart skidded. The shadow at his arm found for him the thread that would bind or scare and it braided quick and low. The creature cocked its head, the line of its neck articulating in a way that looked almost like listening.
It was not hostile at first. It watched. Then, as if testing language, it lifted one delicate fore and tapped the pool's skin with a single, precise motion. The ripple it made was not water but a skitter of tiny lights—runic dust that spread on the pool's face like a pattern being sewn.
Liora's bead flared and she sucked breath in sharp. "It's reading the marker," she whispered. "It recognizes the sigil language. It's—" She stopped, searching for a word that would not make things larger than they were.
"Curious?" Arin offered.
"Cautious," Kael said, though his voice was the very opposite. He felt the urge to cross, to meet that inquiry with his own, but the rules Liora had set were a rope around his feet. They had come to learn, not to be swallowed.
The creature tapped the pool again, then tilted its head and produced a sound that was not a note but a pattern: a series of clicks and a low, almost human syllable that slid like a pebble down a mossy slope. The sound reached Kael's ears and, strange and bright, the shadow-sleeve answered with a correspondingly small movement—an echoed pattern of knots and loops that the creature watched with bright, unreadable patience.
It was communication of a sort. Not speech, not yet, but a gentle negotiation across a seam. Liora's breath hitched and she waved them both back with a sharp finger. "Do not move," she said. "Observe. Record."
Kael obeyed because observation had become a habit grafted to his ribs. He watched the creature's limbs unroll like measuring tapes. It did not try to attack the surface. It interacted with the marker as if with tools: tapping, drawing, listening. When it found the pattern in the rune, it flicked a motion like a key turning and the bead on Liora's lens thrummed.
Then something else happened: from somewhere deeper in the other side, a sound answered the creature's tapping—a far rumble that made the strange tree-angles vibrate. The creature hunched for a moment, and its eyes blazed with a quick, animal fear. It glanced at Kael, then at the seam between them, and in a motion that tasted of decision, it reached out and set something on the pool's rim.
It was small: a scale, dark and glinting like oil, shaped like the petal of a leaf. When Kael picked it up, it was warm in his palm and left a faint pattern of runes across his skin for a breath. The creature clicked its sound again—the pattern softer now—and retreated with the same careful steps that had brought it out.
Liora grabbed the scale with gloved fingers and held it to the bead. The runes flared and then cooled into lines she could trace. "A token," she breathed. "A gift—or a marker. It's…not a trap, not of immediate malice. The other side has beings that notice our markers and answer them. This one answered with a token and then retreated. That's a good sign."
Kael's chest felt like a tight drum. He should have felt triumph; instead he felt the double edge of the world he had always carried: wonder braided through threat. The creature's gift was a bridge and a warning both. It proved that the pool led to a place with life and law—not merely an empty passage meant to bruise things on the way through.
They withdrew then, slowly, each motion measured by Liora's bead and the soft voice of the coin-plate. Kael bent and let the braid of shadow fold him like a sleeve; when his boots found Emberfall-ground again the other air released him with a small sigh. The creature watched once more from the far bank, then turned and vanished into the other world's tilt of trees.
Back at the terrace they sat in a circle that had the air of an emergency meeting of people who had just seen one more truth than they expected to hold. Liora's hands shook in a way that was part exhaustion and part delight. She traced the scale's runes and wrote them down carefully.
"It's safe—relatively," she said, but the caution in her voice was heavy with caveats. "Safe because it did not attack us and because it answered in a token. Not safe because the crossing brands things and because something out there noticed us. Not safe because doors bring visitors both kind and cruel."
Arin tried his bravest grin but could not make it steady. "It handed us a scale like a thank-you note. That's a start."
Kael looked at the scale in Liora's palm and felt the shadow along his wrist hum as if pleased to have proof. He put his thumb to the faint runic mark that had brushed his skin and felt—briefly—a cold like the belly of a coin. He wrote into his notebook: First crossing — creature contact. Token: scale. Other-side life present. Marked on skin. Rules hold. Return with more supplies & a map-maker.
The last line he wrote with slow resolve. They had found a doorway and they had met someone—something—on the far side that had chosen to answer instead of attack. That choice changed everything. Doors were no longer only danger or only treasure; they were a place where other wills moved, where negotiation happened, where treaties could be struck or broken.
They walked back toward Emberfall carrying their new ledger entry like a weight both useful and dangerous. The scale lay in Liora's palm like a dark promise. The coin-plate hummed faintly in the bag, pleased to be recognized. The shadow at Kael's wrist breathed steady as a thing that had learned new language.
At the village edge they paused and looked back: the pool lay black and patient, a mouth that had breathed them out and then closed. Emberfall's roofs glittered in the pale afternoon. Kael tucked the notebook close to his chest. The world had been stitched with new seams. They had found one of the threads. Now they needed maps and more tools, and perhaps, as Kess had said, someone who had made a living reading old doors.