Knock. Knock. Knock.

  The sound rolled through the room in slow, measured pulses, each impact sending a tremor up Kitai’s spine. The air in the library turned unnaturally still. The shelves, the books, even the lantern flames seemed to hold their breath.

  No one moved. No one spoke.

  The Singer exhaled first, breaking the silence. “Saon. It’s ready. We need to go.” His tone was steady, but his eyes had gone dark red, the glow inside them pulsing like a slow, deliberate heartbeat.

  From the folds of his cloak, he drew a jade ring and slipped it onto the pinky of his left hand.

  Saon jerked out of his daze and grabbed Kitai by the wrist, pulling her toward the glyph carved into the floorboards. Her feet dragged. Her chest was heavy, anchored by something that felt like dread and stubbornness tangled together.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  The door shuddered as if something outside was testing the hinges. Fog began to push through the gaps, thick and slow, curling across the floor like it knew where it was going.

  Knock—

  With a sharp crack, the wood shattered inward.

  The basement door flew off its frame, spinning across the room. It missed Kitai by inches and slammed into the far wall, splintering on impact. Her bag swung forward and smacked her in the face, knocking her off balance.

  “Careful,” Saon snapped, voice tight. A Vermillion ring slid onto his right index finger as naturally as breathing.

  Kitai barely heard him. The fog was already spilling into the room in earnest, swallowing the warm glow of the lantern light. The temperature dropped, a creeping, marrow-deep cold that made the hair on her arms stand on end.

  Something’s coming, she thought. Something wrong.

  The Singer’s hand closed over her shoulder, firm and grounding. “Focus on me, Kitai.” His voice was calm, but the grip said hurry. “Don’t turn around. Step onto the glyph and say, ‘To escape is to forget, and to forget is to be remembered.’”

  His eyes contradicted his tone. The red in his crystals had deepened, streaked through with a frantic yellow core that flickered like a trapped flame. Whatever he was looking at over her shoulder, it was getting closer.

  He was whispering under his breath, words she couldn’t fully catch.

  Kitai swallowed against the dryness in her throat and forced herself to move. One step. Then another. She shut her eyes, took a shaking breath, and stepped onto the glyph.

  Then—

  “Wait. Don’t go.”

  She froze.

  The voice was Erika Deshawn’s. Warm, familiar, polished by years of lectures and soft disappointment.

  Kitai’s eyes flew open. She turned, ignoring the Singer’s warning.

  Mrs. Deshawn?

  But the thing in the doorway was not her mother.

  She slapped both hands over her mouth, even though she no longer needed to breathe.

  The creature had too many limbs. Skeletal appendages extended from its torso at mismatched angles, some dragging along the floor, some curling up toward the ceiling. Its skin—or what passed for skin—gleamed with thick, oil-black liquid that never dripped, never pooled. It moved with eerie grace, gliding instead of walking, its head smooth and featureless, yet somehow tilted as if it were staring right at her.

  The wrongness of it seeped into her bones. Staring at it felt like trying to look directly at a nightmare.

  “Say the words, Kitai!” Saon’s voice cracked, raw with urgency. He drew his shortsword, the blade trembling in his hand. Wind coiled faintly along its edge. “You don’t have a stable Frame yet! If it touches you, you’ll be consumed or corrupted!”

  The Singer spun her back to face him, fingers tightening on her shoulders. “It’s alright,” he said, and somehow his voice softened. “We can handle a Nyx-born. We’ll be right behind you.”

  Nyx-born.

  The name landed like an omen.

  Kitai stole one last glance over her shoulder. The creature’s limbs uncurled further, reaching, tasting the air.

  Her fingers flew to the bag, checking that it was still strapped across her torso. The compass inside seemed to hum against her.

  Whatever the wind courier had handed her, it mattered. She felt that much in her bones.

  She took a breath that shook all the way down and whispered, “To escape is to forget, and to forget is to be remembered.”

  The glyph flared under her feet. A pale blue light spread outward in concentric rings, brightening until it was almost white. The glow climbed her legs, wrapped around her torso, swallowed her vision.

  The Nyx-born screamed.

  The sound was wrong—distorted, like a chorus of voices trying to scream through the same throat. It lunged, limbs whipping forward.

  Wind ripped up from the floor, forming tendrils that lashed around its arms and legs, locking them in place. The Nyx-born thrashed, black liquid splattering across books and floorboards, but the invisible shackles held.

  Saon blurred to her side, his right arm engulfed in a swirling vortex of air threaded with blue glyphs. “I can’t hold it long,” he gritted out. “But this should buy us enough time.”

  The light around Kitai grew harsher, edges fraying. She could feel herself slipping—out of the room, out of her own weight.

  The glyph began to flicker.

  Saon tightened his grip on her arm. “If we don’t come through in a few minutes, don’t wait,” he said quickly. “Look for the lights in the distance. Find Lafiya. Show them your ring.”

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  Her vision blurred as the magic yanked at her, pulling her loose from the scene.

  Saon’s voice chased her into the light.

  “Trust your gut. Trust nothing else.”

  Then—

  The world shattered into white.

  And Kitai fell into the dark.

  She stirred.

  Movement came first. A slow, drifting motion, as if she were being carried on an invisible current. She wasn’t standing. She wasn’t lying down. She was simply… suspended.

  Then understanding struck like a dropped stone.

  She was falling.

  The void around her stretched in every direction, an endless, ink-black expanse that swallowed depth and distance. Her own faint glow was the only light: her spectral body outlined in dim radiance, like moonlight trapped in glass.

  She felt wrong inside her own skin. Too light. Too hollow. Every shift of direction turned her stomach,she had no real sense of up or down. All she knew was her descent.

  Time thinned out. Minutes, hours, days blurred into a single, stretched moment. Sometimes she felt herself tipping forward. Sometimes sideways. Sometimes backward. The fall never stopped, only changed trajectory, like a slow, cruel carousel.

  When she thought she would break from the vertigo alone—

  It ended.

  The invisible pull released her, and Kitai’s motion eased into a weightless float. She blinked, breath coming in slow, shallow pulls. The nausea faded, leaving only wary exhaustion.

  Silence pressed in. Not the silence of an empty room, but a vast, cosmic hush. The kind that made her feel small and seen at the same time.

  She realized she was still holding the bag. Her fingers were locked around the strap. Somehow, despite the fall, she hadn’t let go.

  Her voice came out small. “Is this… the Forgotten Plane?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  A voice.

  Not her own.

  The words slithered out from the void itself, as if the abyss had leaned in to answer her.

  “This is just a Couloir des ames.”

  A chill crawled up her spine. Who said that?

  Kitai’s pulse hammered. She twisted in place, scanning the blackness. “Who’s there?!”

  Silence.

  Then, the voice sighed, closer this time. “Maybe a little louder. The sleeping souls around you would love a soul frame to latch onto.”

  Kitai’s breath hitched. She stilled.

  Her gaze darted through the darkness, straining to see something—anything.

  Then, from the void, they came.

  A slow procession of small white lights, bobbing toward her like distant lanterns floating on an unseen current. They moved with an eerie, deliberate rhythm, murmuring in a language she couldn’t understand—but somehow, she knew it.

  The words brushed against her soul, laced with a nostalgia that wasn’t hers.

  The orbs surrounded her, drifting close—too close. Kitai stiffened as she noticed one hovering near her bag, almost as if it were trying to peer inside.

  “Is that what these orbs are?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yes, little one. A Couloir des ames is just a fancy name for the waiting room where souls linger before they are reborn.”

  Her stomach tightened. “I didn’t die,” she muttered. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

  She lifted the compass and nudged one of the orbs away from the bag with its edge. The orb drifted aside, then lazily floated back as if unconcerned.

  “No, you didn’t,” the voice replied. There was a pause, then a wry addition. “Not recently, anyway.”

  Her heart skipped. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Your soul is old,” the voice said. “Old enough to have seen planes rise and fall. Old enough to have been broken and stitched more than once. Almost primordial.”

  Her breathing quickened. “Then where are you?” she demanded. “Why can’t I see you?”

  “You’re looking in the wrong direction,” the voice replied. There was a faint smile in it now. “I’m not out there, little one.”

  She realized her spectral body had been humming faintly every time the voice spoke, as if something in her resonated with the sound.

  Her chest tightened. “It’s… almost like my frame is reacting to your voice.”

  “It isn’t reacting,” the voice said gently. “It’s recognizing.”

  The words settled over her like a weight.

  “I am a piece of you,” it continued. “A shard of your Soulframe that was cut away and left here, waiting. When you began crossing planes, your frame felt the absence. So it diverted you, just for a moment, to pick me up.”

  Kitai opened her mouth to argue, to say this was impossible, ridiculous, too much—but something tugged at her.

  A slow, insistent pull.

  Her hands blurred at the edges again. Lines of her form unraveled in glowing threads.

  The orbs around her recoiled, scooting back as if in respect or fear.

  “Seems our time is up,” the voice sighed. “I look forward to seeing you again. Waiting is boring.”

  Her vision blurred, the darkness closing in.

  Through the dim, something moved.

  A shape stepped out of the black, just at the edge of her fading sight. Taller than her. Sharper. A silhouette with spiraling red hair, glyphs spinning lazily around her like pale embers. The face was obscured, lit only by the white markings floating near her cheeks.

  The figure tilted its head, as if studying her.

  Then winked.

  “Knock him dead,” the figure murmured.

  The words echoed inside Kitai instead of outside.

  The last of her light unraveled.

  And then there was nothing at all.