Despite the living sun outside, the High Manor remained hollow, a stone ribcage holding only the cold.

  When they reached the Main Dining Hall, Finlay halted.

  The door.

  A monolithic slab of steel that devoured the ceiling, forcing him to crane his neck just to find the lower edges of its engravings. The Crown and Brambles—the Esterra coat of arms—carved into dark, unforgiving metal. Even at a distance it radiated a biting frost that needled his skin, gnawing beneath the pores.

  Forged from Sorrow-Steel—an extreme-grade substance formed over millennia in the Eastern Depths—this slab weighed dozens of tons. Or more. He'd stopped trying to calculate it after the first hundred attempts.

  He'd thrown himself against this door more times than he could count.

  It wouldn't budge.

  His shoulders ached with the memory before he'd even touched it.

  He could still hear them—muffled across the steel. The clink of silver. Shared laughter. The warmth of a table he couldn't reach. He'd stood on this side of it as a child, pressing his hands flat against the cold, and it hadn't cared. The door simply there, a silent testament to the precise distance between what he was and what this Family required.

  Because no amount of training fixed it. The door was a boundary between the Kindled and the dregs. A wall a common man could spend a lifetime screaming at and never move an inch.

  He almost laughed.

  A sharp, barbed promise took root in his ribs:

  He reached out. His fingertips grazed the frost-slicked surface.

  And froze.

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  Every hair on his nape prickled.

  The texture. That unnatural, light-devouring pulse within the metal. It wasn't just cold. It was a cold—the particular cold of something he'd encountered in a different life, in a different ruin, lying half-buried in the filth of a corner, a weight he'd spent a week trying to lift.

  His mind flashed to the Sovereign's Blade. The arrogant bastard that had watched him die in the dirt, years from now. Never moved an inch. Gloated. He had assumed it was unique: a singular artifact, strange and ancient.

  But this door.

  This was more than the same Sorrow-Steel. It was the same The same lightless , the same soul-gnawing void that didn't just touch the skin but reached past it, past the flesh, toward something further in.

  The Door. The Sword.

  Three points. One shape.

  He didn't know what it meant yet. The answer was buried in the locked wreckage of his future memories, biding its time. But the connection existed. He could feel it the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue: not there, but Getting closer.

  His hand found the Beggar's Sword without permission. Clenched it.

  "What are you waiting for? Let's go."

  Remy stepped past him. Her small, pale palm met the hungry steel—and the door her. With a wet, guttural inhale, it yielded.

  Inviting him in.

  He stood motionless, his shadow stretching thin against the threshold. A grinding mill of thoughts revolved in his head, driving him layer by layer into the dark.

  Remy glanced back. Read his face with the efficiency of someone who had been reading it for nineteen years.

  Then, without ceremony, she unwound the wool from her own neck. Rose onto her tiptoes. Looped it back around his.

  The same fibers. Still carrying the cold-warmth of her.

  "Stay sane."

  "I'm not crazy."

  "You are."

  He stood there a moment longer, the scarf at his throat, the door open, the hall beyond it exhaling its brand of cold into the hallway. He thought of the Blade in his future corner. He thought of this door and the child who had pressed his hands flat against it and gone hungry on the wrong side of it.

  He thought of the trinity and its patient, unlit shape.

  Finlay stepped forward. The Sorrow-Steel's aura washed over him: not a baptism, just the cold acknowledging him the way it always had. Impassive. Waiting.

  He crossed the threshold.

  The hall received him in silence.

  Around the great table, the Esterra Court was already assembled—every face a study in the particular blankness of people who had decided, long ago, how they felt about the person now entering the room.

  At the head of the table, the chair was not empty.