Chapter 71. You Made Me Forget

The gate wasn’t a door.

It wasn’t even stone.

It was a curve in the world—a vast, arched seam where the floor stopped being stone and became something older. The air tasted like smoke, like old ash soaked in river water, and the silence hummed. Not absence of sound. The presence of something holding back.

Adria approached slowly.

The ring burned cold.

Royce kept two steps behind her.

“This is what they were afraid of,” he said. “Not that you would fail to open it. That you would.”

She stopped a foot from the arch.

The surface shimmered faintly, like the skin of still water, reflecting nothing. No face. No light. No time. Just… waiting.

“What’s behind it?” she asked.

“No one knows.”

“Not even you?”

“I was never meant to see this,” he said. “I wasn’t even meant to remember the path here. But the night they tried to erase me—I saw it.”

Adria turned slightly.

“The glyphs in my blood… the glyphs in the ri