Chapter 61. The White Between

Light didn’t blind. It erased.

No weight. No breath. Just that clean, absolute white and the faintest sense of moving without a body. I could have floated there forever if I were the kind of thing that drifted.

I am not.

A sound threaded the blank—three small taps, like knuckles testing wood. Then a voice I knew in my bones and feared like an honest mirror.

Door, child, the Moon said. Not window.

“I tried,” I said, or thought I did. The words came out as ripples in the light. “It stuck.”

Because you asked it to be gentle, she said, almost amused. You are not gentle.

The light thinned. Shapes edged in—root, stone, a basin cracked down its perfect middle. Kael’s hand tight on my wrist, Orla’s palm flat on the door, Mavienne’s mouth moving around a word she would not give voice. The white pressed in again. I reached for whatever was left of my spine.

Three tethers, the Moon said, and the command softened