28. Asha
Asha
Istare at the line in the stone, and fury burns through me so hard it almost steadies me.
It’s here. Under my hands. Under SilverGate. Buried beneath traps and dead things and enough old wardwork to make an entire realm choke. My way home has been sitting under this academy while I’ve been forced to smile at lecturers and pretend I’m less than I am.
I set the spear aside and press my fingertips to the exposed script.
Cold slams up my arm, and the chamber quivers.
“Careful,” Leith says, low and sharp.
“I am being careful,” I snap, though the floor is already answering me in dull gold flashes beneath the broken silver.
The line brightens under my fingers. Symbols rise from the crack, one after another, burning through the dust in thin strokes of gold and purple. I know every mark. I know what they say. I know what they demand.
It’s a ritual.
My throat locks the second I try to speak.
“Fuck off,” I whisper.
Tobin watches the script with ruthless focus. “It’s a ritual,” he says as if he read my thoughts.
“What kind of ritual?” Hale asks.
“One that will open the gate,” I reply absently, still staring at it.
“I gathered,” he says dryly. “I meant, what do we have to do to open it?”
I stare at the marks until my eyes blur. “I don’t know.”
“I thought you could read it,” Tobin says gently.
“I can, but I can’t,” I say, frustrated. “I know how, but it scrambles in my brain. This fucking realm is fucking with me. I don’t fucking belong here!” Tears prick my eyes again, and I hate it. I hate this weakness.
A hand closes over mine before I can do something stupid like rip the whole chamber open by force.
Tobin.
His fingers slide between mine and pull my hand gently off the script. “Look at me.”
“I’m going to set this realm on fire.”
“Probably,” he says. “Later.”
I drag my stare up to his silver eyes and try not to scream. “I can read it and I still can’t fucking use it.”
Hale drops into a crouch at my side, the heat and aggression held on a leash that looks close to snapping. “Then we work round it.”
“It isn’t a maths problem.”
“No,” Leith says from the crack in the floor. “It’s an incompatibility problem, a ward problem, and very likely a blood problem.”
That gets my attention through the agony. I look at him sharply. “Blood?”
He doesn’t look away from the exposed script. “Old gates usually want identity, intent, and power. If it’s been buried, sealed, and dressed in anchor constructs, then whoever hid it wanted it sleeping until the right person came to wake it.”
“The right person being me,” I mutter.
“Obviously,” Hale says.
The gold-purple lines pulse, and this time the light doesn’t stay in the floor.
It climbs.
Gold and purple thread up my wrist in thin lines, circling my skin before sinking in under the surface. Pain follows, not enough to drop me, enough to make my breath catch.
Tobin’s grip on my hand tightens. He studies the marks moving under my skin with that infuriatingly calm focus that makes me want to climb him and throttle him in equal measure. “It’s not attacking.”
“That is a bold assumption.”
“No. It’s calibrating.”
Leith rises from his crouch and comes closer, blue eyes fixed on my arm. “He’s right.”
A low vibration moves through the chamber floor. The broken silver lines spark, then die back as if whatever sits under them no longer gives a shit about SilverGate’s wards. The old gate wants me.
I wrench my arm back, but the marks stay under my skin, glowing in thin veins of gold and purple that crawl towards my elbow before settling. The chamber answers with another shudder.
“Well,” I say through clenched teeth. “That feels invasive.”
Tobin still has hold of my hand. “Can you feel what it’s doing?”
“Yes.” I swallow against the pressure climbing into my shoulder. “It knows me.”
Hale’s stare drops to the glowing lines under my skin, and his face turns murderous. “Then we cut it out.”
“No,” Leith says at once. “If you start hacking bits off her because a buried gate got excited, you’ll find out what I do to things that damage her.”
“That wasn’t literal.”
“It sounded very literal.”
I jerk my hand from Tobin’s and brace my palm on the stone to steady myself. The floor hums under me. The magic is older. Mine, but not obedient. Not yet.
The script in the seam changes.
“We need that book,” I state. “The one that keeps vanishing. It will tell me how to open this gate.”
“How do you know?” Hale asks.
“It’s a ritual, but it’s scrambled. I don’t know what it wants. Until I can unscramble it, I’m stuck here.”
Tobin glances at Leith. “Can you get us back up there without this place dropping on our heads?”
Leith looks round the chamber once, taking in the broken seams, the dead constructs, the cracked floor. “Probably.”
“Comforting,” I mutter.
Hale retrieves the spear, snaps the shaft across his knee and wields both in his hands. “We go now. We find the book, we come back with it, a plan, and preferably fewer fucking ghosts.”
“I don’t want to leave,” I whisper.
“You are leaving because you’re bleeding through your shirt and whatever that thing just put under your skin is still moving.”
I look down. He isn’t wrong. The gold-purple lines have gone dim, but they haven’t vanished. They sit under my skin in a deliberate pattern, not random, not wild. A mark, a key, a fucking insult.
Leith moves back towards the passage. “Move. The chamber is trying to rebuild the outer ring.”
That gets me on my feet.
I shove upright, and the room tilts for a second. Hale is in front of me before I can pretend otherwise.
His hand lands at my waist, firm and possessive. “Steady.”
I grip his shoulder anyway until the floor stops trying to move under me.
Tobin’s attention stays on my arm. “The pattern has stopped spreading.”
“For now,” Leith says. He is already halfway to the passage, watching the walls and the damaged seams with that cold focus of his. “I’d prefer not to discover what phase two looks like.”
That gets all of us moving.
I force my legs into action. Every part of me objects, especially my side, which pulls where I was cut. My arm throbs with the buried script. My pride is having a truly dreadful morning.
The passage feels narrower on the way out. Airless.
Silver lines pulse weakly under our feet. The broken chamber behind us gives off low grinding sounds that set my nerves on edge. I keep expecting another construct to drag itself out of the wall and force us back into a fight I’m in no mood to enjoy.
Hale walks too close behind me. Tobin stays in front, which is even more irritating because it means they’ve silently decided I’m not to be trusted near old gate magic on my own. Leith takes the lead without making a sound, which is somehow the most unnerving position of all.
The stairwell appears ahead, black stone curling upwards in a tight spiral. Relief punches through me so fast I go lightheaded. Then the marks under my skin flare once. The wall to my right answers with a low metallic scrape, then they disappear.
“Good news or bad?” Hale asks from behind me.
“Who knows? Let’s just get back to the library so we can figure out how to find that book.”
We hit the stairs and take them as quickly as we can. By the time we reach the hidden door in the library stacks, my lungs are burning, and my temper is one hard shove from becoming divine intervention.
We spill into the deities section like we haven’t just crawled out from under the academy after fighting dead things and finding my gate. Leith shoves the book back into place, and the shelves slide silently closed.
The library is too calm.
The candles drift without flickering, the shelves have gone quiet, and the librarian is nowhere to be found, which should feel like a mercy but doesn’t, because what replaces all of it is a deep, watching silence that prickles along my skin and tells me this place has noticed.
I straighten slowly and press my hand over the tear in my top where blood has dried tacky against my side. “I don’t like this.”
“That makes four of us,” Hale says.
Tobin turns in a slow circle, silver eyes scanning the aisles. “Something shifted while we were below.”
“Brilliant,” I mutter. “Could this place be any more irritating?”
“Yes,” Leith says. “Don’t challenge it.”
I glare at him on principle, then stop because a soft sound carries through the deities section.
A page turning.
We all hear it.
It comes from the far end of the aisle, where the shelves should meet the stone wall and nothing else. Instead, a book lies open on a pedestal that absolutely was not there before.
Hale’s hand brushes my lower back at once. “Don’t run at it.”
“I wasn’t going to run.”
“You were,” Tobin murmurs.
“Okay, I was. I don’t want to let it vanish again.”
“Approach it as you would a scared rabbit.”
I scowl at him. “And that would be how? I usually just lunge at stuff.”
He rolls his eyes. “Carefully, quietly, hands where the book can see them.”
“I’m not sneaking up on a book,” I inform him.
“Try anyway.”
I take a breath, then start forward, slow enough to satisfy their collective need to manage me and fast enough to satisfy mine.
My boots make almost no sound on the stone floor.
The open book waits on its pedestal with maddening composure, pages lit by a low purple-gold glow that spills across the wood beneath it.
It’s the same book. I know it before I reach it. The same weight in the air. The same ancient recognition that sinks its claws into me and refuses to let go.
I stop an arm’s length away.
The page turns on its own.
“Oh, good,” I murmur. “You are in one of your theatrical moods.”
The book ignores that and settles on a spread unlike the map.
Dense script fills both pages, written in the same beautiful, impossible language that lives in my bones and dies in my throat every time I try to use it.
A painted diagram sits beneath the text.
A circle. Four points around it. A central mark that makes the lines under my skin flare in answer.
My pulse jumps.
Tobin steps up beside me, not touching, just close enough to annoy me. “Can you read any of it?”
“All of it, and then it blurs,” I say, staring at the script.
I brace one hand on the pedestal and force myself to focus. The language lands in me whole, then breaks apart the second I try to hold it. Meaning flickers. Structure. Demands. The book is trying to help, but this realm still keeps putting a knife through the centre of every useful thought.
Then it shows me a diagram. Something I can see and understand. It’s a basic sketch with stick men, and I snort. “It’s dumbing it down for this realm,” I snicker.
“Oh?” Leith says, moving closer, probably quicker than he should have.
The book twitches
“Yeah. It wants three anchors,” I say slowly.
Hale exhales sharply behind me. “Us.”
The book flashes once.
I look over my shoulder. “Well done. You can identify yourselves from stick figures.”
“Fuck off,” he says, though there’s no real heat in it.
Tobin studies the page with narrowed eyes. “If it wants anchors, that tracks with what we found below.”
“And one in the middle,” Leith says.
My arm burns.
I drag my stare back to the diagram. The central mark pulses again, directly over a drawn figure standing in the middle of the circle. Me. Obviously me. The four points are marked with functions. The book tries to offer more, and I catch fragments before they slip.
I hiss out a breath. “It needs specific currents.”
Tobin goes still. “What did you get?”
“Power, death, fire and sight. Remember that!” It’s gone from my mind, and I growl. “It’s gone. Did you remember?”
“Yes,” Tobin says. “Power, death, fire and sight.”
I drag my hand over my face and try not to lose my mind in the middle of the library. “Good. Excellent. We’ve got stick figures, half a ritual, and a cursed pop-up book that enjoys humiliating me.”
The page turns again.
A second diagram appears beneath the first. The same circle. The same central mark. Three figures around it and one set apart, standing just beyond the outer edge with a line connecting inward.
I frown. “No. Not three anchors and me. Four functions total.”
Tobin steps closer. “Show me.”
“It’s showing you,” I snap. “You have eyes.”
“It’s showing me shapes. You have context.”
That annoying calm of his almost pushes me into violence. “Leith and Hale stand closest. Tobin and I are opposite each other.”
Leith’s expression hardens by a fraction. “That matters.”
“Yes,” I breathe out, and then the book vanishes again. “Dammit!” I snarl and slam my hand on the pedestal. “It’s not downstairs where we were. It’s somewhere else.”
“Where?” Hales asks.
I glare at him. “If I knew that, we’d be standing there already.” I hate this fucking realm.