Chapter Twenty
Time had gone slippery. Days bled into nights and back into mornings, and I couldn't tell exactly how long we'd been down here.
The Sanctum had a strange way of warping it.
Some mornings felt like we'd only just arrived.
Other times it felt like weeks had passed without any of us noticing.
I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a real sunrise, or felt actual wind on my face instead of the false, temperate air this place kept circulating through vents that led nowhere anyone had found yet.
I missed my life. My friends. Aria, who'd probably worn a groove into the floor of my old room by now , or keeping all the things in my home and life running for me.
The bakery, sitting closed and quiet with nobody there to open it, the cinnamon rolls I hadn't gotten to make for the festival, the whole town wondering, probably, where the Halloway girl had disappeared to.
We were all trying to find our way out, but the answers kept slipping past us.
Each day we gathered around the couches in the lounge, poring over old texts stacked three deep on every surface, Cian and Dad walking us through the spells they'd already tried over the years while Rowan, Orias and I threw in ideas of our own — half of them useless, most of them already attempted, but nobody wanted to be the one who stopped trying first.
"What about a blood binding?" Orias asked one afternoon, flipping through a book so old the pages had gone soft and brown at the edges. "You're both Thorne blood. Amber's got Rose blood. Maybe the door responds to something like that instead of a spell."
"Tried it a few years ago, remember," Cian said, not even looking up from his own book. "Three separate variations. Door didn't so much as flicker."
"What about combining it with the transportation spell you used for the journal?" I asked.
Dad shook his head. "Tried that too, actually. Took everything I had left that week and got us nothing but a headache each."
Orias slumped back against the couch, tossing the book aside with a groan. "We're just naming things at this point, aren't we."
"Pretty much," Rowan said, though he didn't sound annoyed by it, just tired in the same worn-down way we all were most days now.
There was always something that felt just out of reach, like a door we couldn't quite find the key to, no matter how many keys we tried making from scratch.
Between the research, we ate together, talked, tried to fill in years of missing time. The twins and Cian had started finding their rhythm again, the awkwardness of the gap between them fading a little more every day. I could see how much it meant to them to have each other back.
Even if we were stuck in a fucking tree like something out of a fairytale gone wrong.
"So," Orias said one evening, sprawled across an armchair with his boots up on the arm despite Dad's repeated, half-hearted objections to it, "what did you two even do down here for entertainment, before we showed up? Please tell me it wasn't just reading."
"It was mostly reading," Cian admitted.
"That's tragic. Genuinely tragic." I sighed. "I love a good book but I need my TV sometimes."
"We played cards sometimes." He said.
"Marginally less tragic."
"I taught him three-card brag," Dad said, not looking up from his book. "He owes me approximately four hundred imaginary dollars at this point."
"I'm good for it," Cian snorted. "The second we get out of here, I'm opening a tab."
Spending time with Dad still felt surreal, no matter how many days passed.
He was here, alive, a little older, grey threading through his hair and lines etched into his face that hadn't been there when I was small enough to think he'd always look exactly the same.
But in every way that mattered, he was still the same man who'd taught me to ride a bike in the car park behind the bakery, who'd sung off-key lullabies when I couldn't sleep as a kid, who still remembered every embarrassing thing I'd ever done before the age of ten and brought them up at the worst possible moments.
We talked about everything, catching up on the years we'd missed in fits and starts.
Some of it felt bittersweet in a way that caught me off guard.
For every laugh we shared, there was a quiet ache tucked underneath it, the years we hadn't gotten and never would get back.
The festival planning I'd been so wrapped up in a lifetime ago was almost certainly falling apart without anyone to run it.
None of it felt like it should matter this much, given everything else going on down here, and yet the thought of it sat there anyway, heavy at the back of my mind most nights.
Today I needed a break from the endless circling.
The Sanctum had a kitchen, nothing like the one back home, but functional — pans, ingredients, an old stove that worked better than it had any right to given how long it must have sat unused before we arrived.
So I decided to bake. It was something my hands knew without my brain needing to be fully involved, and right now I needed exactly that kind of quiet.
"Pumpkin pie?" Dad asked, peering over my shoulder as I gathered ingredients.
"I figured we could all use something sweet today."
He grinned, stepping closer, already rolling his sleeves up. "Need a hand?"
"Sure." I passed him a bowl and the flour. "You can start on the dough."
He laughed, shaking his head, but took the bowl without complaint. "Haven't done this in years. You might regret asking."
"We'll see." I pulled out a tin of pumpkin puree. "Mess it up and I'm taking over."
Orias wandered in halfway through, drawn by the smell, and immediately made himself useful by eating a spoonful of filling straight from the bowl before I could stop him.
"That's for the pie."
"Quality control," he said, entirely unbothered, dodging the spoon I swatted at him with. "Someone has to make sure it's not poisoned. I'm being a hero."
"You're being a menace."
"Historically accurate description of me, yes." He hopped up onto the counter, swinging his legs, clearly settling in to watch rather than actually help. "Can I lick the bowl after? I feel like that's a sacred baking tradition I'm owed."
"You're not five." I giggled, knowing full well I wanted bowl licking rights.
"I contain multitudes, including a five-year-old's appreciation for raw pie filling."
Dad laughed at that, the first real, easy laugh I'd heard out of him since we'd found each other, and something in my chest loosened at the sound of it.
We worked together in a loose, comfortable rhythm after that, mixing and rolling and prepping the filling while Orias hovered nearby stealing bites whenever he thought nobody was watching, which was often, and badly disguised every time.
"Remember taste-testing every batch of cookie dough before it even hit the oven?" Dad asked, glancing over with a familiar twinkle in his eye.
I grinned. "Still do that. Still get a bite of everything before we sell it, just to check. Then Orias does it too."
"Some things don't change." He chuckled, and for a moment it felt like we were standing back in Halloway's Hearth, flour on both our hands, the years between us folding away entirely like they'd never happened.
When the pie finally came out, golden and steaming, we called Cian and Rowan in to join us, all five of us crowding around the small dining table with slices still too hot to properly eat, blowing on forkfuls and burning our tongues anyway because none of us had the patience to wait.
For a little while, nobody mentioned magic or monsters or the darkness creeping through the Hollow above us.
We just existed together, trading stories, laughing at Cian's increasingly embellished version of him sneaking the twins into their father's study as a kid to play with an old sword collection, Rowan rolling his eyes the whole way through while clearly enjoying every second of it, occasionally cutting in to correct a detail Cian had exaggerated for effect.
"It was one sword," Rowan said. "Singular. You make it sound like an armory."
"Artistic license."
"You nearly took my finger off." Orias added with a grin.
"That part's true, actually. Sorry about that, by the way."
As the day wore on, it started to feel almost normal.
Too normal. We'd settled into a rhythm — wake, research, eat, talk, laugh, look for answers, sleep.
Comforting. Also, if I let myself think about it too long, mildly terrifying.
I could feel it sinking into my bones, that rhythm, and part of me worried about how easy it would be to get used to it, how easy it already was.
I didn't want to get used to it.
I didn't want to be stuck here forever.
I caught Rowan's eye across the table, his fingers tapping absently against the wood while he half-listened to Cian and Dad debate some old spell they'd dug up earlier that week.
His eyes met mine, glowing faint even in the warm kitchen light, pink bleeding soft toward violet, and for a second I saw the same flicker of unease there that I felt sitting in my own chest. He was enjoying this — I knew that much, could feel it faint through the bond whenever he laughed at something Cian said — but he didn't want to be trapped here forever any more than I did.
When I glanced at Orias he looked the exact same and I almost wanted to cry.
"Amber?" Dad's voice pulled me back.
"Hm?"
"You alright?" He studied my face, brow creased.
I forced a smile. "Yeah. Just thinking."
He didn't press, though I could tell he'd clocked something was off. I was grateful he let it go. I didn't want to drag the mood down, not after a day that had actually felt good for once, maybe the first one since we'd fallen through that tree.
Hours slipped by after that, the pie long gone, and I found myself standing in the hallway outside our room with Rowan while Orias and Cian kept arguing over something in the library, their voices carrying faint through the door, punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
I broke the silence eventually. "It's turning into routine, isn't it?"
Rowan nodded, thoughtful. "It is."
"That scares me." My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "I'm happy we're all together. I love having Dad back, and I know what it means to you guys having Cian again. But—"
"You don't want to be here forever," he finished.
"I miss my life. Aria's probably worn a hole in the carpet. Nobody's opened the shop in I don't even know how long. And this place — it's not real. Not in the way that actually matters. I don't want to grow old inside somewhere that isn't real, no matter how good the pie turns out."
Rowan's hand found mine, fingers threading through.
"We'll figure it out," he said. "I'm not going to stop trying. Neither's Orias, and neither will Cian or your dad, now that they've got real reason to."
I nodded, letting the words settle, though the weight of the unknown didn't fully lift. How long could we keep living like this before the comfort of it turned into a cage we stopped noticing was even locked?
That night, lying in bed between the two of them, I couldn't shake the thought.
Rowan's breathing evened out steady beside me, Orias's arm heavy and warm across my waist on the other side, and the closeness of both of them helped dull the worst of the fear, at least enough to let my eyes stay closed.
But as I drifted off, I couldn't shake the feeling that time was slipping away from us faster than any of us wanted to admit, and if we didn't find a way out soon, we might stop wanting to look for it at all.