The Voice Beyond The Door

The voice said my name again.

Not loudly. Almost gently, the way you’d say something to a child you didn’t want to startle awake, and somehow that gentleness frightened me more than shouting would have. I took a step back before I’d decided to. My body seemed to trust it less than my mind was still trying to.

Beside me, the king’s arm shot up, flat and firm, a silent order to everyone at once. *Don’t move.* Nobody did. Not Rowan, not the guards, not even the wind, which still hadn’t found its way back into the clearing.

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“Who are you?” I asked, once I trusted my voice to hold steady. “How do you know me? Why can’t I see you?”

Three questions, thrown out one after another the way I’d thrown them at the king in the carriage. This time, at least, I got an answer — though it wasn’t the kind that satisfied anything.

“Because you have forgotten,” the voice said.

That was all. I waited for it to continue, to explain what exactly I’d forgotten or how, but the dark beyond the door stayed dark, and the silence stretched out until it felt like its own kind of answer — one I still couldn’t read.

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I glanced sideways at the king, half hoping his face would tell me something the voice wouldn’t. It did, though not what I expected. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked unsettled — not the composed, unreadable mask he wore for archers and council members and me, but something closer to dread, carefully held.

He leaned toward Rowan, voice low enough that I almost lost it beneath the sound of my own pulse.

“If it tells her everything now,” he murmured, “we lose the little time we have left.”

I didn’t understand what that meant. I understood, with total clarity, that it meant something enormous, and that he was afraid of it in a way he hadn’t been afraid of the archers on the ridge.

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“Place your hand on the stone,” the voice said, and only then did I notice it — a low pillar just inside the entrance, smooth and dark, untouched by the vines that claimed everything else in this place.

“Don’t,” the king said immediately, sharp enough to cut through the stillness.

“The choice must be hers,” the voice answered, unbothered by his interruption, patient in a way that felt older than patience should be able to feel.

I stood between them — a king who wanted to protect me from something, and a voice that wanted me to choose for myself — and understood, with a kind of tired clarity, that I was going to have to decide who I trusted more. Not because one of them had earned it. Because I was tired of being kept in the dark by people who claimed they were keeping me safe there.

I reached toward the stone.

Cold shot through my arm so fast it stole my breath.

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The instant my fingers touched it, the world came apart at the edges.

Every symbol in the forest flared at once, so bright I felt it through my closed eyelids. The ground shuddered beneath my boots, hard enough that I heard someone stumble behind me. And behind my eyes, memories poured through too fast to hold onto — fragments, flashes, gone before I could close my hand around any of them.

Laughter. A field of white flowers. A woman’s hands braiding my hair.

Then, sharper than the rest, one image held just long enough for me to see it clearly: my mother, younger than I remembered her, turning toward someone standing just outside the light, someone whose face the shadow refused to give up.

“Promise me,” she said, “she’ll never know until the forest calls her home.”

I strained toward the vision, toward whoever stood in that shadow, needing just one more second to see who had made that promise to her.

The vision shattered before I could see who answered her.

*End of Chapter 13.