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Cole stepped through.
The door didn't slam behind him. It just stopped being there. One second Ivy was reaching for his shoulder, yelling something he couldn't quite hear anymore, and the next there was only stone wall and the smell of wet earth and something else. Something like the air after lightning, sharp and wrong.
The hallway stretched ahead. Too long. The figure in Kael's coat stood at the far end, backlit by a light source Cole couldn't see. Didn't move. Just waited.
Cole's hand throbbed where he'd cut it. Blood dripped from his fingers onto the floor and the stone drank it. Actually drank it. He watched the red disappear into the cracks between the tiles like water into sand.
"Kael."
His voice came out flat. Dead. The hallway swallowed the sound before it could reach the other end.
He started walking.
The first few steps felt normal. Stone under his boots. Cold air on his face. Then the temperature dropped and kept dropping and his breath came out in white clouds. The walls pressed in. Not physically. He could still reach out and touch them at arm's length. But they felt closer. Like the space itself was shrinking.
Halfway down the hall he forgot why he was here.
Just for a second. Just a flicker. He was walking toward someone and he knew it mattered but the reason slid away like oil on water. Then it snapped back. Kael. The bounty. The seal. Ivy's warning.
Ivy.
He'd left her outside.
Cole stopped. Turned around. The door was gone. Smooth stone wall, no seam, no crack, nothing. Like it had never been there. Like he'd been in this hallway his whole life.
Behind him, footsteps.
He spun back. The figure in Kael's coat was closer now. A lot closer. Halfway down the hall when it had been at the end three seconds ago. Still backlit. Still not moving when Cole looked directly at it.
"You took long enough."
Kael's voice. Coming from the figure. Coming from deeper in the temple. Coming from everywhere and nowhere. Cole couldn't pin it down.
"What is this?" Cole's throat felt tight. "What did you do?"
"I left you a map." The figure tilted its head. "You just had to follow it."
Cole's hand went to his belt. His knife was there. His focus crystals. The small iron charm Ivy had given him three towns back, the one that was supposed to ground him if he pushed his magic too hard. He closed his fingers around it.
The charm was warm. Too warm.
It burned.
Cole dropped it and the thing hit the floor and shattered. No. Not shattered. Melted. The iron ran like wax across the stone and the smell hit him. Copper and char and underneath it something sweet and rotten.
He looked up. The figure was right in front of him now.
It wasn't Kael.
The coat was right. The height was right. The way it stood, weight on one leg, shoulders slightly hunched, that was right too. But the face was wrong. Blurred. Like someone had smeared it before the paint dried. Cole could see eyes, a mouth, the shape of a nose, but nothing stayed in place long enough for him to recognize.
"Where is he?" Cole's voice cracked. "Where's Kael?"
The not-Kael smiled. At least Cole thought it smiled. Hard to tell when the face kept shifting.
"You're standing in him."
The floor lurched. Cole staggered, caught himself against the wall. His palm hit stone and stuck. Not physically stuck. But when he tried to pull away his hand wouldn't move. He looked down.
His fingers were sinking into the wall.
No. Not sinking. Merging. The stone rippled around his knuckles like water and he could feel it creeping up his wrist, cold and patient and hungry.
Cole yanked. Hard. His hand came free with a wet sound and he fell back against the opposite wall. His palm was unmarked. No cuts, no bruises, nothing. But he could still feel the stone inside it. Moving. Spreading.
"Stop fighting." The not-Kael took a step forward. "You came here to understand. So understand."
It reached for him.
Cole threw fire.
No words, no focus, just raw panic channeled through his bleeding hand and out. The flame roared down the hallway, white-hot, bright enough to burn afterimages into his vision. It hit the not-Kael square in the chest.
The figure didn't burn. It opened its mouth and breathed the fire in. Swallowed it. The light went out.
Darkness slammed down.
Cole couldn't see. Couldn't hear. Couldn't feel the floor under his feet anymore. He was falling or floating or both. The hallway was gone. The temple was gone. There was only the dark and the sense of something vast moving around him, circling, patient.
Then a hand grabbed his collar and dragged him backward.
"Move!" Ivy's voice, hoarse and furious. "Cole, move!"
Light crashed back. The hallway snapped into place around him. Ivy had him by the coat, hauling him toward—toward what? There was no door. But she was pulling him anyway, boots skidding on stone, teeth bared.
"It's not real," she hissed. "None of it. The hallway loops. You've been walking in circles for ten minutes."
"I saw—"
"I don't care what you saw. We're leaving."
Cole dug his heels in. "Kael's—"
"Dead! He's dead and you will be too if you don't—"
She stopped. Went completely still. Her hand was still locked on his collar but she wasn't pulling anymore. Wasn't looking at him. She was staring at the floor.
At the footprints.
Cole followed her gaze. Two sets. His and hers, overlapping, scuffed, leading back the way they'd come. And underneath them, glowing faint silver, another set. Older. Burned into the stone.
Ivy let go of him. Took a step back. Her face had gone white.
"What?" Cole reached for her. "What do you see?"
She didn't answer. Just kept staring at the footprints. At the silver light. At something Cole couldn't see.
"Ivy."
She looked at him then. And Cole knew. He didn't need her to say it. The way her hands were shaking, the way her breath came shallow and quick, the way her eyes went glassy.
She was seeing her own death.
Right here. Right now. In his arms.
"No." Cole grabbed her shoulders. "No. We're leaving. Together. You said the hallway loops, so we find the edge and—"
"It doesn't matter." Her voice came out small. Faraway. "I already saw it. The moment you cut your hand, I saw it. This is where it happens."
"Then we change it."
"You don't change a footprint, Cole. You follow it or you don't."
She pushed his hands away. Turned back toward the darkness at the end of the hall. Toward the place where the not-Kael had disappeared.
"But we're not following it back out. We're following it through."
She started walking.
Cole swore and went after her.
The hallway didn't loop this time. It opened. The walls fell away and the ceiling vanished and they stepped into a chamber so big Cole couldn't see the far side. No torches. No moon. Just a pale green luminescence coming from the walls themselves, lichen or fungus or something else, casting everything in sick underwater light.
In the center of the chamber, someone was chained.
Hands above their head, wrists locked in iron, toes barely brushing the floor. The chains ran up into the darkness overhead and the figure hung limp, head down, hair covering their face.
Ivy stopped. Made a sound like she'd been punched.
Cole moved in front of her. Hand on his knife. Every nerve screaming trap.
"Who is it?" he whispered.
Ivy didn't answer.
The chained figure lifted its head.
Same blurred face. Same smeared features. But the shape was different now. Smaller. Softer. The hair was longer, dark, shot through with silver. The build was wrong for Kael. Wrong for anyone Cole had ever seen.
But Ivy knew.
She took a step forward, then another, like someone walking in a dream. Or a nightmare.
"No," she breathed. "You're dead. I watched you—"
The Taker smiled.
Its face rippled and settled into something clear. Something Cole had never seen before but Ivy had. Every day. Every time she looked in a mirror.
It was wearing her mother's face.
"Hello, little track," it said. "I've been waiting."