Page 57 of Whisper of Nightmares

She finds chambers that have clearly gone unused for months, their furnishings shrouded beneath dust. A library whose shelves hold more empty spaces than books. A music room with instruments missing their strings. An armory, stripped nearly bare, with only hooks and brackets remaining where weapons once hung.

In one room, Euphemia discovers a reliquary with a few strange artifacts. Most of the displays have been empty, but a few relics survived the manor’s disembowelment. Among them is a small figurine of a beautiful woman wrapped in a cloak of feathers, her face work smooth with age. Euphemia suspects she is one of the old gods her new family might still worship, though she couldn’t say which one.

More than anything, it’s the absence she notices. It seeps from every corner of the manor, leaving behind empty shelves, bare hooks, and pale patches on the walls where something once hung.

Even the rooms that remain intact feel as though they are waiting for something to be returned.

Eventually, she finds herself standing at the foot of Dagfinn’s tower. She’s tempted to climb back up. She wants to set eyes upon the man who is her husband, just once.

But the climb would be pointless. Kelda locked the door last night, and as far as Euphemia can tell, she is the only one with a key.

Coming back through the eastern corridor, Euphemia finds herself nearing her own bedchamber just as exhaustion starts to settle in. The journey north had been a grueling one, and her body has not yet had enough time to recover.

Through a window, she catches the first hint of the sunset along the horizon. Perhaps it would be wise to retire for the evening and save the rest of her exploration for another day.

Until the stench of sulfur draws her attention.

It’s so out of place here in this sea-salted manor that it begs her to stop.

It’s then that Euphemia realizes she’s in the same corridor she stumbled through earlier—the one where the sconce lit itself. Perhaps that is what she’s smelling. Leftover smoke from a doused flame. Nothing more.

Only, the sconce at the end of the otherwise dark hall is still lit. The flame stands tall, as if the breeze cannot quite reach it. Cast in its unwavering glow, the strange door emerges from darkness once more, a heavy, round mechanism protruding from its center.

Curiosity draws her nearer.

The ornate rug barely compresses beneath her shoes, as if this hallway has been walked down for years. She takes another step, the smoky fumes thickening as she draws nearer the door at the end of the hallway.

Now that she’s closer, she notices etchings in the oak.

All along the arched frame are runes, a language her unlearned eyes cannot decipher but one that seems similar to those carved outside Dagfinn’s door.

But it’s the large, iron disk in the center of the door that she cannot tear her eyes from.

At first, Euphemia chalks it up to an intricate design, like the sculpted stonework of a cathedral or the ornate carvings in the bedposts of her bedchamber.

But as she examines the door more closely, she notes the absence of a doorknob or keyhole. The iron centerpiece acts as both, and she uncovers with increasing fascination that it is more than a singular slab. Five interlocking pieces, she realizes.

When she presses her hand against one, it shifts beneath her palm.

Euphemia traces eager fingertips along the intricate designs. The metal is cold, and each circular shape is a different shade of grey—one bright silver, one pale grey, one charcoal, and one nearly black.

She cocks her head, studying the rings. They remind her of a ship’s wheel, though she cannot imagine what such a mechanism could possibly be doing here. But the longer she stares, the better sense she develops of what she’s looking at. It seems as though the five circles might form a cohesive image when placed in the correct positioning.

Oh, how her mind buzzes with excitement. It’s the same sort of fascination she’d be rapt with anytime she and her father had brewed a particularly tricky ale and needed to figure out how to rescue it. She had always loved the moment when something impossible began to reveal its solution.

Bringing her other hand to the mechanism, Euphemia rotates the innermost wheel.

As she does, the outer ring begins twisting as well, but in the opposite direction.

Exhilaration buzzes in her chest.

The manor disappears behind her, lost into oblivion.

Euphemia takes turns rotating each wheel individually. She watches the others that move as a response, noting which rings cause which reactions. Rotating one wheel always makes another turn as well. Sometimes it shifts two of them. And usually they move in opposite directions, making it difficult to anticipate what part of the ring will land in any given position whenever she moves another.

“Impossible,” she mutters to herself after a dozen attempts. Yet there is breathless elation in her voice, and her deft hands never slow. They never stray far from the problem before her now, not now that she is desperate to solve it.

She’s not sure how much time has passed, but eventually, she has the center and second rings aligned. She can tell because of the grooves along the iron, even if she cannot yet deduce the larger image she’s building toward.