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Idonea drew in a careful breath and fed it more. Slow, deliberate, the way she'd learned to do when blood was already spilling, and restraint mattered more than force. The outer ring turned, not smoothly, but with resistance, metal screeching faintly.
Then the backlash came.
The vibration spiked, sharp enough to rattle her teeth. The Current surged erratically, skidding along the grooves, searching for purchase.
Lysander moved without asking. His hands closed around her forearms, solid and unyielding, pinning her in place when her knees threatened to buckle. His grip was firm enough to bruise, not cruel, but absolute.
“Don’t let it rush you,” he said low, close to her ear. “It wants you off-balance.”
She hated how right he was. Hated how her body leaned into the steadiness anyway, even as her pulse roared in her ears.
“I know,” she said, teeth clenched. “Don’t let go.”
“I won’t.”
She adjusted, easing the Current back, letting it flow like water instead of blood. The outer ring slowed, then aligned, the resonant glyphs clicking into harmony one by one until the vibration smoothed into a steady pulse.
The door quieted, waiting. Idonea turned to the inner ring.
The heat struck immediately, a sharp, punishing burn that crawled up her fingers and into her wrists. The Riven marks throbbed beneath her touch, eager and resentful, recognising her not as a key, but as a wound they remembered inflicting.
Her pulse leapt. The door drank it in.
She swallowed hard and pressed her hand flat against the jagged metal.
Pain bloomed. Not enough to break skin, but enough to make her breath falter. The ring resisted her, grinding beneath her palm, pushing back against her will with violence.
Lysander’s grip tightened. “Easy,” he murmured. “You’re bleeding into it.”
“I have to.” She gasped. “It won’t listen otherwise.” Everything wanted pieces of her.
The ring turned, grinding, each inch of movement dragging a response from her body. Sweat slicked her spine. Her vision swam, edges darkening as the Current surged and snapped, desperate for release.
The door wanted more than strength. It wanted surrender.
She forced herself to slow, to guide instead of demand, shaping the Current with memory and instinct rather than pain. The heat dulled, the resistance easing just enough to allow the ring to lock into place with a dull, satisfied thud.
Idonea sagged forward, breath ragged.
Lysander caught her fully this time, one arm braced across her chest, the other firm at her back, holding her upright as the chamber rang with the aftershock.
“One left,” he whispered.
She lifted her head and looked at the final ring. The blank grooves waited.
She didn't move from Lysander's arms, couldn't, not yet, with her legs still trembling and her breath coming ragged against his chest. But her gaze drifted to the third ring, and for the first time she truly looked at it.
Her stomach dropped. She had taken the grooves for damage. They had looked, from a few paces back, like the marks of something old and abused; a place the metal had been pried open by force, an old wound in the door.
They were not damage. They were sockets.
She stilled. She stepped forward, half-pulling him with her, until the lantern's light fell against the third ring at close range. She had to lean within a hand's breadth of the metal before her glasses resolved the carving's details. The sockets came clear.
The sockets ran in a short, careful arc along one segment of the ring; not the whole circumference, only a stretch of it. They had been set into the metal like beads pressed into fresh clay. None of them was old. The earliest had begun to settle into the surrounding metal, the edges softening, but only a little. The newest were clean cuts, the metal still bright at their lips.
Each socket held a tooth.
The world tilted. Idonea's hand flew to her mouth, a strangled sound escaping her throat. She counted them without meaning to.
