There was no door.
Vane had expected one, though he had never admitted it even to himself. Some visible threshold. A line in the world. A curtain of light. One clean instant in which here became there.
The ring offered none of those things.
It did not open.
It considered them.
The sensation began at Vane's hands.
The low, unnatural hum he had felt in the yard pressed suddenly against his skin, no longer distant, no longer buried beneath stone. It moved over him with deliberate patience—not through flesh or bone, but along the four currents housed within him, tracing each one as though following the seams of something it had not yet decided to trust.
The Warlord current came first.
Something vast touched it, weighed it, and let it go.
Then the Celestial Heart.
Then Samsara.
Then Dreamscape.
Each was isolated from the others. Examined without haste. Read one after another, as if Vane were a page and some ancient intelligence had chosen to study him sentence by sentence.
