POV: Seren Adaeze
I did not sleep properly for three nights after the flower.
The first night I sat up until four in the morning with every light on, the flower in a glass of water on the kitchen counter where I could see it, doing research I kept stopping and restarting because I did not like where it was going. The species was real. Rare. Found in one documented location on earth, a small Atlantic island that appeared in a single botanical survey from 1961 and nowhere else after that. The survey listed it as inaccessible. No follow-up expedition ever filed a report.
I put the flower in the bin on the second morning and told myself that helped.
It did not help.
The second night I called Dami and talked around the edges of everything without saying any of it directly. She could tell something was wrong. She asked four times. I said I was tired and she let it go the way she does when she knows pushing will only make me close further.
The third night I went to bed at ten because I was genuinely exhausted and because I had made a decision. The decision was: nothing has actually happened. A man came to the gallery and showed me photographs. Someone left a flower in my apartment, which was disturbing and needed addressing, but nothing had happened to me. I was the same person I was a week ago. The answer was still no.
I was asleep within minutes.
What came was not like the other visions.
The other visions arrive like walking into a room you have not been in before, quiet, full of detail, you look around and your sleeping hand starts to record. This was not that. This came in like something breaking through a wall, a pressure difference, a change in the air before sound catches up with it. I was standing somewhere that had no floor, no ceiling, no edges I could find.
Just the door.
It was enormous. Stone, ancient, the kind of old that has its own weight and smell even in a dream. It filled the entire space in front of me, taller than anything I had a scale for. Down the center, from top to bottom, a crack, not damage, not an accident, deliberate, like something on the other side had pressed outward with one clean decisive force and split it perfectly in two.
Light came through the crack, not light like a lamp or a sun, light like pressure, like it had been waiting behind that door for a very long time and was using every available millimeter to get through.
Then the voice.
I have thought about this part a lot in the hours since and I still cannot explain it properly. The language was not one I have ever heard, not Portuguese, not English, not anything I recognized as a language at all. It was older than that. It sounded like the first time someone decided that sound could carry meaning.
But I understood every word.
It said my name first, not Seren, my full name, the one my mother uses when she is being serious, the one that carries the weight of where it came from. Then it said: you have been looking at the edges. It is time to look at the center.
Then it said: come to the door.
I woke up screaming.
Not a frightened sound, something involuntary, like my body needed to release the pressure of what had just moved through it. I sat straight up and the sound stopped and I was in my bedroom and my hands were covered in charcoal and paint.
I turned on the light.
The door covered the entire wall behind my bed, floor to ceiling, edge to edge, I had drawn over the window frame without stopping. Every detail. The crack down the center rendered in charcoal so dark it looked carved. The light coming through it in thin pale paint applied with what must have been my fingers, because there was no brush with that much paint on it anywhere. The stone texture on either side dense with symbols running top to bottom the way water runs, connected, continuous, one long statement I could not read but had apparently written.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
This was not the same as the other paintings. The others felt like recording. This felt like being recorded, like something had used my hands to write itself down and the message was not for me to read, it was for me to carry.
My throat hurt. My hands would not stop shaking.
I went to the kitchen and drank a full glass of water and stood at the counter breathing carefully until the shaking slowed down. Then I went back to the bedroom because running from it was not going to change what was on the wall.
I looked at the door I had drawn, at the crack, at the symbols, at the light rendered in pale paint that somehow looked warm even dried on plaster.
Then I noticed the center.
Not the crack itself, just to the left of it, at roughly chest height, where the two halves of the door nearly met. There was a symbol there I had not seen before, not in any of the thirty-one paintings, not in the borders, not in the texture work, not in any of the seventeen years of things my sleeping hands had made.
It was small and precise and my hand had clearly made it with great care.
I photographed it and took the photograph to my desk and opened my laptop.
I was not expecting to find it quickly. I searched for an hour, cross-referencing symbol databases, historical cartography archives, medieval stonework catalogues. I changed the search terms four times.
On the fifth search I found it.
Not in an art archive. Not in a cartography database.
In a historical records index, a heritage listing, the kind of dry institutional document that catalogues old families and their associated iconography for preservation purposes.
The symbol was listed once. In one context.
The Veyne family crest. Registered in Lisbon. Original documentation dated 1423.
I sat back from the screen.
Six hundred years old. A symbol I had never seen, never researched, never consciously encountered anywhere, drawn by my own hand in my sleep on my bedroom wall, on the door of a vision that used my name in a language older than anything I knew.
Sitting in the center of a crest belonging to the man who had been quietly collecting my work for eighteen months.
I picked up his card from where I had left it facedown on the desk three days ago.
I turned it over.