POV: Seren Adaeze
I don't tell Lucian about the writing on the floor.
Not immediately. I wake up thinking about it and I lie there running the line through my head, he needs you to see him, not the empire, him, and I think about what it means that Sera scratched those words into stone for me from eighty years ago, and I think about the fact that she knew enough about what was coming to leave that specific message, and that specific message means she understood something about the Veyne men that the archive probably doesn't say plainly.
I get up and go to the ruins because I need to see the crack before I decide what to do with any of it.
The crack is wider.
I see it from the corridor entrance and I stop walking. Yesterday it was two fingers wide at its broadest point. This morning I could fit my whole hand in flat, and the orange light coming through it is not the quiet steady glow of the last few days. It's active. Moving, the way firelight moves, and warm enough that I can feel it from six feet away.
I stand at a careful distance and look at it and I feel the ground hum accelerate under my feet, faster and more urgent than usual, the island's version of a raised pulse.
Lucian arrives behind me seven minutes later. I hear him come through the gap in the rock and stop.
"It's wider," he says.
"Significantly."
He comes to stand beside me. He looks at the crack and his face does the working version of nothing, the version where he's processing and I can almost see the calculations running.
"How fast is it changing?" I ask.
"Faster than I expected." He looks at the base of the crack where the stone has split cleanest, pale and fresh. "It wasn't this wide last night."
"I was here at ten. It was normal then."
"It changed overnight." He crouches down and looks at the gap without touching it. "The shudder yesterday. When you mirrored the shape in the Veil. That moved something."
I crouch beside him. The warmth from the light is steady on my face. "Is that bad?"
"It means the enchantment is accelerating. Which means we have less time to complete the preparation than I thought." He stands. "We can't go through yet. The map isn't complete enough. If we go through before it is—" He stops.
"What."
He looks at the crack. "The archive describes what happens when someone goes through an incomplete door on this island." He pauses. "They come out somewhere else entirely. A different time."
I look at him. "A different time."
"Yes."
I stand up and take a step back from the crack, which is a reasonable physical response to that information. "That's what happened to your mother, isn't it. She went through before it was ready."
"I think so. I've thought so for a long time." He looks at the wall. "The second breathing behind the wall. I don't know who that is. But I think my mother is somewhere on the other side of that gap that isn't quite here." His voice is level and I respect the effort it takes to keep it that way. "Which means to get her out, we have to go through it properly. Completed. Stable."
"And what does completing the map actually require?"
"You," he says. "Your Sight, fully engaged. The record the island has been keeping needs a witness who can receive it completely, all of it, not just sections. That's what the spiral in the symbols was building toward. That's what your room is for." He looks at me. "You have to receive the whole thing. Every piece of what the island has been holding. And I have to be here when you do it, holding the key open, which is what the bloodline does."
I look at the crack. The moving light. "And after."
"After, the door is complete and we can go through."
"And the cost," I say. "The archive says the key has a cost."
He doesn't answer, which is its own kind of answer, and I decide not to push on it right now because pushing on it feels like borrowing trouble I'll have soon enough without borrowing.
I look down at the base of the crack instead, at the split stone, and that is when I see it.
A corner of paper, just visible, wedged into the crack about a foot off the ground. Not pushed all the way through. Sitting in the gap like it was placed there from this side deliberately, or like it came through from the other side and got caught.
I crouch down.
"There's something in the crack," I say.
Lucian crouches beside me immediately.
I work the paper out carefully with two fingers, not wanting to tear it, easing it free from the stone edge, and it comes out in one piece. It's folded once. The paper is thick and slightly yellowed, not fresh, not recent. The kind of yellow that takes decades, the same quality of age as Sera's journal cover.
I unfold it.
One side is blank. I turn it over.
There are four lines of writing. Short, quick, the hand of someone writing fast under pressure or writing in the dark or both. The ink is dark and slightly blurred at the edges the way old ink blurs when the paper has been in a damp place.
I read it once and I don't say anything for a moment.
I read it again.
Then I hold it out to Lucian because I need him to see it and confirm what I'm seeing before I decide what it means.
He takes it. He reads it. I watch his face.
His face does something I have never seen it do before. Not the careful nothing and not the unguarded exhaustion and not the wet eyes in the ruins. Something that is all three at once and something else underneath all three, a specific kind of unsteadiness that belongs to a person whose understanding of their own situation has just shifted completely.
He looks at the paper for a long time.
"That's your handwriting," I say carefully. "Isn't it."
"Yes," he says.
"And that paper is decades old."
"Yes."
I look at the crack. The moving light. The gap that is wider this morning than it was last night and will be wider still by tomorrow.
"Lucian," I say. "What does it say?"
He looks at me and his face is doing the thing where it is completely still because everything inside it is moving.
"It says don't let her go through alone," he says. "It's signed with my name." He looks at the paper one more time. "And I have never written this."