Turn 5 of 7

Answer the door honestly — you don't know

"I don't know," you say. You say it to the door, but the words land in the room like something dropped, and you hear how they sound — nine years of service, and you are standing before a threshold admitting ignorance of the most basic term of your own apprenticeship. Your voice is steady. You have learned that much from Yrenne. Steadiness even when the ground is uncertain, especially then.

"She never told me. I don't know what she promised."

The door does not respond immediately. The seam holds its fraction of width, the glass breathing with that low resonant silence, and you have the strange sensation of being considered. Not judged — considered, the way a doctor considers a symptom, the way Yrenne considers a fracture in a lattice of light. Something behind the glass is turning your honesty over and looking at it from different angles. Then the seam widens another fraction, and another, and the door swings inward on no hinge you can see, revealing a narrow corridor of black glass that curves out of sight. The air that comes through is dry and old and tastes faintly of metal.

"Good," Yrenne says, and the word is so unexpected that you turn to look at her. She has withdrawn her hands from the lattice and is standing with her arms folded, watching you with an expression you cannot fully read. There is relief in it, and something harder — the set of her mouth that means she is holding back words she has chosen not to say.

"The last one lied. He told the door he'd been promised power, and the door let him through, and every room after that was built on a lie he could never take back. You don't know. That's the right place to start."

You look at the open corridor. The glass walls are close enough to touch on both sides, and the curve ahead means you cannot see more than a few strides in. The light is sourceless, the way light in this tower is always sourceless — present without explanation, as though the glass itself remembers what illumination is and provides it from memory. You think of the eighth apprentice, nineteen years old and hungry for something specific, telling the door what it wanted to hear. You think of his messages in the mortar, scraped in desperation or in warning, and you wonder at what point he realised the doors were not testing his knowledge but his honesty, and how far he went before the lie caught up with him.

Cassiel's footsteps resume below, climbing now. You hear them on the stairwell — still weightless, still wrong, but ascending with purpose. Yrenne's gaze flicks toward the sound and her jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. She looks back at you.

"The first room will not hurt you. I can promise that much, and I intend to keep it. What it does is show you something. Whether what it shows is bearable depends entirely on what you're carrying." She pauses. The lattice of light behind her is dimming, the work abandoned, and in its fading glow the lines of her face look older than they usually do.

"Go. Cassiel will not follow you past this door. I've made sure of that."