Turn 6 of 7

Ask Yrenne what the first room will show

"What will it show me?" you ask. The corridor breathes its dry, metallic air against your back, and the question feels like the last one you will get to ask before the door decides for you. Yrenne's arms stay folded. She does not shift her weight or look away, and the silence between you stretches long enough that you begin to wonder whether she will answer at all.

"It will show you what you came here for," she says. "Not what I brought you here for. Not what you think you want. What you actually came looking for, nine years ago, when you walked three days across the ash plain and knocked on a door made of black glass." She unfolds one hand and gestures, not at the corridor but at you — a motion that takes in your whole stance, your dust-covered boots, the key heavy in your pocket, the nine years of labour written into your hands.

You turn this over. Nine years ago you were younger, desperate in a way you have almost forgotten, walking across a plain of ash with no water and no plan beyond the rumour of a tower and a sorcerer who took apprentices. You had a reason. You know you had a reason. But when you try to find it now, it is like reaching for a word you know exists and finding only its outline, the shape of absence where certainty used to be. The years have smoothed it over. The work, the routine, the one hundred and seventeen steps every morning — all of it has buried whatever it was you came here wanting under layers of usefulness.

"The eighth apprentice thought he came for power," Yrenne says, and something in her voice changes — not softer, but closer, as though she is stepping nearer to an edge she usually keeps distance from. "The room showed him something else. He could not reconcile the two. The lie at the first door made it worse, because the room kept showing him what he actually wanted and he kept insisting on what he had claimed to want, and the contradiction — " She stops. Her hand goes to the bench, fingers pressing flat against the wood, and you see the scarred knuckles whiten.

"It did not go well. I am telling you that so you understand the rooms are not cruel, but they are exact. They will not bend for you. Go now, before I find a reason to stop you."

Below, Cassiel's footsteps reach the landing just outside the workroom. You hear them pause — one beat, two — and then stop entirely. Yrenne's gaze moves to the doorway and stays there, her body angling slightly toward it, and you understand with a sudden clarity that she is not watching you anymore. She is watching the door, and whatever is standing on the other side of it. The corridor behind you waits, dry and dark and patient, and the key in your pocket is silent. Whatever you came here for nine years ago, the first room is about to dig it up and lay it in front of you, and Yrenne — who has never once told you that you were good — is letting you walk in alone.