The staircase did not feel like stone beneath Lysandra's boots.
Each step hummed softly, as if she were walking across stacked moonlight. The silver-violet-gold glow ran down the spiral in a slow river, disappearing into a throat of darkness below.
The air cooled as they descended, but it wasn't the clawing cold of fear. It felt like the edge of night before a storm, that held breath between calm and chaos.
Evander stayed just behind her, close enough that his hand brushed the back of her cloak every few steps. The Shadow Heir walked at her other side, his footfalls soundless, his shadows folded in tight.
"How far down does this go?" Evander muttered.
"Farther than your fear can measure," the Heir said.
Evander made a face. "You're terrible at comfort."
"I am not here to comfort you."
"You're not here for me at all," Evander muttered.
"That," the Heir replied quietly, "we both know is no longer true."
Lysandra almost smiled.
Almost.
Her wolf was too focused, ears pricked toward whatever waited at the bottom of the spiral.
There is something at the end of this.
Not test.
Not throne.
Door.
Crossing.
A crossing.
Between what, she didn't yet know.
The further they went, the fainter the Realm's usual whispers became. No more distant howls. No more breathing shadows at the edges of her vision. It was like walking out of a crowded room and realizing, suddenly, that the noise had stopped.
It made her skin crawl.
"Do you feel that?" she whispered.
Evander frowned. "Feel what?"
"The quiet."
The Heir inclined his head. "We are leaving the Realm's body."
Evander blinked. "Its what?"
"The places we walked until now were inside it," the Heir said. "Its heart, its bones, its memory. This stair leads to the skin between worlds."
Lysandra's fingers tightened on the cold rail.
"Between… worlds?" she asked.
"Yes."
Evander's voice sharpened. "You mean we're heading toward her world?"
"Toward a seam," the Heir replied. "Where her world and mine press too close."
Lysandra's heart kicked once, hard.
Something tugged deep in her chest. Not the bond to the Heir. Not the warm thread to Evander.
Something older.
Luneville's rain-dark cobblestones flashed in her mind. The smell of baked bread at dawn. The way the clocktower sounded just before midnight. Children's laughter racing past her shop.
Home.
Her wolf shifted uneasily.
Home.
But not safe.
Not anymore.
At last, the spiral ended.
The final step gave onto a narrow landing and a plain stone arch. No carvings. No symbols. No visible magic.
It looked like any old doorway in any cellar in Luneville.
Evander stared. "That's it? No teeth, no floating eyeballs, no whispering skulls? Just… a door?"
The Heir's jaw tightened.
"That is more dangerous than any teeth," he said quietly. "Teeth you can see."
Lysandra's palms were slick.
"Why is it dangerous?" she asked.
"Because there are no rules on the other side of it," he said. "No Realm to catch you if you fall."
The air inside the arch rippled, faint as heat above stone.
Lysandra reached toward it. The closer her fingers came, the clearer shapes swam across the surface, like reflections on stirred water.
Her flower shop.
The clocktower.
Moonlight on familiar rooftops.
She caught her breath. "That's—"
"Luneville," Evander whispered, voice going thin. "That's home."
The Heir's shadows tightened around his boots.
"It is not only home."
The picture shifted on its own, gliding through the town like an invisible bird. The streets the veil showed were too bright for the hour—too many lamps lit, too many people awake. Figures clustered in tight groups. Torches flared in the square.
Lysandra leaned forward, eyes burning.
Her neighbor with the crooked hat. The baker dusted in flour. Two children she'd once given free petals to, clinging to their mother's dress.
Fear sharpened all their faces.
The view slid to her street.
Floraison de Minuit sat in the center like a wounded heart.
The Moonblossoms in the window hung limp. The door was open. Her sign dangled from one chain, as if it had been grabbed and shaken.
Petals littered the cobbles.
Evander's hand closed around her arm. "What happened?"
Then she saw the mark.
Painted in something dark and heavy on the wall beside her door:
A circle.
Two straight lines.
A curved stroke cutting through them.
An eye turned sideways.
The Heir's expression went cold. "Of course."
Lysandra's stomach flipped. "You know that symbol."
"It belongs to the Order of Hollow Light," he said.
Evander snorted, but there was no humor in it. "They sound lovely."
"They hunt anything the realms touch too strongly," the Heir replied. "Moonblood. Shadow-touched wolves. Children born under eclipses. They call it 'purifying the world.'"
Lysandra's fingers dug into the veil.
"Someone marked my shop," she whispered.
Evander's jaw clenched. "Then someone told them about you."
The scene slipped sideways again, carried as if on a tide.
Now it showed the market square.
A rough wooden platform had been thrown together beside the fountain. Torches ringed it, flames hissing. On the platform stood a man in pale armor and a half-mask shaped like that cruel sideways eye. Beside him, a robed woman held a heavy book and shouted words the barrier did not let them hear.
Lysandra didn't need sound.
The air around the platform tasted of hysteria.
At their feet knelt an old man, hands bound behind his back.
Bent shoulders.
Grey-streaked hair.
The same worn coat she'd mended twice for him in the back room.
"Marcel," she breathed.
Her seed supplier. Her gossip-trader. The one who always pretended the bouquet he bought was "for the table," even though he lived alone.
Evander's voice broke. "Lysandra—"
She pressed both palms flat to the veil.
The man in armor raised his voice.
The words didn't cross the seam, but the images did, slamming into her mind like thrown stones.
Witch.
Monster.
Moon-touched.
Shadow.
Some people jeered. Some stared. A few lowered their eyes and said nothing at all.
Marcel flinched with every unseen word.
Her wolf snarled, a sound that rattled her bones.
They hurt pack.
They hurt ours.
They mark our den.
Lysandra shook.
"This is happening now?"
The Heir nodded. "Time twists between realms, but this is a thread still being woven."
Evander's teeth bared. "Then we go back. Now."
The Heir didn't move.
"Crossing costs you," he said. "You are Awakened, but untrained. If you step out there now, you will not be able to hide what you are. Not from mortals. Not from the Order. Not from the moon."
The veil shuddered again.
A new image surfaced.
A poster nailed to a post.
A painted face in rough strokes—dark hair, pale skin, silver eyes. A crude sideways eye carved through it.
Beneath it, words:
MONSTER OF MIDNIGHT.
SEEN NEAR THE MOONBLOSSOMS.
Evander cursed under his breath.
"I don't care if she shines like a star in front of them," he hissed. "We are not leaving them to hang her life in the square."
"Evander."
Her voice was soft. It cut through anyway.
He turned to her.
Her eyes were bright, but steady.
"We can't stay here," she said. "If I hide in this Realm while they burn everything I love, then they're right about me."
The Heir studied her, the shadows around him quieter than she'd ever seen.
"You are not ready," he said. "They will hunt you from both sides now. Mortals who fear shadows. Shadows that resent your light."
Her wolf lifted its head, teeth bared in something almost like a grin.
Let them hunt.
We know what we are now.
We are no one's prey.
"When I first came here," Lysandra murmured, "I thought maybe I belonged more to this darkness than to Luneville. That maybe the moon made a mistake, putting me there."
She looked back through the seam.
At the torches.
At the frightened children.
At Marcel on his knees.
"I was wrong," she whispered. "I belong to both. I was never meant to abandon one for the other."
She turned to the Heir.
"I'm not asking if it's safe," she said. "I'm asking if it's possible."
Silence stretched.
Then he raised his hand and laid his palm against the veil, beside hers.
Shadow slid from his skin into the barrier like ink in water.
"It is possible," he said. "But it will bind the worlds through you more tightly than before. You will be the seam they tear at."
Evander stepped up and pressed his hand to the other side of hers.
"Good," he said, voice rough. "Let it bind. Maybe then it will stop trying to rip her apart."
The veil trembled around their joined hands.
Silver from her.
Violet from the Heir.
Warm gold from Evander.
The colors sank into the barrier, staining it, rewriting its light.
Lysandra drew one slow breath.
Then another.
"Then we go back," she said.
The Shadow Realm answered with a deep, low pulse.
Not anger.
Agreement.
The arch shuddered.
The veil thinned.
And for the first time since she stepped into shadow, Lysandra felt her world pull on her—
not as prey,
but as reckoning.