The lock accepted the key with a soft, resonant click that was louder than any thunderclap in the suffocating silence. The door did not swing open. Instead, the dark wood of it shimmered, its solidity dissolving into a wavering, oil-slick mirage. Beyond was not a room, but a darkness so absolute it seemed to drink the dim light from the hallway. The air grew colder still, and the metallic scent of old blood sharpened, now mixed with the ozone tang of raw, unleashed power. The key was now fused to the door, its weeping eye the only fixed point in the swirling void.
Elara took an involuntary step back, her breath pluming in the sudden frost. This was wrong. This was more than an Echo, more than a memory. This was a wound in the world. The stone of silence in her gut turned to ice, a cold so deep it burned. She had to get the key back. She had to seal it. But as she reached for it, a voice, smooth as polished bone and just as cold, cut through the heavy air from behind her.
"I would not do that if I were you."
She spun around. He stood at the end of the hallway, framed by the archway to the foyer. He was a man made of shadows and sharp angles, clad in black that drank the light. Rain glistened in his dark hair and on the shoulders of his long coat. But it was his eyes that held her. the color of a winter storm, and just as devoid of warmth. In them, she saw no curiosity, no malice, only a terrifying, absolute purpose. The Shade's presence preceded him, a wave of psychic pressure that made the existing Echoes in the house recoil and whimper. To her senses, he was not a man, but a walking void of concentrated agony.
"The Vayne Relic," he said, his voice devoid of inflection. He took a step forward, and the floorboards did not creak. "The Conclave sends its regards."
Elara's mind went blank with a primal, screaming fear. This was the hunter. This was the death that had been stalking her. There was no reasoning with the emptiness in his eyes. Instinct took over. She turned and lunged for the key, for the only thing that felt like it was hers in this nightmare. Her fingers brushed the cold, weeping iron. As they did, the swirling darkness beyond the door surged, not outwards, but inwards, wrapping around her wrist like a vine of living night. It pulled. It wasn't a physical force, but a psychic one, a hook set deep in the stone of silence inside her. She was caught between the hunter at her back and the devouring dark before her. There was nowhere to run.