The floating door didn't open so much as accept them.
As Rose's hand touched the runes carved into its surface, the glyph beneath her skin flared with heat. The door pulsed, a slow heartbeat of magic and memory. Then, with a sound like whispered names, it swung inward into shadow.
The air shifted.
One step across the threshold and the world behind them vanished.
No trees. No sky. No Nimbus.
Just Rose and Basil, surrounded by a corridor made of moving ink. Walls pulsed with shifting symbols, some Rose recognized from old spellbooks, others that felt carved into her very bones.
"This isn't a place," Rose breathed. "It's… a memory."
"Whose?" Basil asked, scanning the shifting shapes.
"I think—mine."
The corridor led them to a chamber lit by a thousand candles floating in the air. In the center stood a stone basin, filled not with water, but with silver smoke that curled and shimmered like dreams caught mid-thought.
Rose stepped forward and peered in.
She saw herself, age six, dancing in a thunderstorm barefoot, laughing as the rain turned to petals. Then she saw herself at thirteen, screaming at a teacher after being told magic had limits. Then fifteen, carving sigils into the walls of detention rooms. Sixteen, building her first storm spell from raw grief.
It was her life—but seen through someone else's eyes.
Basil leaned beside her. "He's been watching you longer than we thought."
"Not just watching," Rose murmured. "Collecting."
A voice slithered through the chamber then—low, velvet, undeniably familiar.
"Of course I've been watching. I wanted to see when you'd stop running from your potential."
Mortain stepped from the smoke as if carved from it. Tall. Impossibly elegant. Eyes like voids with stars inside.
Rose instinctively raised her hand to cast—but her magic fizzled. Contained.
"This is not a battlefield," Mortain said calmly. "It's a conversation."
Basil stepped between them, hand on his sword.
Mortain smiled, amused. "Still protecting her. Loyal even in futility."
"Speak," Rose snapped. "Then vanish."
"You think I'm your enemy," Mortain said, circling the basin. "But I am the only one offering you truth. You are chaos incarnate. Untamed, unruled. You were made to shatter the cage this world has placed around magic."
"I'm not interested in breaking the world just because it's crooked," Rose replied.
"No," Mortain said. "But part of you wants to. That part you buried? I gave her freedom."
"You twisted her," Basil growled.
Mortain tilted his head. "She chose. She understood power without fear."
"And I'll show her there's another way," Rose said, stepping forward.
Mortain's smile faded. "Then we are at war."
"I thought we were having a conversation," she replied sweetly.
He vanished with a flicker of smoke and cold.
The chamber shook.
The glyph on her chest burned hotter, now pulsing with a deeper, louder rhythm.
Basil caught her arm. "We need to move."
As they fled the unraveling chamber, the candles burst into fire, and behind them, the silver basin boiled.
And far away, in a place no map could reach, Mortain began to prepare his army.