The throne room collapsed in stages—first the ceiling cracking open to reveal a sky choked with crows, then the floor dissolving into a pit of writhing roots. Jacob leapt over a fissure, his boots slipping on the blood-slick bones raining from above.
Eleanor's voice echoed in his skull: "The key wasn't for a door. It was for you."
A corpse wearing his father's face tackled him. Jacob drove the rusted key into its eye socket. Black ooze sprayed across his vision as the thing wailed—
—and he was twelve again, standing in the Blackwood garden with blood on his hands. Eleanor crouched beside him, her small fingers carving sigils into his forearm with a shard of glass. "This will make you remember next time," she whispered. Behind them, something in the house giggled.
The vision shattered as the Priest's claws raked Jacob's back. He stumbled forward, nearly impaling himself on a stalagmite of bone. The key glowed white-hot in his grip, its teeth now moving, rearranging into a shape he recognized—
The sigil on his arm. The same one Eleanor had carved.
The Crow's true voice, small and broken, whispered directly into his mind: "You promised we'd go home."
Jacob froze.
The Priest's killing blow never landed.