Doors are never just doors. They're arguments with the world about who gets to leave.
Ash fell upward like reversed snow, lifting off the broken mosaics and drifting toward the bell frame over the Market Basin. The bells had no clappers and made no sound. The sound happened in Kade's bones instead—pressure shifts and the idea of a tone.
[PORTAL LOCUS — MARKET BASIN]Status: dormantCoordinates: triangulated (3/3)Activation Sigils required: Downwell — Censer — BearerTime remaining (zone attrition): 23:58:12
"Plenty of time," Kade said.
Euthymia gave him half a look that meant don't say things like that. Nor scanned the slopes around the bowl without moving his head, the way a man reads a room full of knives.
Rase hovered behind them, not close enough to be counted, not far enough to be dismissed. The Mist Horse stood at the rim with its ribs showing and hiding in slow breath, vapor peeling off its flanks in strips. Ash lifted from the ground and curled toward it like the beginning of a claim.
"Not yours," Kade told the ash. "Not today."
He held out his hand. Euthy placed the Censer Sigil in his palm—a small, pierced lid the size of a thumb. Heat bled through the leather of his glove. He slid it into the bell frame's depression at the apex. The metal drank the position and vanished, leaving the frame a fraction heavier in the air.
[ACTIVATION: Censer Sigil — 1/3]
The Basin shifted, as if remembering a younger shape. Sand at the center flattened. The bells didn't chime. Something under them did.
"Downwell," Euthy said.
Kade fitted the crescent of cold metal into the altar mouth cut into the inner slope. Downwell seated like a decision.
[ACTIVATION: Downwell Sigil — 2/3]
The sand breathed in and didn't breathe out. Pressure built on his teeth again, a deep-held note that wanted to crawl up the roots.
Then all the wrong air moved. Robes poured from the lanes, taller now, faster, hands like polished stone and bad ideas. Ash Collectors, drawn by the locus the way flies find heat.
They formed a half-circle around the bowl and didn't approach the bells. The ash falling upward curled around their hoods and was swallowed. They grew by invisible degrees.
[ENTITY SWARM — ASH COLLECTOR COHORT]Aggression: escalated (locus proximity)Targeting priorities: bearers > constructs > corpses > sigilsAdvisory: protect Bearer Sigil custody
Nor's jaw went tighter on the cloth-wrapped lump in his pocket. Smoke had already chewed the edges of the rag. He hadn't unwrapped it. He didn't need to. The heat bled through like a warning.
Kade nodded at him. "Your piece," he said.
"Not until we're ready," Nor said. It wasn't doubt. It was the sort of caution men get after learning what caution costs. "The last one wakes everything."
"Everything's already awake," Euthy said.
Three of the Collectors stepped forward like they'd rehearsed. The one in the middle was a head taller than the others, edges feathered with glass like a crown of grit. It extended its hand toward the Mist Horse. The air thickened.
The Horse's skin flickered in ripples, as if it were making choices at the cellular level about where to be solid. It tossed its skull and blew a stream of vapor that turned the air to faint frost tracery.
"Anchor," Kade said.
Duskveil answered without being asked twice. Threads snapped to the bell frame and the altar stone, dropping lines to the Horse's legs, stapling it to the world.
The Alpha tilted its hood. If it had had a mouth, it would have smiled.
"Rase," Kade said without looking around. "You wanted out. Help earn it."
"To do what," Rase said, and then flinched at his own voice. "Right. Sorry." He dashed left along the rim, breaking loose chunks of stone and tipping them down the slope to shear into Collectors' paths. It wasn't pretty. It worked.
They did not get a second casual moment. The half-circle collapsed inward.
Kade met the first robe at dagger-length; its wrist came up, his threads sank, bones-that-weren't-bones cracked, the robe flowed to fill the failure. Euthy moved like she owned the slope: feet finding holds that weren't there, blade taking away joints that didn't have names. Nor didn't waste motion—clean, efficient strikes that treated obstacles like arithmetic.
The Alpha kept its hand out and pulled. Not at Kade. Not at the sigils. At the Horse.
The ash sheet from before rose and tried to lift. Anchor lines hummed. Duskveil groaned across Kade's ribs. The Horse's front hooves left the ground by a thumb's width, then set again. It looked at Kade with its empty socket like an accusation and a request.
"Stay," Kade said. "Please."
It obeyed like obedience had a price and it was willing to pay it.
A spear grazed Kade's shoulder—metal that hummed with the charged note of someone else's system. He spun out of the next strike, let the thread torque carry him into a low slash that took a Collector at the knee. "Not ours," he said to no one, and then to someone because someone had jumped across the gap between two stalls and landed like they wanted the ground to resent it.
Players.
Three of them, dusty and bright-eyed and hungry in the human way. One had the red scarf you wore if you wanted everyone to know you killed for sport. Another had a bow like a story prop. The third had a face Kade didn't remember and arms banded with thread burns.
"Circle wants the third," Red Scarf called, cheerful as poison. "Hand it over and you get to go through. Maybe."
Nor didn't answer. He moved between Red and Kade without making it obvious he was the one blocking the line to the bells. Euthy flicked ash off her blade with a shake. Rase had the good sense to look small.
Kade counted distances. Collectors advancing. Players choosing a lane up the slope. The Mist Horse shaking against pull. The Bearer Sigil in Nor's pocket burning a hole in the math.
"Negotiation?" Red Scarf tried.
"My answer has an edge," Kade said. "You can borrow it."
Red Scarf sighed like a man denied a dessert, then bounced forward, spear humming a narrow tone. The bowman went wide for angle. Thread-Burns took the middle, hands out like he meant to catch someone and break them.
The first clash felt like two fights smashed on top of two others. Euthy took Red head-on, slapping the spear wide with the flat and punishing the wrist with the tip. Nor shut Thread-Burns out of the bells by occupying exactly the piece of slope he needed, dagger punching short, fast patterns. Kade went after the bow. He didn't kill archers or let them shoot people he liked.
The Collector cohort surged at the same time, internal clock dialed to chaos. The Alpha tried one more pull on the Horse and got a lunge of teeth for its trouble—no bite, because there was nothing to take hold of, but the intent stung anyway. The robe jittered, offended.
Kade broke the bowman's range by giving him no range. One thread took his ankle, the other his elbow. Gravity did the rest. The bow snapped under the body it was attached to. Kade left him breathing. For now.
Euthy pressed Red down-slope, then let him overcommit and gave him a foot of empty air to fall into. He skidded on his back, the spear whining past his ear and taking a piece of scarf with it. "Rude," he complained.
"Expedient," she corrected.
Thread-Burns almost made it to the altar. Nor cut him across the thigh and knocked him into the stone with a shoulder. The man slid, cursed, and changed his mind about how long he wanted to live.
[NOTICE — CIRCLE ALERTED]
Bearer custody: contested
Cohort massing: +2 groups inbound
Time remaining: 23:27:01
"Faster," Euthy said.
"Working on it," Kade said.
A new ripple went through the basin. Kade didn't have a word for it, but his skin recognized the shape: threshold. The locus had never been truly asleep. It was blinking now. It wanted to open. It wanted the last key.
"Nor," Kade said.
Nor's jaw shifted. "Cost."
"We pay it," Euthy said.
"Who's 'we,'" Nor said, and looked at Kade, not her.
Collective ash began to drag. The slope softened under boots that had been firm a heartbeat ago. A Collector's hand reached from the ground ahead of Kade and tried to erase his ankle. Duskveil punished it with a coil, wrist bones popping like burnt sugar.
"You held the cloth this long," Kade said. "If I take it, the Circle still comes for you. If you take it, it burns you and it's honest about it. Choose."
Nor didn't like choices. He liked facts. He took the rag out and peeled it back. Smoke braided into the air; the Bearer Sigil lay on his palm like a small, ugly sun. It was not beautiful. It was what people made when they wanted power to pretend it was responsibility.
He looked at the bells. He looked at the altar. He looked at Kade like a man measuring a wound.
"Do it," Kade said.
Nor closed his hand on the Sigil.
The smell of cooked leather hit first. Then the sound—the kind of muffled scream metal makes when it had a different plan for its day. Nor didn't scream. His face went white around the spine and red around the eyes. The Sigil branded itself into him—lines burned into the skin of his palm in a pattern Kade's instinct wanted to read and couldn't.
[CLAIM: BEARER SIGIL]
Custody: Nor
Side-effect: Toll (personal) — active
Definition of "Toll": undisclosed
"Nor," Euthy said, soft. Not an order. Not a pity. A fact check.
"I'm fine," he said, not fine. He turned and pressed his burned palm to the third depression at the base of the bell frame.
The world made room.
[ACTIVATION: Bearer Sigil — 3/3]
[ASSEMBLY COMPLETE]
Portal: activating
Stability: low
Hostiles: approaching
The bells didn't ring. The space under them tore the polite way paper tears in the hands of someone who's done it before. Black not-black opened from nothing to oval, edge bright as a blade. Wind that wasn't wind came through—cold, high air tasting of altitude and metal and old stone above any market's pay grade.
The Collectors didn't flee. They converged, understanding door the way hunger understands mouth. The Alpha led. The slope turned treacherous under its own rules. The Mist Horse lunged at the line, not away from it—ears pinned, empty socket on fire with intent.
"Break them," Kade said.
The Horse hit like winter. Vapor rolled ahead of it and slicked ash. Robes faltered, sliding. Euthy cut into a knot, taking away elbows and future plans. Nor, burned hand useless for a moment, switched his dagger to the other and made the bad decision of keeping them alive—hamstrings and tendons, not throats. Rase tripped a Collector with a length of fallen stall pole and looked surprised when it worked.
Red Scarf threw his spear—not at them, at the frame. Kade saw the angle too late to prevent the throw and early enough to understand it. He went anyway. Threads hit the haft mid-flight and yanked it down into the altar lip, taking a chip out of old stone instead of a bell.
"Seriously," Red called. "You people don't like fun."
"Fun's expensive," Kade said.
He didn't get to finish the thought. The Alpha reached the threshold and grabbed the edge. It tried to pull the door sideways like it was furniture. The oval wobbled, threatening to smear into shape and unshape. The air in Kade's lungs tried to be somewhere else.
Duskveil moved on its own.
Threads cracked like whips and stapled the Alpha's hands to the now. Kade hit it at the wrist where a human would keep a pulse. The cut bit deeper than it should have—deeper than stone. Something came off the robe that wasn't ash. It evaporated before it learned the ground's name.
"Not yours," Kade said again, to the Cohort, to the door, to everything.
The Alpha didn't retreat. It leaned, trying to find the room you never get when you're not the one writing rules.
"Kade," Euthy warned.
"Busy," he said.
"No," she said. "Look."
He looked.
At the edge of the oval, where the light went black and the black went light, a silhouette stood on nothing like it had paid for the spot. Axe on shoulder, hair a little longer, grin the same wrong temperature it had always been.
Vox.
He didn't speak. He didn't need to. He raised two fingers in a small, familiar gesture that meant you first when it meant anything at all.
The Alpha surged. The Horse braced. Nor's burned hand shook. Euthy's blade wrote a short argument across a Collector's throat. Rase said a prayer to doors.
The portal held itself open. The market tried to decide who deserved to use it.
Kade took a breath that tasted like altitude and ash and old bells. "Fine," he said. "We'll do it your way."
He stepped toward the threshold.
Vox dropped his hand, smile sharpening. "Prove it," he said as the oval narrowed, forcing a choice no one had time to discuss.