The wooden door stood in the middle of nothing.
No walls.
No frame.
Just a door.
Paint peeling, brass knob dull with age, the kind you'd find on a grandmother's house that burned down years ago.
Behind it: absolute black.
Not darkness.
Black that had weight.
Law's bleeding had stopped.
The white flowers at his feet were gone.
Only the last shard remained, warm and pulsing in his fist like a second heart.
Laura found her voice first.
"We are not opening that."
Her duplicate was gone.
For the first time since the orphanage fire, she was only one person.
Liora was shaking so hard her teeth chattered.
"That isn't an exit," she whispered. "That's a mouth."
Nysera's wolf was completely silent.
Even the beast knew when to be afraid.
Zero stared at the door like it owed him money.
Then he laughed.
One sharp, broken sound.
"After everything," he said, "the city's final joke is a fucking door."
He took a step toward it.
Law moved faster.
His hand closed around Zero's wrist like a vice.
"No."
Zero met his eyes.
For once, the void in them flickered.
"You felt it," Zero said quietly. "Same as me.
Whatever's on the other side… it's been waiting longer than the city."
Law didn't deny it.
The shard in his hand pulsed harder.
A rhythm that wasn't his heartbeat.
A rhythm that remembered his mother's lullaby.
He looked at the door.
Then at the Four.
Then back at the door.
And understood three things at once.
The city hadn't been a prison.
It had been a lid.
Tavren hadn't been the jailer.
He had been the seal.
Law had just broken the seal.
The knob turned by itself.
Slowly.
With the sound of a child waking up from a very long nap.
The door opened six inches.
Black poured out.
Not darkness.
Memory.
Every death Ka'thar had ever swallowed.
Every scream it had ever muffled.
Every child it had ever watched die alone.
They spilled across the ground like liquid starlight, forming shapes.
A woman reaching for a baby that wasn't there.
A man clawing at his own eyes.
A little boy holding a broken mirror and crying because his reflection wouldn't wave back.
They didn't attack.
They just looked at Law.
With his own eyes.
Older.
Tired.
Grateful.
One of them, an old woman with Law's mouth, spoke with his mother's voice.
"You kept your promise," she said.
"I don't know you," Law answered.
"You will."
She smiled.
And stepped aside.
Behind her, the black resolved into a path.
A simple dirt path through a field of white flowers under a sky that had no mirrors in it.
At the end of the path: a house.
Small.
Warm light in the windows.
Smoke from the chimney.
Someone was cooking dinner.
Law's hand opened without his permission.
The last shard rolled out and fell.
It didn't break.
It bloomed.
A single white flower that grew roots into the stone instantly.
The old woman, his mother, maybe, touched his cheek.
"The door stays open now," she said.
"You can walk through anytime.
But once you do…"
She looked at the Four.
"Only five can fit."
Law understood.
The door wasn't for escape.
It was for choice.
Five chairs around a kitchen table.
Or five graves in a city that no longer watched.
He looked at Laura, Liora, Nysera, Zero.
None of them were breathing.
He looked back at the open door.
At the warm light.
At the empty path.
And made the only choice he had ever been born to make.
He stepped forward.
Not through the door.
Toward it.
And closed it.
With both hands.
The wood burned where he touched it.
The black screamed.
The path withered.
The house lights went out.
The dead sighed, one long, grateful exhale.
And crumbled into ash that the wind finally carried away.
Law leaned his forehead against the closed door.
His voice was raw.
"Not today."
He turned the knob the other way.
Locked it.
Then drove the last blooming shard straight through the wood like a nail.
The door cracked down the middle.
And vanished.
Taking every corpse, every flower, every promise with it.
Only the Five remained.
In a dead city that would never open its eyes again.
Laura was the first to move.
She walked over and punched Law in the arm. Hard.
"You absolute bastard," she said.
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Liora started crying.
Nysera's wolf howled once, long and victorious.
Zero just stared at the place the door had been.
Then grinned.
"Five chairs," he said.
"Guess we're stuck with each other."
Law looked at his empty, unbleeding hand.
For the first time since he was born,
there was no reflection in his eyes.
He smiled.
It was small.
It was real.
"Then let's go home," he said.
Somewhere very far away,
a mirror that had watched for ten thousand
years
finally,
finally,
looked away.