Elias sat back, the memory like a hard stone rolling awake in his chest. He blinked, then found himself telling the story — the tower, the ledger, the smell of burnt ink and the way the thing that attacked them had moved with a deliberate hunger. Words tumbled out before he could smooth them: Veran's invitation, the way the place had hummed, the chest of Dianol, the ritual that had been almost complete. He told it bluntly, the way a man repeats a wound so it becomes less sharp.
Lyra's face went pale as she listened, then she closed her mouth and, after a long breath, asked what had been worrying them both since the first terrible pages of the book: "So — hell. Is it real? Is there truly a place like that the demon claimed?"
The old man — whose hair the firelight had silvered into something like frost — chuckled, low and dry. His smile had no malice in it, only the weary amusement of someone who had watched how the world made excuses and names for things.
"Hell," he said slowly, "is a tidy word for a messy idea. But listen: the words that demon used are a pretext. It will tell you of infernos and an underworld to make itself sound urgent, terrible, absolute. Spirits — the things you call the world's first breaths — are not born solely from the order of sky and stone. They come from the land, yes, from rivers and roots and stone, but they also arise from feelings that press hard enough against the world to leave a shape: hatred, grief, courage, the sharp hunger of vengeance. Those are as much a womb as any soil."
He paused, letting the notion settle on them. Lyra's fingers tightened around the edge of her bowl. Daren's jaw worked. Elias felt a line of cold slip along his spine.
"If what you call a spirit born of a demon's will," the old man went on, "then it is a spirit shaped by wrath and hunger. It would not be a natural spirit that tends a stream — it would be will made hungry and taught to bite. That is dangerous. You burned a ledger; you cut a thread. But threads are braided in more places than one."
Lyra's question came out before she could choose its tone. "So — if hatred can make a spirit… does that mean the 'hell' he spoke of exists?"
The old man's laugh this time was soft. "Ask me whether the sea is salt and I will answer. Ask me if death tastes like iron and I will say yes. But as to hell—" he tapped the table with two fingers, counting the rim of the bowl and the grain of the wood as if they were halves of an answer. "You will understand what he meant when you face a hunger like his, when you stand before a will that has learned to feed itself on cruel things. Whether that is an underworld or simply the worst part of what lives in people — that I cannot say. Perhaps the same thing goes by many names."
He turned his gaze to the three of them, suddenly decisive. "But words will not protect you. Names will. Tell me your names."
Lyra answered first without hesitation, as if she had been waiting for the prompt. "Lyra Warns," she said, chin up. The surname stuck in the air like a banner — Warns — and for a moment the sound fit her like armor.
Daren's voice followed, slow and steady. "Daren Dragon." The name landed with the weight of a promise; there was a stubborn pride in it that fit the man's broad shoulders.
Elias felt hollow and full all at once as he pushed his name through his lips. "Elias Everen."
The old man, who had not been given a name by them but whose presence was as settled as the house itself, nodded as if these names were the exact shapes he had been waiting to fit into a mold. For a long moment he looked at each of them as if he were measuring the sunlight that fell across their faces.
"Very well," the old man said. "Then if you will be named by your own mouths, let me give you something in return."
The old man pressed his palms together and breathed in as if drawing something from the room itself. Dust motes gathered like tiny planets around his hands. For a moment it was only motion and the low hum of the lantern; then light pooled and condensed, answering whatever old ritual he invoked.
From his left palm a pulse of red light uncoiled—hot, quick, like the first breath of a forge. It took shape with a crackle, resolving into a small creature no larger than a songbird: a body of ember and living flame, feathers like coals and eyes like smoldering chips. Sparks curled from its wings when it beat them; its presence made the air taste faintly of singed wood. The red spirit hovered, a furious heartbeat in the quiet room.
From the old man's right hand a green glow swelled, not the bright jewel-tone of jewels but the deep, breathing green of new leaves after rain. The light drew together into a lithe figure composed of leaf-vein filaments and a translucent bark-like skin. Where it hung, a scent of crushed herb and turning earth rose, and the floor beneath it seemed, for an instant, to remember the feel of moss. This green spirit moved with a slow patience, a living root that watched and learned.
Between the two, the old man coaxed a third spark—a flash of yellow, electric and thin as lightning. It blinked into being like a lightning-bird, bones of quicksilver wrapped in filaments of light. The yellow spirit hummed with a restless energy; when it trembled the lamp flickered as if someone had passed a hand over the flame.
The three spirits circled once, then twice, as if testing the air, mapping the three of them with the smallest of movements. The red spirit darted like a mote of ember near the rafters; the green spiraled slowly, brushing the back of a chair and leaving a memory of damp; the yellow darted about the old man's head and left the faint scent of ozone on the breeze.
They drifted toward the trio: red toward Lyra, green toward Daren, yellow toward Elias. Each spirit paused before its mark as if reading a name only it could hear, and for the first time since the old man spoke of bargains and force, the three of them understood the weight of the gift he offered—three living pieces of the world arrived, bright and unbent, waiting to be met.