The morning after the journal revealed itself, Elior woke with the residue of words burning behind his eyes. Not his mother’s voice this time—something lower, older, speaking in pulses like a heartbeat translated into language. He lay in bed and could almost swear the ceiling pulsed back, the dream-state of waking still clinging to him like a second skin. He waited for the dream to drain.

  It didn’t.

  The pulsing continued, slowly and methodically becoming more intense, as if it were trying to reach him.

  The root remembers you.

  It was a voice, or a thought; it wasn’t a promise or even fully audible. It felt like fresh memory—something old yet new, pushing its way into his existence but like it had always been there.

  The phrase wasn’t a threat. It was a fact, delivered with the same certainty as water runs downhill or the dead do not return. He pushed himself upright, and his hand brushed the nightstand, seeking his mother’s pendant for comfort, for the feeling of home so far away.

  It wasn’t there.

  His heart stumbled until he remembered—he’d fallen asleep clutching it. It must have slipped between the mattress and wall, he thought. Spinning in his bed, thrashing at the covers, throwing the pillow to the floor, a soft glow stopped him dead in his tracks. There, underneath where the pillow had been, was the pendant. But something was off. It had always looked like it glowed due to the amber catching light, but this morning there was yet no light to catch.

  As Elior sat in the bed, the pendant seemed alive, thrumming with the same heartbeat, pulsing a soft, almost unnoticeable glow. The lines in the leaf were attempting to dance their way into thought; Elior could almost make out what they were trying to say, but it was as if he were missing some keyword that unlocked the message.

  Elior slapped the side of his face with both palms and shook his head. All this new information, new and crazy concepts his uncle talked of—the house that couldn’t possibly be alive yet seemed always to know where he was going and decided for him—these things were too much for morning brain-fog, and Elior refused to acknowledge them without mental lubrication.

  He got up, placing the pendant back around his neck, ignoring the pulsing, ignoring the unusual warmth, and turned his thoughts toward breakfast, and coffee.

  The house was playing with him too early. He decided he didn’t mind that, as long as it still delivered him to the kitchen.

  Something else caught his eye.

  In the corner of his room, half-hidden by the morning shadows, stood his father’s trunk. The same old mahogany chest, the one that had traveled with him from the old house, the one that had been in his room since he arrived at the manor, waiting patiently, the lock too pulsing like it was alive, like it was speaking in memory. Memory that was still foreign. He’d ignored it this past week, grief-blind, but now his gaze snagged on it and refused to let go. The trunk seemed more present than it had yesterday, its brass corners catching light that shouldn’t exist in a room with only one window.

  Elior approached it slowly. The lock that had taken up so many curious hours of his childhood—when he would talk to it, beg it to reveal its secrets—now seemed to have words for him, but he couldn’t understand them.

  Exploring the lock like he had thousands of times as a child, it consisted of five rotating rings carved from petrified wood, each inscribed with symbols, but this morning those symbols glowed and danced in a way that made his eyes water. Elior reached out, and the moment his fingers brushed the brass, his vision split. The symbols didn’t just glow; they spoke—not in any human way, but the word expressed itself as if he had always known it, as if he had always been waiting to hear it, yet as if it were always something he could recall in memory. A single word burned across his mind in a voice that tasted like iron and sap:

  Heimsfr?.

  There was a sudden jerk, a solid, final heartbeat that shuddered through the manor, causing the house itself to bend to its whim. The lock pushed back. The rings turned of their own accord, aligning in a configuration that Elior could only guess at, but something inside him knew the meaning: Not Yet.

  The pressure was gentle but absolute, a closed door that felt less like rejection and more like patience.

  The house had shown him the trunk to prove a point: he had power, but no key.

  Stepping back, Elior’s breath was ragged from the experience, pondering what it all meant. The trunk remained closed, secretive, its message delivered.

  Elior turned away, not with defeat, but with understanding: the trunk would wait. The house had other rooms to show him first, and he had found himself a goal to focus on.

  The corridor smelled of old leather bound with smoke. It led him not to the kitchen but to a door he’d seen but never had the chance to open. He had seen Auren enter this room from time to time when he wished to be alone but had never gotten anything from his uncle about the room other than a generic it’s my personal study and the only place off-limits. Auren had set it with a lock much like the one on his father’s trunk; Elior, although burning with questions about the lock, had not been able to get Auren to give him any details on it.

  It was, however, much less complex than the trunk’s, but still daunting: three rings. The symbol at the center was the same crossed-thorn compass from Auren’s scar, and today the runes on the rings danced much like the ones on his father’s trunk, making his eyes again water and sting. The house had delivered him here. What did it want?

  Reaching out to touch the lock, Elior noticed it did not push back like the one on his trunk.

  This lock yielded to his touch, and the runes danced again into place. Again the word appeared to remember itself into his being, but this time it was something else:

  Syni.

  Elior had studied mythologies with his parents for years, and that meant hours, weeks, and months of his father and mother drilling him on old languages. This one in particular had been his favorite. He recognized the plain dative; this was Old Norse. Memories of his mother’s lessons on grammatical forms, patronymics, and even poetic kennings all came flooding back, almost bringing a tear to his eye.

  “For the son,” Elior whispered to himself.

  The memory of his uncle’s picture from his father’s study resurfaced. It had never been just his uncle in the picture, but Elior had paid no mind to the other man in the frame. When his father had caught him in his study late one night staring at it and trying his luck with the trunk, they had talked at length about his uncle—nothing in depth, but about the two growing up. Auren was older and had had a son while Dad had been studying in college. Elior had never met his cousin, and his father would say no more about him, only that his name was K?l.

  Elior didn’t know how long he had been standing at the door staring at the lock when he snapped out of the memory, but the runes had settled themselves into place—runes that were somewhat familiar now, runes his father had made him practice time and time again alongside his mother’s lessons in Old Norse.

  Elior understood. The lock was coded in runes of Old Norse, and the code was a word. The memory of the word pulsed again: Syni. But the runes to make this word were not on the Runelock. Elior frowned. “Still a riddle on top of a codeword.” It was surprisingly on-brand for everything he had studied about Norse mythos.

  “Syni is the base dative of ‘for the son,’” Elior thought out loud. “And so, using the son’s name, K?l, the dative would be…”

  His speech trailed off as he pushed back through his lessons in his memories.

  “…K?li,” Elior said, and he felt the manor lean in, pressure focusing on him and the lock. Elior studied the runes, and they were all there.

  Elior rotated the rune-rings to make ????—K?li in Old Norse.

  The lock pulsed, silver veins of life dancing across it as the mechanism popped open with a sequential sound like vertebrae cracking. The door opened on Auren’s personal study.

  Inside the study, the air was thick with the weight of decisions. A desk grew from the wall, its surface carved with a map of roots that shifted if you looked too long. A chair held the imprint of a hundred previous occupants. On a lectern in the corner waited a book—not a journal, but a tome. Its cover was stone veined with wood, heavy enough that Elior needed both hands to lift it.

  To the naked eye, the tome was bare: no mark, no title, nothing. But when Elior touched it, he could see traces of runes dance into place on the cover:

  ??? ??????

  “Bók Varear,” Elior whispered to himself.

  Book of the Warden, appearing in his mind. The same symbol from Auren’s scar glowed on its spine.

  He opened it.

  The pages were blank. Elior blinked, confused at first. Then they weren’t.

  Runes bloomed across the parchment like mold in time-lapse, each character burning with faint silver light. They rearranged themselves as he watched, forming patterns that made his eyes water. He couldn’t read them. He shouldn’t have been able to read them.

  But he could.

  Not the words—the language was too old, older than any Old Norse he had studied—but he understood the meaning:

  Danger. Threshold. Memory debt. Veilmark pending.

  The tome was choosing to be understood.

  Testing him.

  And it had approved.

  Elior was confused. What was a Veilmark? Memory debt?

  The tome didn’t care about his questions, only its own decisions.

  A flare of light shot up from the pages, threading through his fingers, slithering around his arm, working its way up his shoulder to his neck.

  Elior panicked, trying to put the tome down, but his body stood frozen, unresponsive to the surge of fear and anxiety pumping in his heart.

  The light was at his cheek.

  Elior gasped for breath, trying to wrench his face away, but it was hopeless.

  He looked down at the light, sheer terror in his soul as the memory of the light in the Veil came back to him. Had he made the same mistake again? This time there was no Auren to pull him back, to save him.

  Elior slammed his eyes shut in a final attempt to keep the light at bay, but the light slid under his eyelids, forcing them up. Blinding light encased his eyes. Elior went limp, legs giving out as an overwhelming sensation flooded his body.

  Not pain.

  Surrender. Acceptance.

  And everything else fell away.

  The light did not fade. It became.

  Elior stood—though he had fallen, though his legs had given out—upon a floor of white stone that was not stone but compressed ash, soft as snow under his boots. Above him, the sky was not sky but a canopy of branches so vast they defied geometry, stretching not up but through, piercing a thousand different dawns at once. The tree was white. Not the silver-white of bark, but the white of bone bleached clean, of paper before ink, of the moment between lightning and thunder.

  The Ash. Not the one in the courtyard, but a ghost of remembrance touched it.

  A figure stood at the base of the trunk, hooded in grey wool that might have been woven from fog. He tended the roots with a knife made of shadow, trimming away nothing that Elior could see, yet the blade came away dark with sap that smelled of iron and old libraries. The man did not look up, but his voice was there—in the air, in the roots, in the spaces between Elior’s thoughts.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” Elior asked, the feeling of terror ever present in his throat, but no longer leading him.

  The figure did not answer his questions outright. Instead, he pointed at Elior, and in doing so, memory flashed: the planting of a seed in the void of nothing, growth, life, decay, all one. And a single word emerged, first in Old Norse, then translated to English:

  “?????????.”

  “Trjótungr.”

  “A crossroads.”

  Finally, the figure spoke: “You carry a question in your left hand,” the voice said. It sounded like wood creaking in a house that had settled after a century of standing. “Ask it, or the roots will drink it from you while you sleep.”

  Elior’s mouth was dry. He looked at his left hand—empty, yet heavy. There were many questions, but one burned in him brighter than the others.

  “What am I supposed to be?” he whispered.

  The old man trimmed a root. The sap fell and became runes that crawled away into the white soil.

  “A bridge is not the road, nor the destination, nor the traveler. Yet without the bridge, the river claims all three. You are the space between the step and the stone. You are the yes that follows the why.”

  He moved to another root, his hood never shifting, his face hidden.

  “Ask a second, before the bark grows over your tongue.”

  Elior swallowed. The air tasted of ozone, something metallic and sap. “Why does the Veil call to me?”

  The old man paused. His knife dipped into the white earth and came up clean. “The mouth does not want the food. The stomach does not want the seed. The soil does not want the root. Yet all consume to give back. You are not called to. You are hungered for. The Veil is a throat that has swallowed too much memory. You are the cough that clears it, or the silence that chokes.”

  He stood. The tree shivered, though there was no wind. White leaves fell upward, back into the branches, reversing their decay.

  “A third and final question—you do not yet know to ask, little bridge—is the price.”

  Elior’s chest ached. He thought of the trunk in his room, of the pendant cold against his chest, of his mother’s voice cut off mid-sentence. “Price?”

  The old man turned. The hood fell back—not to reveal a face, but to reveal that he had no face, at least not one Elior could hold in his mind, only features that shifted like smoke. Except for his eyes. One was grey and sharp as Auren’s on a good day. The other was amber and silver, veined with ash, a tree ring made flesh, pulsing with the same rhythm as the roots beneath Elior’s feet.

  “You ask what you must lose. The better question is what you must remember to forget. The leaf does not give up the branch. The branch does not give up the tree. The tree does not give up the soil. Yet all fall, and in falling, feed. You will not lose. You will become the losing. You will be the mercy that cuts, the memory that burns, the root that remembers it was once a seed.”

  He stepped closer. The white ground did not crunch beneath his feet; it sighed from the weight of veiled truths.

  “I give you nothing you do not already possess. I only polish the glass through which you see.”

  The old man raised his hands—weathered, scarred at the knuckles with patterns that matched the Runelock on the trunk back in his room—and placed them on Elior’s shoulders. The weight was immense, as if the entire tree leaned through this single point of contact.

  “Look at me,” the voice commanded, though the lips did not move.

  Elior tried not to look, but the command pulled at something deep inside of him, pushed him to meet the figure’s eye, and Elior looked.

  The eye saw through him—all of him: his thoughts, feelings, insecurities, his pain, his confusion, his wonder, and his thirst to know the unknown. The eye grew, drawing him in like gravity. Elior felt himself bend against reality in ways that shouldn’t be possible for his body to do. His feet left the ash beneath him, and he tumbled into the void of the eye.

  Elior fell into the amber-and-silver eye. It was not an eye but a world, a forest of glass, a library of roots, a crown of thorns worn by someone who resembled the face he saw in every mirror but older, sadder, more certain. He saw the runes there, not written but growing, not symbols but sap and memory. He understood, for one blinding moment, that reading was not decoding but recognizing, that language was not communication but memory made visible.

  The eye swallowed him whole—or had it made him whole? The void settled, and Elior floated in nothing and yet everything.

  Elior woke on the floor of Auren’s study, the Tome of Warden closed beneath his cheek, his fingers still curled around its edges as if he’d never let go. The stone-wood cover was warm, pulsing gently against his skin like a heartbeat that had synchronized with his own.

  He blinked. The room was darker than before, the shadows longer, but he could see them now—really see them. The grain in the desk was not random; it was a map of the coastline near Reine. The dust motes in the air were not drifting; they were spelling out words too small to read, but he knew they were words. The scar on Auren’s temple, visible from the doorway where his uncle stood frozen in shock, was not a scar but a sentence.

  Elior stood up. His legs were steady. His eyes—he could feel them, could feel the silver threads that had been etched into his retinas, the gift that had no name, the sight that saw meaning before form.

  He looked at the tome. The cover was blank again to the naked eye, but to him, the runes still danced there, quiet now, waiting.

  “Bók Varear,” he whispered.

  He understood. Not because he had learned, but because he had remembered.

  Outside, the Ash Tree in the courtyard groaned, a sound of recognition, of welcome, of warning.

  The roots remembered him.

  Now, finally, he could remember them back.