The silver light did not carry her upward or downward.

It carried her inward.

Zelda felt the mansion, the pack, the blood-soaked earth of the southern grounds peel away like old skin. Kael’s voice fractured into echoes and then into nothing. The inverted tether remained—the only thread still connecting her to anything that had once been real—but it had become a bridge of pure principle, humming with the weight of every life she had ever refused to surrender.

She stood on a plain of white glass that stretched without horizon. Above her there was no sky, only a slow rotation of doors. Thousands of them. Millions. Some were wooden and...