The third place did not have a sky.

It had ceilings made of bedframes and torn curtains and the particular half-light that lives in rooms where bodies once learned each other and then never returned. The air tasted of salt and iron and the ghost of skin left cooling. Underfoot, the ground was neither stone nor mud nor marble; it was the soft, giving resistance of mattresses layered across centuries of interrupted nights. Every step sank slightly, as though the place itself remembered weight and warmth and the exact moment when a hand had lifted and never come back down.

Zelda landed hard on her knees, the three children still...