The door did not simply close.

It sealed with the finality of a throat closing over a last breath, and the sound of it traveled through both worlds at once.

On the multi-life battlefield, the white-glass powder that had been the quarantine circle was still falling like cold snow. Zelda knelt in the center of it with the three children clutched against her, the seven-syllable name burning through their linked hands and her own thinned living mind. The absence of Kael’s physical presence was a sudden, violent hole in the circuit. The seventh syllable remained—rooted now on the other side of the sealed door—but the living heat of him, the...