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The cold spreads outward, spooling from my skin in fine lines that branch and link. A shape emerges, familiar and impossible. A doorway. The blue light pulses faster, brighter, syncing to a rhythm I can’t quite follow. The wall beneath my palm hums with pressure, a low vibration I can feel but can’t hear.

Then the surface begins to thin, becoming less substantial. I can almost feel through it now. The heat of the desert beyond, the vast openness waiting. The barrier between here and there stretches, pulls, andweakensbeneath my touch.

With a sound like cracking ice, the wall gives way.

Not all at once. Just the section under my hand, dissolving in a shimmer of frost and light. It peels back in slow ribbons, revealing brightness too sharp to look at directly, a vertical slash of open desert where smooth metal used to be.

Sunlight pours through the gap, golden and blinding. Heat crashes into me like a wave, thick and dry and real in a way nothing else here has felt.

I take a step back, breathing hard.

The tower has opened. I’ve done what I didn’t think was possible.

Behind me, Sacha’s moves. He stops beside me, and I can feel the change in him as much as see it. His gaze locks on the desert.

“You did it,” he whispers, genuine awe coloring his voice. “You actually did it.”

I stare at the opening, hardly believing what I’m seeing ... whatI’ve done. My hand tingles where it was pressed against the wall. The air smells different now—drier, scorched. After three days trapped in this place, after believing I might never see the sky again, freedom stands before us, harsh and unforgiving as it may be.

The desert beyond looks just as deadly as when I first arrived—worse, maybe. Now I understand what it can do to a body unprepared for its brutality. What it almost did to mine. But it’s a way out. It’s movement and change and possibility. It’s the path to answers I desperately need, and maybe,somehow, a way home.

Sacha approaches the opening with steps that can’t quite hide their hesitation. He pauses at the very edge, where the tower wall meets desert air. Sunlight strikes his face for the first time since I’ve known him. His expression stays carefully blank, but tension radiates from every line of his body, every muscle drawn tight with anticipation … or fear. Maybe both.

And maybe it’s not just fear of what’s out there, but of what’s no longer holding him back. Of what it means to stand at the edge of a cage and find the door open.

“What’s wrong?” I move closer, afraid we’ve come this far only to find another barrier. “Didn’t it work? Can’t you leave?”

His head turns, and his eyes meet mine and, for once, they don’t look through me but actually hold. See. Settle.

“Nothing is wrong.” His voice is soft. He studies the opening for a moment longer, gaze sweeping across the horizon as though committing it to memory. Then, with a deep breath, he steps through into the light.

Chapter Eight

SACHA

“Some structures are not built to shelter. They are built to watch.”

Sayings of the Earthvein Sages

My first step outof the tower and onto the sand is a rebirth.

The desert heat slams into me, brutal and immediate after spending so many years in the tower’s cloistered shade. My skin protests under the sun, eyes watering against the brutal light. But I welcome each miracle—the tight pull of hot breath in lungs, the sting in my eyes, the burn where the light touches exposed flesh. Each sensation lands like a brand. Undeniable proof that this moment is real and not another cruel dream of freedom.

Twenty-seven years of captivity, ending with one single step.

The sand gives beneath my feet, loose and unfamiliar after years of stone. I shift my weight, dig my toes deeper, absorbing the texture of it—gritty, sunbaked, abrasive, and gloriously real. A gentle breeze brushes across my face, carrying scents I’d half-forgotten—sun-baked earth, distant minerals, the smell of sunlight. I breathe them in until my chest hurts, filling my lungs with air that hasn’t been recycled through magical filters for decades.

The vastness of the desert in front of me is almost overwhelming. There are no walls or boundaries surrounding me. Only an endless horizon in every direction, a sky so blue it seems unreal after years of violet-tinged twilight. My senses, dulled by years of sameness, are drowning. My vision swims, edges blurring as tears form unbidden. Too much input at once. Too much freedom.

Too mucheverything.

I stagger. Just a step. Caught between elation and vertigo, my mind struggling to process the sheer enormity of open space after so long in confinement.

Despite the rational part of my mind that recognizes the need for provisions before going any further, I cannot bring myself to turn back. Not when freedom has just embraced me. What if I go back inside and the binding slams back into place? The thought sends a tremor of genuine fear through me.

I take another step forward, then another, each one carrying me further from my prison. Each footfall sends a shock of recognition through my body.

This is real. This is happening.