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She speaks again. I hear the words, but it takes effort to separate them from the sound of her voice.

“What is this place? Who are you?”

Questions. She’s asking me questions. But I don’t answer. I’m still watching her. Still processing the sounds. Still trying to work out how she got here.

“Why are you staring at me?”

The demand snaps my focus back into place. She’s waiting for an answer.

“My name is … Sacha.” The sound of it sits strangely in my mouth. Heavier than I remember.

I watch her closely as it leaves my lips, searching for any sign of recognition. There is none. No reaction, and no fear. Either my name means nothing to her, or she’s hiding it well.

It should mean something. Once, it meant a great deal. Once, it was a name to be feared.

I take a step toward her, and the binding pushes back—slow, invisible, absolute. I stop. I let her appearance here distract me. I stopped tracking the boundary’s movement across the room.

She doesn’t seem to notice. Her attention is scattered, pulled in too many directions at once.

“You’re safe here.” The words come out easier now. But it’s a half-truth at best. “The desert can’t reach inside these walls.” That, however, is absolutely true.

Her eyes shift again, sweeping slowly across the room. She takes in the shelves, the food on the table, the tapestries draped across the walls to mute the mirrored sheen. Each detail adds a new thread of confusion to her face.

None of this makes sense to her, and it shows. She doesn’t know what this chamber is, who I am— what I am—or what any of it means. But she’s trying to work it out. I can almost feel the effort it’s taking for her to piece things together.

“How did I … I was in Chicago …”

Chicago .

The name means nothing to me, but I guess from her phrasing it’s a place. I know of no city in Meridian that bears it. If one exists now, it didn’t when I was last free.

“If you would like to rest.” The words come slowly. Each one halting as I recall the shape and sound of them. “There are blankets in there.” I gesture to the wooden chest against the wall.

She doesn’t look. Instead, she backs away until she hits the wall behind her, eyes darting around the room again .

“No.” She shakes her head. “I can’t rest. I need to get out of here. I need to go home. It’s almost Christmas.”

Another word I don’t recognize. It doesn’t belong to any regional dialect I know, or any tradition I recognize. Not a solstice, not a name-day, not anything Meridian has ever marked.

A new possibility begins to form.

“I need to find the door.”

There is no way out. She hasn’t accepted that yet.

“There isn’t one.” I force the words out after half a beat of silence.

“What do you mean, there isn’t one ?” Her eyes widen, panic rising beneath the exhaustion again. “There has to be a door, a window … something !”

“It’s night.” I pause. I became accustomed to silence a long time ago. I’m not sure I can adapt to speech again. “It’s too cold. You’ll die out there.”

She presses her hands against the wall, shaking her head.

“This can’t be happening.”

I don’t argue. She isn’t going to listen to me anyway. She’s already retreating inward. Her panic has nowhere left to go. Let it break. Let it consume her attention. While she does that, I can work out how to shape what comes next.

She slides down the wall until she’s sitting, knees pulled up to her chest. “This is insane,” she whispers, more to herself than to me. “This can’t be happening.”

I return to my desk, and leave her to unravel in silence. If she believes I’m giving her space, she won’t question the limitations of my movement. That kind of misdirection is easy to maintain, and it buys me time.

The tower’s blue light begins to dim as night deepens outside, the blue-violet glow softening by degrees. She notices the change. I can see it in the way her eyes lift, wide and unfocused, straining to orient themselves in a room that refuses to behave in any way she understands.

“What is happening now?”

“Night falls.”

She blinks at me. I ignore her, and pull the open book toward me.

I keep my eyes on the page, but I can still see her at the edge of my vision—head bowed, shoulders starting to sag.

She lists forward, then jerks upright, clearly not trusting her surroundings or me.

But each reset takes longer. Her body is shutting down, needing rest, whether she wants it to or not.

I wait until sleep takes hold, then rise, and walk as far as I can before the binding stops me. She’s still against the wall, folded in on herself, arms tight around her legs, chin against her knees. Her breathing has deepened, slowed.

She must have responded to my summoning. Years after casting the spell into the void, she alone found her way to this tower.

My pulse jumps once. I suppress the response.

It didn’t work in the way I expected. It didn’t draw someone loyal to me. But perhaps that’s better. She doesn’t know who I am. Doesn’t know what I was. And that opens new possibilities I hadn’t considered .

I can barely contain the surge of triumph. Years after pouring the last of my magic into the summoning, of accepting it had failed, it found someone.

And now she’s sleeping across the chamber from me.

Real . Tangible. My potential salvation.

I study her features in the dim light. Unremarkable by the standards of this world. Sunburned skin already blistering across her cheeks and nose. Chapped lips. Strange clothes that speak of a world unlike my own.

My eyes track over her face, her hair, her hands, pausing on her fingers. The nails are painted. A splash of red against the dark blue material covering her legs.

Nothing about this creature suggests power or purpose or destiny.

So what secrets does she carry? What untapped potential lies dormant within her? I need to know. I need to understand what makes her different. What allowed her to respond when so many others have remained deaf to my call.

But, no matter the reason, she’s here now. My unexpected key.

I pace along the edge of my binding, anticipation coursing through me for the first time in years. My mind races with plans, and with the intoxicating taste of freedom after so long.

Could this woman truly be the one to break my chains? I dare not hope too much. And yet … hope is a stubborn thing. It grows in the darkest of places, even after years of being crushed.

My captors were brutally efficient in their work. They designed this prison with one purpose. To ensure I would never walk free again. In all my time here, I haven’t found a single loophole or weakness. There’s been nothing but unending isolation.

Yet, even they couldn’t predict this.

They planned for everything, except her.

I stop pacing, and turn to focus on her sleeping form.

Who is she? This stranger from Chicago? What life did she lead before stumbling into my summons?

What does she know about Meridian? Does she know anything at all?

Her ignorance could be useful. The less she understands about this realm, about the powers that flow through it, and about me , the easier she’ll be to guide.

I need only offer enough truth to seem honest, enough help to seem valuable, and enough direction to keep her moving along the path I choose.

I’ll need to tread carefully. Build her trust, and convince her that helping me is the only way to help herself. I can play on her desperation to return home, and her confusion in this strange place.

She wants to go home. I want to be free. I’ll make her believe these goals align perfectly.

She doesn’t need to know the reality of my prison, or when I’m at my most dangerous. Better to let her believe she’s safe with me, and that I want to help her.

By the time she discovers what the cost of freeing me could be, it’ll be too late to change her mind.

She stirs in her sleep, mumbling something unintelligible.

Her face contorts briefly, as if caught in a nightmare.

Given what she’s experienced today, I’m not surprised.

Being dropped into a desert, nearly dying of heat and dehydration, then finding herself trapped in a tower with a stranger …

I have no doubt it would break many minds.

But hers hasn’t broken. There’s resilience beneath the fear and confusion. I saw it in how she fought to stay awake despite her exhaustion. That strength is promising. I need someone with a will to survive, with determination.

The binding tightens as night deepens, an invisible force pressing in on all sides until it forces me to my bed.

I’ve grown used to the pattern over the years, the narrowing of space until even standing becomes a strain.

My captors knew exactly what they were doing when they crafted this prison.

They understood perfectly how to limit my power when it should be at its strongest.

The night should belong to me. Instead, it buries me.

I glance over at her again. She’s still curled against the wall, still deep in sleep. I wonder what she’ll make of me in the morning light. Will she remember our brief exchange, or will her mind have blocked it out in her exhausted state?

She shivers in her sleep, pulling her knees tighter against her chest. I could speak, wake her, direct her to the blankets again. But I don’t.

Instead, I stretch out on the bed, hands tucked beneath my head, and wait. With midnight almost here, I can feel the binding close to my skin. I won’t sleep, I rarely do anymore, but I will lie here and plan.

Tomorrow, I’ll offer her food and warmth. I’ll be the solid ground in her shifting reality. By the time the sun sets again, she’ll have taken the first small steps toward trusting me.

And trust, once given, is the key that opens every door.