The vision of a familiar fathomless shape violently squirming within the deepest, blackest depths of Lecia's mind faded quickly as consciousness returned.

  She woke with a sharp breath that tore through her throat and forced her upright before thought fully formed. Her spine locked straight as her hands cut through the air in front of her, testing space she could not yet see clearly. Light pressed down from directly above, focused and contained.

  A circular glass dome had been set into the ceiling, held in place by curved iron ribs bolted into stone, and the low yet steady radiance within it emitted a thin hum that threaded through her skull and settled behind her eyes. The glow was far from blinding, yet Lecia found herself blinking spots out of her eyes as she turned her face away.

  Her pulse struck hard enough to blur the edges of her vision, each beat landing with physical force. Copper coated her tongue, thick and unmistakable, as though it had soaked into her mouth during unconsciousness. Thoughts came like molasses and her limbs moved as if the very same substance ran through her veins. A tight band of pressure held firm at the base of her skull, constant and deliberate.

  Cold traveled upward from beneath her body, seeping through fabric and into muscle. The cot beneath her had been bolted directly into the stone floor, its metal frame fixed at four corners by iron rings anchored deep into drilled sockets. Leather restraints hung from each ring, treated with oil that darkened their surfaces and kept them supple. The straps had been arranged neatly, positioned for use, and returned to rest with care.

  Lecia drew breath slowly through her nose and released it in a shaky stream. The air carried a sharp antiseptic bite that layered over older, embedded scents that had settled into the stone. Salt lingered beneath it, followed by rust and a faint organic trace that suggested something once living had been processed here. The mixture remained steady, circulating without draft or variation.

  The room measured about seven or eight of her paces across and roughly ten or eleven in depth, enclosed by stone walls that still bore faint tool marks beneath a smoothing finish. Dark stone tiles covered the floor from wall to wall, unmarked except for a tight sigaldric array etched into the stone around the cot. Within that confined space, fine lines intersected in precise geometry, converging directly beneath the cot in a dense nexus of inert symbols.

  In the far corner, a metal drain sat flush with the tile, its rim slightly rusted with age. The door stood directly opposite the cot, set into a reinforced stone frame. Its lower half consisted of riveted iron plating, while the upper section held a panel of thick frosted glass.

  After a quick, disoriented once-over of the surrounding space, Lecia closed her eyes and continued to take slow, deep breaths until they came out in rhythm resembling calm. She wasn't sure how long she lay there as she waited for her heavy, trembling limbs to settle back into controlled stillness. It could have been minutes. It could've been an hour. All the while, her mind slowly but steadily began to clear, and thoughts came more easily.

  It was only when her mind felt mostly coherent that she dared open her eyes and take full stock of her surroundings and situation. As much as her emotions wanted to rebel, confusion and fear wouldn't do Lecia any good. With some effort, she stamped those emotions down, along with the questions of what happened and how she'd gotten here, and focused on the here and now.

  Unburdened by the loose leather restraints, Lecia swung her legs down from the cot and let her feet meet the tile. The chill of the floor traveled through the thin fabric at once, grounding her fully in the space. Her knees shook once under her weight before stabilizing. She straightened slowly, giving the room a quick visual sweep before resting her still somewhat bleary golden eyes on the door.

  In her quiet moment of observation, Lecia finally noticed sound filtering in through the door from the corridor outside her small room. A thin whimper reached her first, breaking apart mid-breath as though cut short by exhaustion. Silence followed for several seconds before sobbing rose in its place, raw and uneven.

  A voice, clearly that of a small boy, repeated a single word in a rasp worn thin by pain and repetition.

  "Who are you... Wh-who... are you... Who are...you...?"

  Other sounds moved through the corridor in uneven fragments that refused clear direction. Metal struck tile somewhere beyond the curve of the hall. A cry climbed into a scream and then ended with abrupt precision, as though halted by intervention. The echo lingered a fraction longer than natural acoustics would allow.

  Footsteps traveled across stone at a measured pace, yet the structure bent the sound until it refused to settle in any fixed location. They seemed close and distant at once, passing along the corridor beyond her sight. The distortion persisted, rearranging space through sound alone. Silence filled the gaps between each disturbance with oppressive consistency.

  Hesitantly, Lecia stepped away from the cot and placed her palms flat against the wall to her right, leaning in slightly. A low vibration traveled through the stone, steady and mechanical, carrying a rhythm that did not match any human movement. The vibration continued without variation, anchored deeper within the structure. It felt foundational, integrated into the walls themselves.

  Further away, a small voice pleaded in a halting rhythm that suggested futile hope. The plea ended with a breath pulled too sharply, followed by a sequence of wet coughs and retching. The sounds weakened and then ceased altogether. The silence was quickly followed by a muffled curse.

  That, in turn, was followed by what sounded like several metallic objects crashing to the stone floor. A brief yet heated conversation ensued between a man and a woman, the details of which Lecia couldn't make out, before one set of footsteps stormed away and a metal door opened, then slammed shut.

  Lecia's hands closed into fists against the wall, nails pressing into her palms until skin gave under the pressure. A sense of dread had her heart racing in her chest, and she struggled to keep the tremor in her hands under control. She didn't know how she'd gotten here or where or what this place was, but she knew it was dangerous. Escape was her top priority.

  No, not just escape.

  Survival.

  Clueless as she was, every instinct Lecia possessed was roaring at her that if she remained in this place—in this room—she would die.

  She let the dire situation sink in without shifting her expression. With another small, calming breath, she stepped away from the wall and looked once more to the door. She was too small to reach the window built into the door, which she could tell from just a glance. With that in mind, she retreated to the center of the room where she turned in a measured circle, this time taking a clearer inventory of the interior.

  The cot remained centered over what looked like an inactive sigaldric array. An iron drain crouched in the corner, and beside the wall sat the rough wooden footstool alongside the plain bucket—nothing more than what was strictly necessary. There wasn't much more to see in the dim glow of the light above, but that was fine. Lecia found exactly what she needed at that moment.

  She wasted no time in dragging the stool over to the door. It was a bit of a struggle as the stool, for as small and wooden as it was, was surprisingly heavy. Still, she managed it all the same, and it wasn't long before she had the thing right where she needed it. Lifting herself up onto the stool, she rose onto her toes and angled her face toward the frosted glass pane set into the upper portion of the door.

  Pale shapes blurred into indistinct motion beyond it, resolving into silhouettes that moved along the corridor. A shadow passed by directly outside her cell. She quickly ducked down and remained motionless, counting the seconds by the beat in her ears. To her relief, the figure didn't linger, and the footsteps continued down the corridor until she could no longer hear them.

  It wasn't long after that she heard another scream erupt from somewhere nearby. The wail was accompanied by a strange, indefinable reverberating hum. Together, the noise and the scream rose into a thin pitch that fractured into silence, save several hoarse and ragged gasps of pain. Lecia's fingers twitched as the gasps broke into mewling sobs.

  Again, the tone suggested a child, though Lecia couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. Elsewhere, a heavy object struck stone at measured intervals, the impact repeating until the pattern slowed. A high laugh began and continued at a steady cadence, detached from the rhythm of the blows. The laugh eventually devolved into hiccuping giggles, then died entirely. The blows did not relent.

  Lecia blinked, then looked down at her own trembling hands. Her face remained impassive as she clenched them into fists, but that didn't stop the shaking.

  Where was she?

  What was this horrific place?

  The last Lecia remembered was the dinner. She remembered the discussion with the Magister about the manor in Old Noblecrest, and then she got really tired. And after that, things got... hazy. Everything past a certain blurred into obscurity until there was nothing but a pair of dark hazel eyes filling her vision. And then... that was it. But that didn't make sense. If there was one thing Lecia could rely on, it was her memory.

  And yet...

  Lecia gave a sharp shake of her head and forced the rising panic back down. She could think more about it later—if she got out of this situation alive. For now, all she could do was try to get some more information and figure out some kind of plan. Unfortunately, both goals were easier said than done given her isolation. That said, she could still test a few things.

  Shoving her fears aside, Lecia hopped off the stool and, quietly as she could, placed it back where she'd found it. Next, she approached the door once more and pressed an ear against the cold metal. Hearing no further footsteps outside, she reached for the handle and gave it a careful, deliberate twist.

  Locked.

  She expected as much, but it didn't hurt to check.

  That done, she turned her focus to her own condition. Beyond some residual grogginess, her head finally felt clear enough to think properly. The heaviness in her arms and legs had abated for the most part. The lingering stiffness wouldn't be too much of an impediment if she needed to flee.

  A quick scan of her body showed no outward signs of injury and she didn't feel any pain. It was then that her gaze lowered to her wrists, where faint red bands circled the skin in clean, even rings. A slight scowl of confusion touched her lips as she looked over the rest of her body and found matching marks encircling her ankles at identical heights. Her clothing at least remained intact. No tears or signs of stress.

  Lecia puzzled at the markings for a bit before something clicked and she spun around to face the cot. Specifically, her eyes locked onto the leather restraints connected to the frame.

  Had she been restrained?

  It was the only thing that made sense, but if that was the case, how did she get free? She'd been unconscious up until only moments ago, which meant it would have had to have been someone else, right? But who? And more importantly, why? Just how long had Lecia been sleeping?

  ...It didn't matter, at least, not right now.

  Those kinds of questions could come later.

  For now, there was one thing Lecia needed to know above all else: could she still use the Runic Arts?

  The answer, at least as far as magickal fuel was concerned, was readily apparent once Lecia focused on her aetheric senses. There was an abundance of ambient aether to draw from—so much so that Lecia wasn't sure how she'd missed it before. Even now, she could feel her already-saturated aethercore passively drawing it in and had to actively staunch the flow, lest it spill over and become dangerous.

  This would have been a blessing, if not for the sheer strangeness of what she was feeling in that aether.

  She extended her magickal awareness beyond her skin and tasted the ambient aether once more, letting it brush the edges of her senses. The aether was there, thick enough to be almost a tangible weight. Yet something about it... rankled. If Lecia had to compare the sensation to something, it'd be like catching the slightest whiff of rotting eggs in an otherwise deliciously aromatic bakery.

  She tried to pin down the wrongness and found only a blank gap where understanding should have been. It made her somewhat hesitant to draw it in for a moment, but that hesitation was short-lived once she realized she'd likely been pulling the tainted aether into her core for some time now.

  If something bad was going to happen, it likely already would have by now.

  That reasoning was enough to set aside Lecia's misgivings, and she moved on to the next order of business. With her core full to bursting, she was all too happy to burn the aether within, especially if it meant she could test out a certain incantation in a live environment. To that end, Lecia brought the perfect image of what she wanted from the depths of the steel trap that was her memory. With the image in place, she raised a finger radiating pale aetheric light and began to draw.

  The process was slow. Slow enough that no line wavered and quiet enough that even the faint scrape of breath stayed inside her chest. Curves and angles formed in pale traces that lingered just long enough to guide the next stroke. She paused at each point where the shape tightened, then continued, building the complex pattern of runes and lines with the patience of someone who could not afford a mistake.

  The moment the last line met the first, the sigil flared a brilliant white-green before fading back into ambient aether. In its wake, air pressed outward in a clean rush and wrapped around Lecia in a smooth, rounded shell. It flashed once, bright and thin, then sank from sight as if it had never been there at all. The pressure did not leave, though, and she could feel it waiting at the edge of her skin, ready to turn at least one attack aside.

  At the same time, a quiet pull began deep in her center, steady and insistent, draining her core as long as she kept the barrier alive. Lecia was aware of the cost, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that the ambient aether she was passively pulling in was enough to offset that cost—at least, for the most part. She wasn't sure how long the barrier would last, but she guessed a few hours at least.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Now that she had some measure of protection in place, Lecia focused on the next point of interest in the room. She crossed back to the cot, careful with her steps, and knelt at the edge of the lines and runes etched in an uneven ring around the bed. The lines were too fine to be crude work, cut with a steadiness that made her skin prickle as she followed them with her eyes.

  She reached out a hand to brush her fingers over the interlocking sigils, but stopped herself just inches before. She'd already stepped all over the inert lattice, but still. It was probably best not to tempt fate too much. Instead, she retracted her hand and leaned closer, letting the dim light catch the grooves. Even dormant, the pattern felt... ominous.

  She had heard of arrays from her mentor, usually spoken of with a sort of begrudging respect, which always gave Lecia the impression that she didn't like them all that much. This one was nothing like the simple practice circles she’d drawn in ash or chalk, nothing like the neat little sigils used for drills.

  The design sprawled in layered paths that folded back into themselves, branching and rejoining in ways that made her lose the thread if she blinked at the wrong moment. It looked like something made to run without mercy once it was fed. A few runes stood out as familiar, small anchors of meaning amid the larger whole.

  She caught a binding rune worked into a junction, an emphasis stroke she’d used before, and a couple of directional cuts that suggested flow being forced into order. Past that, it stopped being readable. The rest was too complicated, too intricate, too dense for her to understand. In a lot of ways, it was like many of the images in her grimoire.

  She traced the shape with her gaze again, slower this time, and still the purpose stayed out of reach. There was no clear endpoint, no obvious trigger line, no single intent she could name and hold. A sense of frustration passed through Lecia as she tried and failed to comprehend what she was looking at, but it was all beyond her. This was clearly done by some high-level Mage—maybe even the Magister.

  That is, assuming Lecia was still somewhere in the estate.

  Lecia rose with a small, annoyed huff and forced herself to set her sights elsewhere. She made another circuit of the room, this time with her eyes close to the stone and her fingers hovering near seams and edges. She checked the corners, the drain, the bucket, the footstool, and the cot’s frame for anything loose, anything hidden, anything that didn't belong.

  The tiles gave her only cold certainty, and the walls offered nothing but smooth patience and the promise of certain doom if she stayed. When she returned to the door, she had to accept it. There was nothing here meant to help her leave. She accepted the fact readily, but refused to believe there was nothing she could do. In fact, Lecia knew she still had options, even if they weren't ideal.

  Lecia moved toward the metallic door and stepped off to one side, making sure she was out of view of the small glass partition. She waited a moment, listening to the distant childlike wails, hiccuping laughter, and other disturbing sounds Lecia had no name or description for. She had to escape, but she couldn't help but wonder just what she'd be stepping into once she did.

  What would happen if she got caught?

  She didn't want to think about it, so she didn't.

  Instead, hearing no nearby footsteps or adult voices, she took a deep, quiet breath. For the first time in what felt like ages, she pulled on that strange sensation in her upper chest, and with barely a whisper, the black grimoire appeared in her hands. She stared down at the silvery raven embossed on the cover, heart thudding loudly in her chest despite her attempts to keep calm.

  "Dangerous..."

  The murmur came almost unbidden as she considered the potential consequences of what she was about to attempt. The book was overflowing with secrets she barely understood, its cryptic words practically spilling off the pages. Lecia could still recall every line and sigil, every mind-bending array and magickal formulae etched into its archaic script.

  She might not grasp all of it—or even most of it—but the memory was there. She had the tome, she had the memory of what was in the tome, and if there were any hope of getting out of this place it would likely be found here. Risky prospect or no, Lecia couldn't think of any other options.

  Without ceremony, she opened the grimoire and flipped through several pages.

  During her very thorough scouring of the book, over several days, Lecia had tried to find something she could feasibly use with minimal risk to herself. Some kind of runic incantation script or sigils that held more runes she recognized than not. Yes, her knowledge of runes was limited to the handful her mentor had deigned to teach her, but that handful had to count for something, right?

  As it turned out, there were a few simpler scripts and sigils Lecia felt mildly confident she could pull off without too much backlash. Well, with enough time, patience, and aether Lecia was confident she could cast any of the spells in the book. Rather, she was mildly confident she understood the general essence of what these simpler spells were supposed to do based on what runes she knew.

  Runic script tended to be fairly straightforward in its effects when incanted as is—that fact being one reason Lecia much preferred it over the more complicated geometry of sigaldry. Of course, you had to focus and rely far more on your own intent when casting with runic script, but that—like image visualization—wasn't a problem for Lecia.

  What was a problem was the nuances behind sigaldry. Because most of the intent was explicitly inscribed in the geometric shaping of the runes and filtered through ambient aether, it was harder to get a grasp on what a particular sigaldric incantation did or how much aether it would cost.

  That was arguably a bigger issue with runic script casting, but Lecia could usually get a feel for how much an incantation using runic script would pull from her core. Sigaldric incantations, despite being designed to ease the burden of casting and increase aether cost efficiency, were not so easy to discern if she wasn't directly told the cost.

  In any case, the real danger was overdrawing on one's aethercore.

  If she cast a spell and it drained her core completely before she could stop it, that spell would start tapping into her vitality directly. At that point, the incantation was out of the caster's hands and would continue regardless of intent until the cost had been paid. The vitality threshold was considered a point of no return, and if Lecia allowed a spell to start draining her very life force, she wouldn’t last long.

  And that was assuming she drew it perfectly.

  Death was a very real possibility.

  Sure, she could try to pull in more aether, but could she manage that before the unknown spell devoured her entirely? Her mentor back then had driven the dangers of overdrawing on one's aether into her mind countless times, and from what she'd been told, death by vitality drain was a horrifically painful way to go. Using a spell she didn't fully understand was a massive gamble, especially one from her grimoire.

  It was a gamble Lecia would normally never make under almost any circumstance. Unfortunately, this was one such circumstance where she felt she had no alternatives. Still, it wasn't too hard a decision to make in the end. After all, if Lecia stayed here, she was all but certain she'd either die or suffer whatever nightmarish fate awaited the children she could hear outside even now.

  Lecia would struggle, endure, and survive using whatever means she had to, or at least she would try her damndest. She had a goal to accomplish, and she refused to falter before she reached it, that pinnacle of Magehood. But, failing that, if she was going to die or be tortured anyway, Lecia would rather risk it all and die on her own terms, enduring until the very last breath left her lungs.

  Lecia let the thought settle, neither indulging it nor pushing it away. In this place, choice was only a matter of which risk she would accept first. She lowered her gaze to the grimoire and continued to turn pages until her hands found the place she had marked in memory.

  She stopped on a sheet dominated by a single sigil, dense, compact, and way above what she should be able to remember, let alone draw. The circular lattice folded inward and rejoined itself in tight loops, leaving no wasted space. Under the dome light, the ink looked almost black-green, old enough to have soaked into the parchment rather than resting on it.

  She studied it without blinking for several breaths, then blinked once on purpose and checked that the lines stayed where they belonged. The sigil did not shift, but the page carried the same faint suggestion of movement that the rest of the book did, like the sense of a thought changing just before it becomes speech. Lecia treated that as noise and held her focus steady.

  A dull bitterness surfaced at the same time her mind began to catalogue the runes. Her mentor had never taught her an offensive incantation, not even a crude one meant to drive someone back. Lecia had been given light to see, a barrier for protection, and a small healing cantrip to keep herself functional. She'd understood the logic at the orphanage, but it left her relying on other people’s restraint and it certainly didn't sound like there was any of that in this place.

  The old woman had deemed her unfit for the kind of responsibility such power inherently held. More control and less ambition. Never incant what you did not understand. Lecia had accepted that framework because it was consistent and because it kept her alive, but it had also ensured she had no clean way to end a threat.

  Here, the absence mattered. She could hear children in the corridor, weak and helpless voices beholden to the nameless horrors inflicted upon them. Lecia did not raise her expression to match the sounds, but she kept them in mind and kept her breathing even.

  She returned to the page and anchored herself in what she could read. Three runes were familiar, placed where the sigil tightened and forced the aether to follow a chosen path. She traced each with her eyes and named them silently, letting the names serve as stakes driven into the ground.

  The first was “ālīesan,” set near the upper curve where several lines converged. Release, loosen, unbind, a rune that insisted a lock was not permanent. She had practiced its feel in smaller exercises, enough to recognize its signature even inside a denser lattice.

  Opposite it sat “tūn,” nested deeper where the geometry formed a contained pocket. Enclosure, boundary, a penned space held inside a defined edge. The cornerstone of her wind-aspected barrier incantation. The surrounding strokes narrowed around it, like the sigil itself was reinforcing the idea of containment.

  The third rune was “turhstingan,” written with a sharper confidence and a slightly different hand. Pierce-through, pass, penetrate, the insistence that a barrier could be crossed without being shattered. The three together suggested method rather than violence, a tool meant to breach an enclosure by releasing and passing through.

  Lecia held the trio in her mind and compared them to the sigil’s overall flow. Aether, if guided, behaved like wind in channels, and this sigaldry—almost complex enough to be a smaller array—looked like a careful set of channels. The intended outcome remained indistinct, but the structure did not feel like a spell meant to explode.

  Then her attention slid to what she couldn't name. Two other runes were woven into the lattice where they would matter most, smaller and drawn in an older style that did not match the rest of the page. Lecia memorized their curves anyway, then tested her memory against the symbols again, and found nothing.

  She'd never seen these runes before, not even in passing. She tried to sense whether they carried heat, weight, or any familiar pull in the aether, but the marks remained only marks, and guessing at them felt like stepping onto ice.

  Lecia considered removing them from the equation entirely. If she switched to runic script and drew only what she recognized, she could lean on intent to fill the missing meaning. It would be like the way she sometimes steadied her light orb by holding the concept of steady illumination more firmly than the strokes themselves. It was an appealing idea because it offered the illusion of control.

  It was also reckless. This sigil was not a simple runic script meant to be shaped by the caster’s will; it was sigaldry, compiled and engineered to carry most of its intent in its geometry. Changing a sigaldric working without understanding the underlying logic was a recipe for disaster and this was a delicate situation as it was.

  Not to mention if Lecia got it wrong, the cost of changing a sigaldric incantation to the more aether-hungry runic script method just might kill her outright.

  Before she'd cast her barrier spell, Lecia’s aethercore had felt swollen, already too full from the ambient saturation in this place. The wrongness in that aether still lingered at the edge of her senses, faint but persistent. She couldn't afford a spell that ran away from her, not when the cliff edge was vitality drain.

  So she rejected modification. Casting the sigil as written would at least keep the spell inside the constraints its maker intended. That did not make it safe, but it reduced the number of unknowns she personally introduced. She'd have to hope the incantation meant what she suspected, given the runes she recognized.

  With the decision fixed, Lecia assessed what else was drawing on her reserves. The wind barrier still hovered at the edge of her skin, invisible but present, and its maintenance pull ran steady and small. In another environment, she could have tolerated it, but now that she'd made her decision, it was an aetheric expense she literally couldn't afford to pay.

  She wasn't sure how much aether the sigil in her grimoire would cost. If she were lucky, it would pull entirely from ambient aether, but something told Lecia she wouldn't be quite that fortunate. No, best not to rely on chance. If she was about to attempt an unknown incantation with an unknown cost, she wanted every bit of aether she could shove into her core.

  Lecia reached inward and found the barrier’s structure, the way its sigaldric shape held tension like a stretched membrane. She withdrew her intent carefully, unraveling the pattern seam by aetheric seam. The pressure surrounding her vanished at once, leaving her aware of the room’s chill and the thin fabric of her clothes as the only physical boundary she had.

  She didn't linger on the exposure. If her attempt succeeded, she could gather more aether and redraw the barrier without issue. If it failed, she likely wouldn't live long enough to need one. With the consequences in mind, Lecia shifted her position so that she was facing the door and pulled the grimoire closer under the light.

  She reviewed the sigil again as a sequence of strokes rather than a static picture. Each line had a length, a curve, and a point where it tightened into meaning, and she mapped those points in order. Her memory gave her the whole pattern, but she still followed it with her eyes to keep the execution clean.

  The ambient aether remained thick and faintly rank, but it was usable, and she allowed a thin thread to pass into her core to keep it full without letting it spill. Too much aether in the reservoir made her casting twitchy. Lecia kept her breathing slow and deliberate, letting discipline and focus do the work.

  She kept her haphazard plan in the back of her mind.

  Unlock, remove, or pass through the door. Run. Find a place to hide if possible.

  She raised a finger and gathered pale aether at the tip until it glimmered like frost catching light. Her hand stayed steady, elbow tucked, wrist aligned, prepared to draw the first curve. Her focus narrowed to a finely honed point and as her finger moved to trace the first stroke that would set everything else in motion—

  Click-clack.

  The sound came, small and precise yet echoing through the room like a hammer blow. Lecia's attention snapped to the small glass partition, heart thundering in her chest as she froze, her finger still lifted in preparation. Having lost her focus, the flow of aether from her core cut off, and the radiant glow at the tip of her finger dissipated into wisps of ambient aether.

  The hesitation only lasted a second.

  Lecia reacted without thinking, her instincts taking over in her panic. Her intent tugged reflexively, and the grimoire vanished from her hands in a blink. As it did, she quickly stepped to the side, pressing herself against the wall and placing herself out of the frosted pane’s line of sight.

  Her hands came up loosely, ready to move, ready to run, ready to fight, ready to do... something. Adrenaline spiked and every sense strained to its limit as Lecia waited for the inevitable. Heart pounding in her ears, she waited a second, then two... then three.

  No one entered.

  The hinge didn't move, the latch didn't scrape, and the door didn't swing open to reveal her captor or jailer. Only distant crying and warped echoes drifted through the stone.

  Lecia waited anyway.

  She counted slow breaths, letting time prove whether the click was bait or accident. With no threat immediately incoming, she began to wonder if she'd just been hearing things. Even then, Lecia didn't let down her guard and remained alert and focused on the door, ignoring the growing stiffness in her tensing muscles.

  Then, after what felt like an eternity, she heard it.

  Retreating steps just past her door, light and quick. So quiet that Lecia would've missed the sound had her every sense not been concentrated on the door. It was a controlled pace that didn't sound like it belonged to someone simply patrolling the corridor. The acoustics tried to smear the direction, but the rhythm moved away without hesitation. Whoever it was didn't slow, and the sound soon receded rapidly into the distance.

  Lecia remained still until the steps were gone. She did not press to the glass or try to steal a look at silhouettes. She couldn't see through the pane, but that didn't necessarily mean the same was true from the outside looking in. When no return footsteps came, she moved again, slow enough to react to any suspicious noises or movements.

  She approached the door from the side and put her ear close to the iron. The metal gave her nothing but cold, and she heard no breath, no shifting weight, no quiet scrape of clothing. In fact, a few of the constant sounds she'd been hearing all this time were now absent. She could still hear the far-off sobs and pleas of other children, but no more laughter or banging or muffled conversations.

  Lecia filed that away for now and returned her attention to the metal threshold before her. After another careful count, she reached for the handle and tightened her grip. The handle turned fully under her grip, smooth and complete. There was no catch, no reluctance, only the quiet sensation of a mechanism disengaging. A soft internal clunk followed.

  The unlocked door brought no relief—just a new possibility, a new path, and new suspicion to go with it. There was the fact that she no longer had to risk her life on that incantation, but she wasn't sure if this was better. Not yet, at least. Cautious of the situation, Lecia took a long moment to recast her barrier before returning to the door. That done, she closed her hand back around the handle, but didn't pull yet. Instead, Lecia listened again for any sign of someone lingering nearby.

  She tested the weight of the door with the smallest pressure, enough to feel whether it would swing freely. It yielded a fraction, then settled. She drew in one controlled breath, aligned her feet, and angled her shoulder closer without crossing the threshold.

  The corridor beyond was still unknown, but the room behind her was known and fatal if she stayed. Lecia’s eyes remained flat but attentive as she eased the door open and slipped through, keeping close to the hinge-side shadow. The iron shut behind her without a sound, and she carried her breath with her into the corridor.