The tapping continued for three nights.
Always the same: two sharp knocks against the stone door in the dark. No words. No shadows. Just sound.
But on the fourth night, it changed.
Sarah was half-asleep on the basement steps when it happened—fingers curled around the blackened sigil still etched on her skin, a candle guttering beside her.
The door didn't knock this time.
It whispered.
"Cold…"
Her head snapped up.
The word had come from behind the door—but it was Ace's voice.
Raw. Hollow. Familiar enough to cut her in half.
She scrambled to her feet, breath caught in her throat.
"Ace?" she called, pressing both hands to the stone.
Silence.
Then:
"Don't open it."
She stepped back.
Shaking.
Everything in her screamed to obey—but her heart refused.
"You said I'd have to close it," she whispered to the silence. "Not that I shouldn't open it."
His voice came again, weaker:
"It's not just me anymore."
That night, Sarah poured over Hal's notes once more.
She found an old, tattered page tucked between the backs of two journals.
It wasn't written by Hal.
It was older—inked by someone who had witnessed the rituals before the Order fell.
"The Anakeion opens the way not just with body, but with memory. What they recall becomes law inside the Hollow. Those who pass the gate do not walk through space. They walk through what they loved most. And if they forget it… the Hollow remakes them."
Sarah read it again. And again.
Her heart broke on the third reading.
Because she realized what Ace had been trying to hold onto—the thing that anchored him enough to still speak.
Her.
She had to go in.
There was no other way.
The final sigil, she discovered, wasn't on any page.
It was inside the attic's last mirror—now shattered.
She pieced the glass together like a puzzle, blood pricking her fingertips.
And as she did, something appeared in the reflection:
A door with no frame.
A threshold made of light.
And the spiral carved not in stone—but in her own eyes.
She followed the reflection's direction.
Down into the basement.
The stone wall no longer looked like stone.
It pulsed.
Soft. Living.
She pressed her palm to it—and it opened.
No sound.
No fanfare.
Just the slow peeling back of veil from world.
And she stepped through.
Beyond was not darkness.
It was memory.
The air smelled like rain.
The sky was red.
And in the center of the spiraled field stood Ace.
But not all of him.
His face had cracks down the middle.
His fingers were blackened. His veins were hollow vines.
But when he saw her—he smiled.
"Sarah."
And for a heartbeat, he was whole.