The entrance lay hidden beneath a collapsed grave, beneath the grave beneath the cane fields, beneath the smoke-choked air of a broken world.
Jean-Noël had spoken of it only once, a place where the earth remembers itself. Elias thought it a metaphor until Marise led him there under a waning moon, her strength nearly gone, her voice thin.
"Below," she said. "They buried memory. You need to see what they left behind."
They descended through a cracked limestone tunnel, the walls slick with time. Roots dangled like nerves from the ceiling, pulsing faintly in the torchlight. The air grew colder. Older.
Elias stepped cautiously, hand gripping the hilt of the blade he'd taken from Lucien's study. It vibrated faintly, like a tuning fork struck in a silent room. Even the mirror in his satchel hummed now, reacting to something close, something old.
Then, abruptly, the tunnel widened into blackness.
A city waited in the deep.
It sprawled out before them, a maze of smooth stone and half-collapsed spires. No torches lit it, yet the buildings faintly glowed, as if soaked in phosphorescent moss. Symbols carved into every surface shone blue-white: vevé, spirals, stars within stars. Time had not erased them.
Elias stepped forward and whispered, "How long has this been here?"
Marise leaned against the wall, sweat shining on her brow. "It was old before the first slave ship. They say it was a crossing point. Between times. Between lives."
Then Elias saw it.
A mural carved into a vast obsidian slab. A robed figure stood at its center, arms outstretched, surrounded by swirling glyphs. Lines etched into the wall extended outward, branching like lightning, connecting to what looked like mirrors. Dozens. Hundreds.
One of them, dead center, was cracked.
And the man?
The face was unmistakable.
It was Elias.
He staggered back. "That's not possible."
Marise's voice was barely audible. "This place doesn't care what's possible. Only what repeats."
The mirror in his satchel pulsed hot. He pulled it out without thinking and the symbols on the walls began to move. Realign. Respond.
From every building around them came a low, vibrating tone, like a choir waking from centuries of sleep.
Then, without touching it, Elias found himself inside the mural.
Or rather, the mural was inside him.
He remembered a name he'd never heard.
He remembered standing in the same city centuries ago, carving warnings into the stone, bleeding into the cracks to keep them alive.
He remembered walking through ash and smoke and time itself.
The memory was not linear. It was circular. Like time itself had coiled inward, trapping him in a spiral.
And as he knelt beneath the mural, a soft light bloomed beneath his feet.
Words etched themselves into the dirt, glowing like fire:
"THE PRICE OF PASSAGE IS MEMORY."
Elias whispered, "Then take it."
And the light went out.
When he opened his eyes again, Marise was gone. Or perhaps she'd never followed him inside.
But he wasn't alone.
In the distance, deep within the ancient city, footsteps echoed, slow, deliberate, impossible.
Someone else had come to remember.