Chapter Text
Kai’s body tipped backward.
Not fast.
That was the worst part.
Not a fall. Not a yank. Not violence in the ordinary sense.
It was acceptance—like gravity had been rewritten just for him, like the black water in the fountain had whispered come here and his sleeping body had decided it was the most natural thing in the world to obey.
Yeonjun moved before thought could catch him.
“Kai—!”
Chan’s hand shot out, but Yeonjun was already past him.
The dark surface of the fountain widened in a silent, perfect circle as Kai’s shoulders leaned over it, the water-black pupil opening deeper, rounder, ready to take him whole. Yeonjun lunged and caught Kai’s wrist just before the back of his head dipped beneath the surface.
Cold slammed up Yeonjun’s arm.
Not water-cold.
Threshold-cold.
Labyrinth-cold.
It felt like grabbing a doorknob in the middle of a nightmare and realizing the metal was alive.
Kai’s body jerked once in his grip.
The black water surged higher around Kai’s waist, not splashing, not breaking shape—holding him, inviting him, trying to teach him how to sink without resistance.
“Don’t touch the water directly!” Jungwon snapped, dropping to his knees beside the floor sigils. “Yeonjun, keep hold of him, not the threshold!”
“Kind of busy!” Yeonjun shot back through clenched teeth.
The mouth smiled through Kai’s wet-dark eyes.
“Sea,” it said softly, almost fondly, using Kai’s voice like it had every right. “If you pull too hard, you tear him.”
Yeonjun’s stomach twisted.
“Kai,” he said, louder, fiercer. “Wake up.”
The smile sharpened.
“He is asleep where I can hear him best.”
Sunoo stepped forward, bracelets chiming against his wrist as his fingers traced a quick curve through the air. Silver-white light flashed between his knuckles and struck the black water just above Kai’s chest.
The threshold hissed.
Steam rose in a bitter curl.
But Kai’s body only drifted another inch backward.
Sunghoon was beside Sunoo instantly, blade in hand—not raised toward Kai, but angled low, ready to strike if anything else came through.
“That wasn’t an entry-binding,” Sunoo said, eyes narrowing at the spiral of black water. “It’s layered. Sleep, invitation, and something older under it.”
“The old sigil,” Jungwon said tightly, still reading the floor. “The real one is underneath the false masks.”
Seungmin had dropped his satchel open on the floorboards and was digging through glass vials and wrapped packets with hands that stayed steady only because he was too angry to shake.
“If I can break the dreamless sleep, I can get him to hear us,” he said.
Felix, pale and still by the window, said quietly, “If you wake him wrong and the threshold panics, it’ll drag.”
Seungmin didn’t look up. “Thank you, that was deeply encouraging.”
Taehyun stood at the edge of the fountain, head tilted, listening so hard his whole body seemed to lean into it.
“It’s humming in thirds,” he whispered. “Three layered thresholds. Not just one open mouth.”
Jungwon looked up sharply. “Meaning?”
Taehyun’s gaze stayed distant. “The cabin. Kai. The fountain. Three anchors. That’s why it chose sleep—it needed stillness.”
Yeji’s bow remained trained on Kai’s torso, though her face had gone white with the strain of holding aim on someone she was trying to save.
“Talk faster,” she snapped. “I’d rather not shoot one of the five tonight.”
Chan stepped closer, voice low, commanding even through the fear. “What does it need to hold?”
Jungwon’s fingers hovered over the carved ring on the floorboards. “A living center. A place already marked. And permission—false or real.”
I.N, clutching the screaming compass to his chest, blurted, “The stolen key ring.”
Silence cracked.
Then Seungmin swore viciously. “It used the infirmary transfer tag to move him.”
Sunoo’s gaze sharpened. “Not physically. Ritualistically. Paper counts. In old threshold work, signatures and permissions can stand in for footsteps.”
The mouth smiled wider through Kai’s face, pleased they’d caught up.
“Yes,” it said. “Camp writes its own invitations so prettily.”
Yeonjun tightened his grip on Kai’s wrist so hard his hand ached.
“Let him go.”
The thing using Kai laughed.
Not cruelly.
Worse.
Patiently.
“As if I took him by force.”
The black water rose higher, slick around Kai’s ribs now, and Yeonjun felt the threshold pull harder—not just on Kai, but on him. On the sea in his blood. On the part of him that recognized water before fear.
Home, something old and treacherous whispered beneath the pull.
“No,” Yeonjun said out loud, voice shaking. “Not this. You don’t get to sound like home.”
For the first time, the mouth’s smile faltered.
The fountain water rippled.
Not outward.
Toward Yeonjun.
Answering him.
Sunghoon saw it first. “It’s listening to you more than it’s listening to the breach.”
Jungwon’s eyes widened. “Of course it is. This is Poseidon cabin. The water was always going to choose its own.”
Chan turned to Yeonjun. “Can you separate the cabin from the threshold?”
Yeonjun swallowed hard.
“I don’t know.”
The mouth smiled again, slower this time.
“You can,” it murmured through Kai. “But if you pull the sea away, what do you think he falls into?”
Kai’s body dipped another inch.
Yeonjun’s heart nearly stopped.
Seungmin rose abruptly, small vial in hand. “I need three seconds close enough to break the sleep.”
Sunoo’s head snapped toward him. “And if the threshold lashes?”
“Then you can blame me after,” Seungmin said.
Felix moved before anyone asked, sliding around the fountain’s side like shadow. “I’ll cover you.”
Yeji shifted too, arrow following the black spiral precisely. Chan stepped to Yeonjun’s left, bracing without touching, ready if Yeonjun lost footing.
Jungwon exhaled once, then placed both hands flat on the floorboards outside the threshold ring and began murmuring something too old and too precise to sound like ordinary speech. The carved symbols around the fountain brightened faintly—first one, then another, then the old hidden sigil beneath them like a bone showing through skin.
Sunoo added his own magic over it—soft silver arcs that laced through Jungwon’s lines, not fighting, but pinning.
Taehyun inhaled.
Then sang one note.
Pure. Thin. Mercilessly clear.
The sound hit the black water and turned the surface glass-smooth, freezing the spiral mid-motion like he’d found the exact frequency of its breath and laid a hand over its mouth.
“Now,” Taehyun whispered.
Seungmin lunged in.
He caught Kai’s free shoulder, slammed the vial’s contents beneath Kai’s nose, and hissed, “Wake up, idiot.”
The mouth snarled.
It wasn’t Kai’s voice anymore.
Too many voices at once. Wet stone, dark hallways, paper sliding under locked doors.
The black water surged.
Felix moved with impossible speed, catching Seungmin by the back of his shirt and yanking him clear just as a spike of black rose where his ribs had been.
Yeji loosed.
Her arrow didn’t hit Kai.
It struck the spike itself, pinning the surge back into the fountain with a crack of silver-threaded force that made the whole cabin shake.
The shell lamps on the wall flared once—then burst back to life, pale ocean-blue.
For one heartbeat the room was all light and dark at once.
And Kai gasped.
Not awake. Not fully.
But a real breath.
Yeonjun felt it through the wrist he held.
“Kai,” Yeonjun said immediately. “Kai, stay with me.”
Kai’s wet-dark eyes flickered.
The mouth’s control slipped just enough for something frightened and buried to show through.
“Hyung?” Kai whispered.
Relief hit Yeonjun so hard it almost broke him.
Then the black water yanked.
Hard.
Kai’s body slid downward to the waist.
Yeonjun nearly went with him.
Chan caught Yeonjun around the middle from behind just as Yeonjun’s knees slammed into the fountain rim.
The threshold opened wider with a silent pulse.
And from somewhere deep in the black beneath Kai’s drifting body, the Labyrinth answered.
Stone. Turns. Heat. Distance.
A breath like a tunnel learning his name.
⸻
At the forge, Soobin felt the same pulse hit like lightning through wet ground.
His whole body seized.
Not pain.
Recognition.
The forge automaton—half spider, half stolen workshop nightmare—was still slamming itself against Jay’s binding line, but Soobin barely saw it for one terrible second, because all he could feel was Yeonjun’s panic spike through the storm in his own blood.
Home, the storm said.
Wrong, Soobin thought back savagely.
The construct lunged again.
Heeseung took a glancing hit to the shoulder that spun him hard enough into the anvil to crack wood beneath the base. Changbin swore and drove his spear into one of the bronze joints, Lee Know slashed the softened seam with surgical precision, and Beomgyu’s blue fire kept eating the false signatures strapped across the creature’s frame.
“Focus!” Lee Know barked.
Soobin’s hands were already sparking again.
“It moved,” he said.
Jay, kneeling in scorched chalk and ward-lines, glanced up. “What?”
“The third door,” Soobin said. “It’s active.”
“That’s great,” Changbin grunted, wrenching his spear free. “Maybe tell it to wait until we’re done with this one.”
The automaton’s jaw opened.
The black seam inside it widened and whispered through forge-heat:
“Sky is late.”
Soobin went still.
Beomgyu’s face changed instantly. “No.”
The construct reared back, all its weight shifting not toward the line, not toward escape—
toward delay.
It only needed them busy.
Only needed Soobin here instead of where the threshold wanted him least.
Lee Know saw it at the same instant.
“Go,” he said.
Soobin turned sharply.
Jay blinked. “What?”
Lee Know didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
“This thing isn’t the kill. It’s the leash,” Lee Know said, eyes never leaving the automaton. “It’s here to keep the storm off the sea.”
Changbin’s grin flashed sharp and feral even now. “And I hate being outplayed.”
He drove his shoulder into one of the construct’s side legs hard enough to stagger it sideways.
“Go,” Changbin snapped too. “Before I start taking it personally.”
Heeseung straightened, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. “Jay and I can hold the furnace mouth if Lee Know keeps cutting joints.”
Beomgyu’s blue fire flared brighter. “I’m going with him.”
Lee Know shot him one cold glance. “No. Your fire matters here.”
Beomgyu looked ready to argue, then looked at the false lightning plate still strapped to the automaton’s frame, at the way his flame was the only thing eating the masks cleanly.
He swore under his breath.
Soobin’s chest felt too tight to breathe in.
Yeonjun.
Not a thought now. A direction.
A storm pressure racing toward the cabin line.
He moved.
He vaulted the broken binding line, crossed the forge floor in three strides, and was out the door before anyone could say his name again.
Behind him, the automaton shrieked in metal and heat.
Behind that, Beomgyu shouted, “Bring him back or I’ll haunt you both!”
⸻
Back in the Poseidon cabin, the threshold had stopped pretending to be gentle.
The fountain no longer looked like a basin.
It looked like a well cut straight through the center of the room, deep enough to hold night itself.
Kai hung suspended half-in, half-out, his body trembling with the strain of being asleep and awake at once.
Seungmin crouched nearby, breathing hard after the near miss.
“He heard you,” Seungmin said. “For a second. The sleep broke at the edges.”
Sunoo’s bracelets chimed as he changed the angle of his hands, silver threads now binding not the water but the space above it, as if he were sewing shut a tear no one else could see.
“It’s trying to use his dream-body,” Sunoo said tightly. “If he fully wakes while still anchored, the threshold gets a living mind to walk through.”
Jungwon’s eyes lifted from the sigils.
“Then we don’t wake him all the way. We pull him to the edge and cut the anchor first.”
“How?” Chan asked.
Jungwon looked at the old hidden sigil beneath the false marks, then at Yeonjun’s hand locked around Kai’s wrist.
“With consent,” Jungwon said.
Everyone stared.
The mouth laughed softly through Kai’s lips, though his real voice underneath had gone weak and dazed.
“You think boys sleeping in borrowed beds understand old magic enough to consent their way out?”
Jungwon ignored it.
“This cabin knows Yeonjun,” he said. “The water answers him. If the threshold was built using false permission, we can overwrite it with a true one.”
Yeonjun frowned, breath shaking. “You mean I tell the cabin Kai doesn’t belong to the door?”
“Yes.”
“That sounds fake.”
“It sounds old,” Sunghoon corrected, coolly.
Taehyun kept singing that thin note beneath all of it, the sound now vibrating through the shell lamps, through the floorboards, through Yeonjun’s teeth.
“I can only hold the breath this way for so long,” Taehyun warned.
Felix, still near the side window, went rigid.
Chan saw it immediately. “What?”
Felix looked toward the porch.
“Footsteps.”
Yeji’s bow snapped toward the door.
Not one set.
Running.
Fast.
The porch boards groaned once under sudden weight.
The door banged wider.
And Soobin hit the threshold of the cabin like the storm had carried him there by the throat.
He was breathing hard, hair disordered, hands lit faintly with white-blue current that made the shell lamps flicker in answer.
He took in the scene in one sweep—Kai half-sunk, Yeonjun braced against the pull, the black well where the fountain should have been, Sunoo’s silver bindings, Jungwon on the floor, Taehyun bleeding a note through clenched jaw.
And then he looked at Kai.
At the mouth using him.
The room went colder in a way that had nothing to do with water.
“Let him go,” Soobin said.
The thing inside the threshold smiled with Kai’s face.
“Sky came home.”
Soobin stepped forward.
Not reckless. Not wild.
Terrible in how controlled he was.
Chan moved to stop him. “Soobin—”
“He knows it’s me it wants,” Soobin said without looking away. “It’s been trying to split us since the forge.”
Yeonjun’s breath caught.
Soobin’s gaze flicked to him at last, and something in it made Yeonjun’s chest ache—fear, yes. But under it, certainty.
“Tell me what you need,” Soobin said.
Not are you okay. Not what happened.
Tell me what you need.
Yeonjun nearly broke right there.
Jungwon answered before he could.
“The cabin will answer true permission over false transfer if Yeonjun can anchor it. But the threshold’s using a third force to keep the consent tangled.”
“Sleep,” Sunoo said.
“No,” Taehyun said through his held note, voice strained. “Not just sleep. Distance. It’s using absence.”
Everyone looked at him.
Taehyun’s eyes were wide and bright with effort. “It built the third door around the part of Kai that thinks no one will reach him in time.”
Silence hit hard.
Because that was the cruelest thing the mouth had done yet.
Not just drugged him. Not just marked him.
It had found the fear under the fear.
That he would be left sleeping while everyone chased bigger disasters.
Yeonjun gripped Kai’s wrist tighter.
“Kai,” he said, voice rough. “Listen to me. We came back.”
Kai’s wet-dark eyes trembled.
The mouth’s smile strained for the first time.
Yeonjun stepped closer, ignoring the drag on his own center, ignoring the black water climbing colder over Kai’s hips.
“We came back,” Yeonjun said again, louder. “All of us. You hear me?”
Felix moved to the other side of the fountain. Chan stepped forward too. Sunghoon shifted closer, then Sunoo, then Yeji lowered her bow just enough to change purpose from aim to guard.
Soobin came to stand at Yeonjun’s shoulder.
Close enough that the air sparked where sea and storm met.
“Kai,” Soobin said, voice low and steady as thunder heard from under blankets. “You are not alone.”
The black water shuddered.
Sunoo inhaled sharply. “Again.”
“You are not alone,” Yeonjun repeated.
Chan’s voice joined theirs. “You are not alone.”
Felix, softer, “You are not alone.”
Even Seungmin, grim and furious, said it like an order to wake up.
Then Yeji.
Then Jungwon without looking up.
Then Sunghoon, cool and exact.
Then Sunoo, silver magic brightening between his fingers.
Taehyun’s note changed.
Just slightly.
No longer only pinning the breath.
Now harmonizing around it—making room for something else.
For the first time, Kai’s expression moved independent of the mouth.
Not much.
Just his brow pinching.
His fingers twitching once inside Yeonjun’s grip.
And the old hidden sigil beneath the fountain answered.
It lit sea-blue.
The black water hissed as if burned.
Jungwon’s head snapped up. “Now, Yeonjun. Tell the cabin.”
Yeonjun had no idea how to tell a cabin anything.
But the sea in his blood knew.
He looked down into the threshold-dark and spoke to the water as if it were listening, because it was.
“This is my cabin,” he said, voice shaking. “And he is mine to keep safe, not yours to take.”
The shell lamps flared bright enough to hurt.
The fountain water surged—
Not black now.
Clear.
Only for a heartbeat, but enough.
Enough for Yeonjun to see Kai beneath the threshold-lie.
Enough for the cabin to recognize the difference between home and opening.
The mouth screamed through Kai’s voice.
The black rushed upward in a violent whip, slamming against Taehyun’s sound-barrier, Sunoo’s silver bindings, Jungwon’s counter-sigils.
The whole room shook.
Soobin grabbed Yeonjun around the waist with one arm just as the recoil hit, holding him upright through the shockwave.
Lightning snapped involuntarily from Soobin’s free hand into the shell lamps above.
And this time the sky answered.
Not outside.
Inside the room.
A bolt-shaped blaze flashed above Soobin’s head—brief, fierce, undeniable.
The cabin windows rattled.
The mouth froze.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
“You,” it whispered, and for the first time it sounded uncertain.
Soobin looked like he wanted to hate the light above him, but there was no time.
Jungwon’s voice cracked sharp as glass. “Use it!”
Yeonjun didn’t even ask what it was.
Sea and sky were already touching—Yeonjun braced against Soobin’s hold, Kai’s wrist in his hand, the cabin lit by storm-claim and salt-claim together.
So Yeonjun reached for the water.
And Soobin reached for the charge in the air.
And together they pulled.
Not violently.
Absolutely.
The clear-blue surge from the old cabin water wrapped around Kai’s body even as lightning flashed through it—not to strike him, but to outline him. To separate boy from breach. Sleep from anchor. Friend from door.
Kai screamed.
Not in pain.
In waking.
The mouth screamed too—much louder, much older—as the connection ripped sideways.
The black threshold yanked once, trying to keep its chosen center.
Yeonjun held on.
Soobin held both of them.
Chan lunged in and caught Kai’s shoulder the second his torso cleared the waterline. Felix grabbed the back of Kai’s shirt. Seungmin was already there with the antidote and a rough, shaking hand at Kai’s jaw, forcing another breath.
“Kai! Stay here!”
The fountain exploded upward.
Black and clear water collided in the middle of the room.
The shell lamps burst.
The floor sigils blazed white-blue.
And from the heart of the threshold, something tried to manifest—
Not a hand this time.
A face.
Not whole.
Not human.
A shifting suggestion of features behind black water and corridor-dark, smiling too easily through every mask it had worn.
Sunoo’s bracelets flashed silver.
Taehyun’s voice cut sharper than it had all night, a pure sound-blade through the center of the face.
Yeji loosed.
Her arrow struck the manifesting image dead-center.
And Soobin, fully lit now by the second fierce flare of the lightning-bolt sign above his head, called down the strike he had been holding in his bones since the roof.
It hit the threshold point exactly.
White-blue light.
Thunder in a cabin too small to hold it.
And the face shattered.
The fountain collapsed inward with a sound like a door slamming shut beneath deep water.
Then silence.
Real silence this time.
Not held breath.
After.
Kai sagged between Chan and Felix, coughing violently as Seungmin forced him to drink something bitter from a cracked vial.
Yeonjun dropped to his knees beside the ruined fountain basin, hands shaking so hard they barely felt attached to him.
The water left in the basin was only water now.
Clear.
Ordinary.
The old hidden sigil on the floorboards glowed once and faded like a heartbeat finally returning to normal.
Soobin was still half-crouched beside Yeonjun, one hand braced on the floor, the other at Yeonjun’s waist like he hadn’t realized he was still holding on.
Above his head, the lightning-bolt sign flickered once more—
then settled.
Not tentative.
Claiming.
The cabin felt it.
The camp probably felt it.
The sky had stopped hovering and chosen.
Yeonjun looked up at him, chest heaving.
Soobin looked back with storm-dark eyes and all that impossible light still ghosting around him.
Neither of them spoke.
Because Kai was awake now.
Fully.
Breathing hard. Crying without realizing it. Clutching Felix’s sleeve with one hand and Chan’s wrist with the other like he’d fallen through too much dark and needed proof the world still had edges.
“You came back,” Kai whispered.
Yeonjun laughed once, broken with relief. “Yeah. Obviously.”
Kai’s face crumpled.
Seungmin muttered, “Don’t make him cry harder, he just had a doorway in his spine,” but his own voice shook.
Sunghoon lowered his blade.
Sunoo’s bracelets finally stilled.
Taehyun swayed where he stood and would’ve hit the floor if Jungwon hadn’t caught his elbow without looking.
Then, from somewhere outside the cabin, thunder answered the claim properly.
Not one roll.
Three.
The camp had heard.
The night had heard.
And down at the forge, far across the sleeping paths, the automaton gave one final shriek as its false masks all burned out at once.
⸻
Dawn came slowly and badly.
Not soft gold. Not peace.
Just the dark thinning enough for exhaustion to show on everyone’s faces.
They’d moved Kai to the nearest dry bunk once Seungmin was satisfied he wasn’t still threshold-bound. Chiron arrived only minutes after the collapse with Argus and two silent attendants, took one look at the ruined fountain and the scorched shell lamps and the sleeping-open exhaustion of the room, and did not ask for a report immediately.
He asked first, very quietly, “Is he here?”
And Yeonjun, sitting on the floor beside Kai’s bunk with wet sleeves and shaking hands, nodded.
Chiron’s shoulders loosened in a way that made Yeonjun realize how close the night had come to taking one of them.
Outside, patrols shifted.
Word would spread no matter how quiet the lockdown tried to stay now.
The sky had claimed Soobin in the Poseidon cabin while a third door collapsed around Kai.
There was no version of camp politics that stayed neat after that.
But for one small pocket of dawn, inside the wrecked sea-scented cabin, none of that mattered as much as the breathing.
Kai breathing.
Taehyun half-asleep against Jungwon’s shoulder.
Felix sitting at the foot of the bunk, still watching like he didn’t trust closed doors anymore.
Chan at the porch, speaking low with Yeji and Chiron about wards and patrol routes and what to tell the camp.
Sunoo and Sunghoon by the ruined fountain, inspecting the old hidden sigil with expressions that had stopped being guarded and become invested.
Seungmin capping vials with sharp, irritated precision because apparently surviving impossible magic still required paperwork.
I.N sitting cross-legged in the corner with the compass finally quiet in his lap, like he didn’t know what to do now that it had stopped screaming.
And Soobin—
Soobin leaning against the wall opposite Yeonjun, claimed now in truth, looking more tired than triumphant.
Yeonjun watched him for a long moment.
Then said softly, “You came back.”
Soobin’s mouth twitched—something almost like a smile, too exhausted to fully form.
“You asked me to.”
Yeonjun shook his head. “I didn’t.”
Soobin held his gaze.
“You didn’t have to.”
That landed somewhere deep.
The same place the sea had whispered home and the threshold had lied and the camp had nearly failed them.
Yeonjun looked away first, because he wasn’t sure what his face was doing.
Kai stirred on the bunk.
Everyone in the room tensed instantly.
Then Kai blinked up at the ceiling and said, hoarse and bewildered, “I had the worst dream,” and Beomgyu—who had arrived only minutes before, soot-covered from the forge and halfway to feral from not being here—made a broken sound that was half laugh, half sob, and promptly sat down on the floor because his legs gave out.
Heeseung and Jay came in behind him, both burned and grimy and alive, with Lee Know at their heels carrying the kind of dangerous calm that meant the forge breach had been contained but not forgotten.
“Second door’s sealed,” Jay reported to Chiron without preamble. “For now.”
Lee Know’s gaze swept the ruined cabin, the sleeping anchor-that-almost-was, the scorched floor, the fully claimed sky-son leaning against the wall.
Then he said, with perfect dryness, “I leave for one hour.”
Beomgyu looked up from where he was still sitting on the floor and pointed accusingly at everyone. “This is why no one is ever allowed to split up again.”
Changbin’s voice drifted from the porch. “Counterpoint: splitting up let us beat the robot.”
“No one asked you,” three people said at once.
For the first time since the roof, laughter cracked through fear.
Thin. Tired. Real.
It didn’t last.
Because Kai, still pale, still shaking, turned his head toward Yeonjun and Soobin and whispered, “It showed me something.”
The room stilled.
Chiron stepped closer. “What did it show you?”
Kai swallowed hard.
His eyes moved to the ruined fountain.
Then to the window.
Then to the dawn just beginning to touch the pines.
“It showed me the record,” he said.
Yeonjun’s whole body went cold.
Jungwon straightened.
Sunoo’s bracelets chimed once in sharp surprise.
“The missing part?” Chan asked.
Kai nodded weakly.
“I couldn’t read all of it,” he whispered. “It kept moving. Like the words were underwater. But I remember one line.”
No one breathed.
Kai’s voice shook when he said it.
“Five stars will open what was never meant to wake.”
Silence rolled outward.
Heavy. Final. Terrible.
Then Kai looked at Soobin, at the lightning that had already claimed him, and at Yeonjun, sea-son in a broken sea-cabin, and his voice dropped smaller still.
“And it said…” Kai swallowed. “It said if the sea and sky stand together at the last door…”
His fingers tightened in the blanket.
“Only one of them gets to come back the same.”
And just like that, the dawn stopped feeling like relief.
It became a countdown