Exhausted, I wiped the ash out of my eyes and sank into a ball at the foot of the wooden doors. It was over. There were no bones beneath my feet, only marble tiles.
I tried to focus on the doors. They were so familiar.
I’d seen all of this before. It was even more familiar than the feeling I had when I saw Sarafine coming toward me.
Sarafine.
Where is she now? Where is her soul?
I didn’t want to think about it, and I closed my eyes and let the tears fall. Crying for her felt impossible. She was an evil monster. No one ever felt sorry for her.
So that couldn’t be it.
At least that’s what I told myself, until I stopped shaking and stood up again.
The pathways of my life had doubled back on me, as if the universe was forcing me to choose them all over again. I was standing in front of the unmistakable doorway to all other doorways, to all other places and times.
I didn’t know if I had the strength to go any farther, and I knew I didn’t have the courage to give up. I reached out and touched the carved wood of the ancient Caster doorway.
The Temporis Porta.
CHAPTER 33
The Wayward’s Way
I took a deep breath and tried to let the power of the Temporis Porta flow into me. I needed to feel something other than shock. But they felt like two regular wooden doors, even if they were about a thousand years old and framed with Niadic script, an even older lost language.
I pressed my fingers against the wood. It felt like Sarafine’s blood was on my hands in this world, as my blood had been on hers in the last. It didn’t matter if I had tried to stop her.
She had sacrificed herself so I would have a chance to make it to the Great Keep, even if hate was her only motivation. Sarafine had still given me a shot at getting back home to the people I loved.
I had to keep going. Like the officer at the Gates said, there was only one way into the one place I needed to go—the Way of the Warrior. Maybe this was how it felt.
Awful.
I tried not to think about the other thing. The fact that Sarafine’s soul was trapped in Eternal Darkness. It was hard to imagine.
I took a step back from the broad wooden doors of the Temporis Porta. It was identical to the doorway I found in the Caster Tunnels beneath Gatlin. The one that took me to the Far Keep for the first time. Rowan wood, carved into Caster circles.
I placed my palms against the rough exterior of the paneling.
Just like always, they gave way beneath me. I was the Wayward, and they were the Way. These doors would open for me in this world as they had in the other. They would show their pathway to me.
I pushed harder.
The doors swung open, and I stepped inside.
There were so many things I didn’t realize when I was alive. So many things I took for granted. My life didn’t seem precious when I had one.
But here, I’d fought through a mountain of bones, crossed a river, tunneled through a mountain, begged and bargained and bartered from one world to another, to get myself this close to these doors and this room.
Now I just had to find the library.
One page in one book.
One page in The Caster Chronicles, and I can go home.
The nearness of it swirled in the air around me. I had experienced this feeling only once before, at the Great Barrier—another seam between worlds. Then, just like now, I had felt the power crackling in the air, too, the magic. I was in a place where great things could happen and did happen.