Ash & Wonder

Eva opened the door. Not all the way, but enough.

Enough for the node to hold its warmth. Enough for a voice on the other side of the Veil to come through in the oldest language and say: I have been waiting for you. Enough to prove that six centuries of sealed silence could be broken by a being whose only sin was reaching.

The Academy has stopped learning her. It knows her now-the corridors steady, the doors answering her hand without hesitation, the building settled into the particular quiet of something that has found what it was built around. She is no longer the anomaly being navigated. She is the center.

Soran has stopped being careful. What replaced the careful is not reckless. It is specific, and hers, and she is learning what restraint looks like when it finally puts itself down. Kalixo's strategy is producing results for the first time, and the man underneath the strategy is becoming harder to separate from the man above it. Trystane is not reaching toward her anymore. He is where he was reaching.

Eva has light in her hands and a word for what she is and three men whose presence in her life has stopped feeling like something that happened to her and started feeling like something she chose. She has the work. She has the wanting. She is not making herself small about any of it.

But from the other side of the Veil, from inside the institution that cast her out, someone is sending a signal. Not a message but a location. A Witness who has been working from within for six centuries, ready to open the door from the other side. The door requires two. And what two Witnesses can do together is something Heaven has spent six hundred years making sure no one remembers.

The Underworld is ash and wonder and hers. Eva is about to find out what it costs to keep it.

Ash & Wonder
Infernum Academy • Book Two