The Door's gullet was a labyrinth of fractured time.
Eleanor stumbled through corridors of melting stone, her dagger casting jagged shadows that bent like pleading hands. The air reeked of burnt hair and forgotten birthdays. Whispers nipped at her heels—voices she'd known. Her mother, singing a lullaby. Abigail, laughing. Sheriff Burke, his final curse.
"Focus, guardian," the stones had warned. "Find the thread before the Door finds you."
She followed the scent of gunpowder and grief.
The memory unfolded like a rotting flower.
Elias Burke, age six, crouched in a root cellar. His mother's voice, shrill, seeped through the floorboards: "—not natural, Jeb! That child ain't right!"
Young Elias pressed his hands to his ears. Above him, the house groaned. A shadow slid under the door—too tall, too thin. It spoke with his father's voice:
"Come out, boy. The stars want to meet you."
Elias reached for a rusted hatchet. The door splintered.
Eleanor tried to intervene, but her hands passed through the memory like smoke. She could only watch as the scene reset, looping endlessly—the shadow, the hatchet, the wet crunch of violence. Each iteration left Elias more hollow, his eyes dimming as the Door fed.
"Stop," Eleanor pleaded, though she knew no one could hear. "You're not him. You're just a echo."
The memory froze.
Elias turned, his face half-shadowed. "Aren't we all?"
The cellar walls dissolved, replaced by the standing stones. Not the ones in the Hollow—older, cruder, their carvings fresh. A woman knelt before them, her auburn hair streaked with ash. Abigail Harlow. The first Abigail.
"Take him," she chanted, pressing a squalling infant to the central stone. "Take my son, and spare our blood."
The sky split. A tendril descended, caressing the child's brow. Elias's brow.
Eleanor's dagger flared. "The first sacrifice," she breathed. "Not a Blackthorn. A Harlow."
The infant wailed as the tendril withdrew, taking a piece of his soul. Abigail Harlow smiled, her teeth blackened by heresy.
"The Door forgets nothing," said Memory-Elias, now standing beside Eleanor. His form flickered—child, soldier, sheriff. "It collects. It hoards."
"How do I kill a memory?" she asked.
He pointed to the dagger. "The same way you kill a man. Cut out its heart."
The heart was a locket.
Eleanor found it buried in the memory's core—a tarnished silver oval, its chain snarled with cobwebs. Inside, a portrait of young Elias and his mother, her face scratched out.
"She knew," Eleanor realized. "She knew what he'd become."
The locket pulsed, its rhythm syncing with the Door's hunger. Eleanor pressed the dagger's edge to the clasp.
"Do it," Elias whispered. "Let me rest."
She hesitated. "What happens to you?"
His smile was a ghost. "Same as you. I become… what I'm needed to be."
The dagger fell.
The locket shattered.
The memory unraveled, Elias dissolving into stardust that clung to Eleanor's skin, whispering: "Find the others. The Door has three hearts."
She woke vomiting black bile, the Hollow's dawn clawing her eyes. The standing stones loomed, their whispers urgent:
"The sheriff's body. The church. Now."
Martha Harlow's inn lay between her and the church, its ruins now a nest of fleshy vines that recoiled as she passed. The sheriff's corpse sat propped against the altar, his face serene, a hole in his chest where his heart had been.
In its place: a second locket.
Eleanor pried it free. This portrait showed Elias as a young man, his arm around a woman with Martha's eyes.
"Abigail's mother," she guessed. "Another thread."
The locket convulsed, birthing a swarm of centipede-like shadows. Eleanor crushed it underfoot, the resulting scream shaking dust from the rafters.
Two hearts gone. One remained.
The stones hissed a name:
"Eleanor."