The world returned in fragments.
Eleanor awoke to a sky the color of a fresh bruise, her body sprawled across the splintered remains of the central standing stone. The dagger was gone, but its imprint remained—a jagged scar across her palm, pulsing with the same viridian light that now threaded her veins. She sat up, her bones creaking like a ship's hull in a storm, and surveyed what was left of Blackthorn Hollow.
The town was a wound.
Houses sagged inward, their roofs caved into gaping maws. The church steeple had snapped like a wishbone, its cross impaled in the mud of the town square. The air hummed with a static charge, and the ground beneath her vibrated faintly, as if the earth itself were holding its breath. The Door was gone, but its absence felt like a presence—a phantom limb throbbing in the cosmos.
The townsfolk were gone too. Not dead. Erased. Their belongings lay scattered in the streets—a child's doll, a half-knitted scarf, Jeb Lowe's ledger, its pages blank. Only the faintest impressions remained, shadows burned into walls where they'd once stood. Eleanor traced a silhouette with her scarred hand, and the figure moved, its head twisting to face her with a silent scream.
"They're not gone," whispered the stones—or what was left of them. Their voices were splintered, their power dimmed. "They're… between."
A cold wind coiled around her, carrying the scent of Abigail's herbs and the sheriff's gunpowder. Eleanor turned, half-expecting to see them, but the road was empty.
No. Not empty.
At the edge of the woods, a figure stood watching. Small. Frail. Human.
The girl from the mirror.
Eleanor's breath hitched. The child had her father's stubborn jaw and her mother's auburn hair, but her eyes—those vivid, poison-green eyes—were pure Blackthorn. She raised a hand, beckoning, then vanished into the trees.
Eleanor followed.
The woods were wrong.
Trees bent at angles that defied gravity, their roots knotting into spiral-triangles. The path underfoot writhed like a living thing, guiding her to a clearing she'd never seen. At its center stood a well, its stones slick with algae, the Blackthorn family crest etched above the bucket.
"Down," hissed the wind.
The well's rope was frayed, the bucket long rotted away. Eleanor climbed, her scar burning with each rung. The descent felt infinite, the darkness thickening until even her green-veined glow couldn't pierce it. When her feet finally touched water, the world shifted.
She stood in the Blackthorn crypt, but not as she'd left it. The walls breathed, expanding and contracting like lungs. The coffins were open, their occupants gone. At the far end, the grimoire floated above the altar, its pages fanning in an unseen breeze.
The girl waited beside it.
"You didn't kill it," she said, her voice older than her face. "You just… made it angry."
Eleanor stepped closer. "Who are you?"
"What you could've been. What you still might be." The girl pressed a hand to the grimoire. The pages flipped to an illustration Eleanor hadn't seen before—a woman standing at the edge of a void, her body splitting into roots and stars. The caption read: The Guardian's Ascension.
"The Door isn't a place," the girl said. "It's a cycle. You broke one turn. But the wheel keeps spinning."
Eleanor's scar flared. "How do I stop it?"
The girl smiled, a flash of Abigail's cruelty. "You become the axle."
The crypt shuddered. Water surged from the well shaft, filling the chamber with the stench of brine and decay. Eleanor grabbed the grimoire as the girl dissolved into laughter, her form unraveling into tendrils of mist.
"Find me," the voice echoed. "Find us all."
The Hollow's survivors were not survivors at all.
Eleanor found them in the church cellar—or what had once been the cellar. The room had expanded, its walls now lined with fleshy pods that pulsed like hearts. Inside each pod, a figure floated: the baker, the schoolteacher, old Mrs. Darrow from the post office. Their eyes snapped open as Eleanor approached, their mouths moving in unison:
"Guardian. Guardian. Guardian."
She tore a pod open. Mrs. Darrow spilled out, her body fused with translucent tendrils, her skin studded with barnacles. She seized Eleanor's wrist, her voice a wet gurgle.
"It's growing inside us. Using us. You have to… burn…"
The pod next to her burst. The baker emerged, his limbs elongated, his jaw unhinging to reveal rows of needle teeth. He lunged. Eleanor drove her scarred hand into his chest, her fingers closing around a throbbing mass—a heart, but not a heart. A node of pulsating black energy.
She crushed it.
The baker dissolved, his final scream merging with the others' chorus.
"Guardian. Guardian. Guardian."
Eleanor fled, the grimoire clutched to her chest. The nodes were seeds. The Door was replanting itself.
And the girl—the mirror-child—was its gardener.
The standing stones welcomed her with a groan.
Eleanor knelt in the mud, the grimoire open to The Guardian's Ascension. The ritual required three anchors: the dagger (lost), the blood of the first sacrifice (Elias's, now dust), and a name spoken into the void.
Her name.
"Eleanor Voss," she whispered.
The ground split. The stones reformed, their shards knitting into a throne of jagged rock. The air buzzed with anticipation.
"Last chance," crooned Abigail's voice from the trees. "Join us. Or watch this world crumble."
Eleanor climbed the throne.
The stars blinked out.
And the Door opened—through her.