Something was wrong. The fire was growing, spreading faster than I could run. She wasn’t trying to stop the flames.

She was the one making them grow.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Are you crazy?”

She was in the very center of the flames. “It’s a battle to the death. Absolute destruction. Only one of us can survive. And as much as I hate you, I hate Angelus more.” Sarafine raised her arms over her head, and the fire grew, as if she was pulling the flames up with her.

“Make him pay.”

Her cloak caught fire, and her hair started burning.

“You can’t just give up!” I shouted, but I didn’t know if she could hear me. I couldn’t see her anymore.

I hurled myself into the fire without thinking, falling toward her through the flames. I wasn’t sure I could stop, even if I wanted to. But I didn’t want to.

It was Sarafine or me.

Lena or Eternal Darkness.

It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to sit there and watch anyone die chained like a dog. Not even Sarafine.

It wasn’t about her. It was about me.

I reached for the manacles around her ankles, beating on the iron with a bone at the base of her throne. “We have to get out of here.”

The fire had completely surrounded me, when I heard the screaming. The sound tore across the barren dirt, rising into the air over the pit. It sounded like a wild animal dying. For a second, I thought I saw the distant golden spires of the Great Keep flicker at the sound of her voice through the flames.

Sarafine’s burning body arched back, writhing in pain, and started to crumble into tiny pieces of burnt skin and bone. There was nothing I could do as the flames consumed her. I wanted to close my eyes or turn away. But it seemed like someone should bear witness to her last moments. Maybe I just didn’t want her to die alone.

After a few minutes that felt more like hours, I watched as the last bits of the Darkest Caster in two worlds blew into cold white ash.

It was too late to get out.

I felt the fire crawl up my arms.

I was next.

I tried to picture Lena one last time, but I couldn’t even think. The pain was unbearable. I knew I was going to pass out. This was it.

I closed my eyes.…

When I opened them again, the pit was gone, and I was standing in front of a quiet doorway in a still hallway, in a building that looked like a castle.

There was no pain.

No Sarafine.

No fire.

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.