Page 78 of Ashen Souls

But then I saw it. Just one line, scrawled hastily at the very bottom margin, the handwriting much smaller and messier than the rest:

Some doors were sealed. Others were never meant to be reopened.

Harper rolled her eyes. “I hate ominous last lines.”

“Yeah, well, people don't usually scribble them for fun.”

A harsh electronic chime echoed from the front desk. Five minutes to closing.

The same bored woman from earlier appeared at the end of our aisle, jangling a set of keys. “Wrapping it up, girls,” she called out, already reaching over to kill the lights in the next row.

Harper groaned. “Of course we find the one useful thing right before they kick us out.”

We shoved our notes into our backpacks, returning the ledger to the front desk just as the woman started shutting down her monitor.

Out by the lockers, Harper leaned her shoulder against the metal while I grabbed my coat. “Your demon problem might actually be a foundational one.”

I touched my wrist, right where the sigil lay hidden under my sleeve. “Vesbridge was part of a powerful magical realm. But it still doesn’t explain the sigil. The connection. None of it.”

“And if the doors were sealed,” Harper added, zipping up her jacket, “it means someone is trying to force them back open.”

“Whatever binds me to Daeren... it only makes sense if magic never fully stopped existing.”

Harper slung her bag over her shoulder. “Then congratulations. You’re not cursed.”

“That’s comforting.”

“You’re just historically significant.”

We stepped out into the cool evening air just as the Archive doors locked behind us with a loud clack. The oppressive silence of the Archive shattered, swallowed by the roar of Friday rush hour. Cars crawled bumper-to-bumper down the avenue, and the wind carried the harsh smell of exhaust fumes and damp pavement.

My brain felt like it had been put through a blender, my eyes aching from staring at faded ink for hours. But as we joined the flow of the crowd, I realized something strange. The invisible hand that had been pressing against my windpipe for the last few days had finally loosened its grip.

“I actually feel better,” I admitted, zipping my coat up against the wind. “Which feels suspicious.”

“That’s because you finally got a breadcrumb,” Harper said, dodging a group of loud undergrads. “Your brain loves breadcrumbs.”

“I found out our city used to be the capital of a realm called Aethrya,” I said dryly. “That’s not a breadcrumb. That’s a whole cursed loaf.”

She grinned. “Exactly. Progress.”

I exhaled, grounding myself in the loud, dirty reality of the avenue. “It helps. Knowing there’s a reason. That I didn't just stumble into a demonic dimension out of pure bad luck.”

Harper bumped her shoulder against mine. “See? History. Grounding. Educational. Occasionally life-threatening.”

We reached the corner where our usual routes split: my apartment one way, campus the other. I slowed at the curb, already rehearsing my excuses to go home.

“Nope,” Harper said.

“Nope what?”

“Nope, we are not ending this night by you going home to stare at the ceiling and existentially reflect.”

“I wasn’t going to…”

“You absolutely were.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. “…Okay, maybe.”