CHAPTER ZERO: THE STRAY'S INVITATION

The sky over Neotoma had passed beyond bleeding into a state of profound sepsis. A great, weeping sore of violet and bruise-purple smeared the heavens, the Veil above it pulsing with the labored rhythm of a sick heart. This was the infection point—not a storm, but a cognitive plague scabbing over the city, rewiring reality at its frayed edges where memory bled into moss and breath soured into root. It wanted in. It wanted to grow.

Down in the gutters, the runoff was not water but a thick, plasmic slurry that stank of burnt copper, forgotten names, and the sweet, cloying rot of something blooming where nothing should. Rael moved through it as a man wading through the meat of a bad dream, his progress just another page in a life that had once spun on the axis of neural knife-fights in orbitals, zero-g drag shows that defied physics and propriety, and the quiet, grisly work of patching up gods too stubborn or arrogant to die correctly. He had been a fixer for the cosmos's most esoteric messes, a relic hunter who trafficked in forbidden memories and shattered divinities. He was dangerous because he knew how to pick locks that were never meant to be opened. He was broken because the last lock he'd opened had led directly to them—and then had snapped shut, swallowing them whole.

Now, he was the problem, and there was no one left in the dwindling world who could fix him.

His boots made a wet, fist-like sound against the pavement. Slap. Slap. Slap. A grim metronome for the end of all things. He refused to look at the shapes shifting in the alley mouths—things that were more shadow than substance, chittering softly as they tore at offerings he did not care to identify. He simply walked, one foot in front of the other, a machine whose every cog and gear was rusted tight around a single, rotting thought. The chapel. It has to be the chapel.

It emerged from the urban decay like a broken molar in a skull of crumbling brick. The Church of the Unspoken Gate. Its steeple stood as a crooked finger pointing accusingly at a Heaven that had long since quit the business of listening. One of the stained-glass windows was shattered, a jagged hole left in the shape of a falling angel. The edges of the break crawled with a faint, phosphorescent lichen he distantly recognized from a derelict star-schooner he'd scavenged near Titan. It pulsed with a soft, malignant light, breathing in sync with the distant thunder of the Veil, its tendrils weaving through the glass like veins mapping a dying eye.

Rael paused at the threshold, his hand hovering an inch from the latch. He could feel a subtle vibration humming through the spongy wood. It wasn't the wind. It was something deeper, older, burrowing patiently beneath the foundations, tasting the stone for weakness. The forest wasn't just coming; it was already here, waiting underneath.

The door groaned open before his fingers made contact, swinging inward on hinges that shrieked like a tortured animal. The smell that rushed out struck him with the force of a physical blow—not just dust and dry rot, but beneath it, buried under those layers of neglect, was the ghost of a scent he knew in his marrow. Them. Sandalwood soap and the faint, sweet spice of the hand-rolled cigarettes they'd always favored. This was his ghost story, and it began not with a sight or a sound, but with a smell that could unravel him.

A memory unfolded, unbidden and painfully vivid. Them, tangled in the luxurious sheets they'd lifted from a five-star hotel on Luna, their low laughter a soothing rumble as a perfect smoke ring drifted toward the viewing port and the infinite black beyond. "S'better than heaven," they'd murmured, their fingers tracing idle, familiar constellations across the topography of his chest. Their laughter had been a rare and precious thing then—unguarded, a sound that felt like distant thunder rolling over lunar craters. In that encapsulated moment, the room had been too small to contain the two of them and the weight of all the worlds they carried between them. They had pressed closer, their mouth finding the hollow of his throat, whispering a potent mix of filth and devotion with the same breath. He had believed them. For one terrifying, perfect heartbeat, he had believed every word.

The memory faded, leaving behind a hollowed-out ache that was somehow sharper than the original moment. His heart didn't flutter; it clenched into a fist of ice behind his ribs, so cold it burned.

Inside, the silence was a physical presence, a pressure against his eardrums. The pews were gouged and scarred by claws that suggested an origin neither beast nor man. At the front, the pulpit was split clean down the middle, as if struck from below by a fist of lightning. The air felt thick, heavy with unseen spores that danced like dust motes in the few slivers of weak light piercing the cracked roof. Each tiny particle was an invader, seeking purchase in lung tissue or the fertile ground of a willing mind. The core conflict of this new world was here, in this room: the forest wanted in.

And there it was. The primary threat, made manifest.

Their coat hung on a bent nail beside the shattered window. A long, grey duster, worn soft and shiny at the elbows from use, was draped with an eerie, precise carelessness. It didn't look like it had been placed there so much as the body within had simply evaporated, leaving behind only the skin of its memory. The inner lining had undergone a hideous change; fine, hair-like green filaments, slick with a faint moisture, had threaded their way through the wool in a slow, possessive embroidery. Spores clung to the collar in a delicate, deadly frost. It wasn't merely waiting. It was actively incubating.

Rael's mind supplied another memory, a grounding beat in the rising horror: slipping his hands inside that very coat on a frigid night in the grimy underbelly of some forgotten orbital station, feeling the precious warmth of their body radiating through the fabric, their heartbeat a steady drum against his palm syncing with his own—a tiny victory against the chaos screaming outside. They had always smelled of smoke and engine grease and something else, something indefinably and uniquely theirs. He had once, after a job had gone catastrophically sideways, buried his face in that collar and whispered, hoarse with exhaustion, that he was so tired. They hadn't replied with words, only by pulling him down onto a cot barely wide enough for one, making room anyway, proving through action that the universe could still be bent, could still make space for them. This was his flaw, the engine of his tragedy: he was a man who kept following promises, even now, following the cruelest promise of all—a scent on the air.

He could still see the faint smudge of engine oil on the cuff, a relic from when they'd fixed his pistol for him.

The memory that came now was sharper, more defined. Their clever, capable fingers, stained black with grime, expertly reseating the firing pin while he held the light steady. "There, my angel. Good as new," they'd said, their voice a low hum of concentration. "Don't go pointing it at anything you can't afford to love." Afterward, they'd shared a quiet drink in the flickering glow of a faulty neon sign, their knees brushing under the small table, a world of unspoken promise passing between them in a single, fierce look. That night, the entire station had been drifting on a slow, decaying orbit toward a dead star, and they had kissed with a desperate intensity, as if they were the only gravity left, as if they had to hold each other down to the world or risk flying apart forever. The monster outside knew these intimate habits, these private codes, because it hadn't simply observed them—it had grown from the fertile soil of their shared history. Its intimacy was its most precise weapon.

He stood frozen in the aisle, his own breath the loudest sound in the crushing, vegetative quiet.

A new sound intruded. Tiny. Dry. Not a scuttle or a skitter, but the deliberate, probing scrape of a root seeking a path through stone.

His head snapped toward the altar.

It was a slab of cracked marble, half-collapsed under some unseen weight. Its surface was marred by a series of fresh, deep cuts. A sigil. It was angular, beautiful in its complex precision, and utterly profane.

Their handwriting.

It was a dark mirror of the arcane calligraphy he'd once used to crack open a memory prison buried deep in the red sands of Mars. Back when memory itself was a currency he knew how to mint and spend. Back when he was still somebody who got paid to remember the things the universe wanted forgotten. He was the mythic wanderer, called to one last, terrible job. The sigil wasn't some random scarring; it was a summons, half-complete, its lines actively pulling at the loose threads of the Veil, inviting the infection deeper into this sacred, broken space. The door he was approaching wasn't just wood and iron; it was metaphysical.

He crouched, the bones in his knees protesting, and traced the grooves of the carving with a touch that was almost reverent. The stone was still faintly warm to the touch, as if a body had recently been lying there, pouring its intent into the rock. His fingers remembered a different kind of heat, the memory of making different kinds of marks on living skin instead of dead stone.

It was then that his eyes caught on the paper. Neatly folded, compact, it was tucked into the fractured throat of a broken stone angel's head that lay beside the altar. The angel's cheek was marred by a distinct spore-cluster, a blotchy, irregular pattern that resembled a fractured star. It was a symbol he didn't understand yet, a visual thread that would later be pulled taut when a mute girl named Lethe found its duplicate on a finger bone in a graveyard of failed prophets. He reached out and pulled the paper free, unfolding it with a carefulness that felt like ceremony.

Their handwriting. Sloppy, hurried, bleeding emotion onto the page. The same hand that had scrawled promises and secrets across his skin in the dark.

Rael—

You took your time. I came back. I waited. I was good. Did you forget the way? Or did you forget me? The bed's cold.

It ended with a simple dash, a mark of interruption, of a thought abruptly abandoned. The bed's cold. The words landed not as text but as a phantom touch, a cold hand sliding deftly between his ribs to squeeze his heart. He remembered the shocking heat of that bed, a glorious tangle of limbs and whispered, sleep-slurred secrets, where 'I was good' had been purred against the sweat-damp skin of his neck after a different kind of fight, one that left them both breathless, marked, and fiercely alive.

It had been their private joke, their benediction, born from the glorious chaos of a botched heist on a glittering casino moon. He saw them again, emerging from the fray clutching a stolen vial of star-dust elixir, grinning through a freshly split lip, their eyes alight with triumph. "I was good, wasn't I?" they'd gasped before collapsing, spent and laughing, into his waiting arms, the taste of blood and victory sharp on their shared breath. They had danced later that night, barefoot on the cold metal plating of a rented flop-room, the stolen elixir burning a sweet, dangerous path down their throats, their bodies moving together as if they could outpace every dark thing that had ever chased them. He had spun them until the room blurred and the only truth left in the universe was the press of their skin and the absolute certainty that tomorrow could damn well wait. He should have walked away from this obvious, painful taunt. But he didn't. He couldn't. This flaw—this stubborn, hopeful, self-destructive loyalty—was the core of him, and it would shape the entire brutal arc of what was to come.

He refolded the note with a sharp, precise motion, a lethal piece of origami, and shoved it into the inner pocket of his own coat. It settled over his heart with the specific, pointed weight of a shard of broken glass.

Night fell over Neotoma not as a gentle creep but as a sudden, violent slam, like a coffin lid sealing shut. Rael lit a small, mean fire in the rusted iron brazier they'd hauled into this place years ago, a relic from a more hopeful time. The flames it cast were jagged and restless, throwing up shadows that strained against the walls as if trying to claw their way to freedom. As he watched, those shadows began to move in ways that defied the simple physics of light, stretching and elongating into shapes that hinted at grasping branches, at limbs that reached with a terrible yearning. They coiled around the edges of the pews, testing the very boundaries between substance and void, their forms probing for a purchase on stone or skin.

He sat with his back against the cold, unyielding stone, a stale cigarette—one of their last—burning a bitter kiss into the space between his fingers. His eyes remained locked on the grey coat, which hung in the gathering darkness like a shed skin waiting to be re-inhabited. For a heart-stopping moment, he was certain the fabric twitched, the spore-laden cloth shifting subtly, as if filled by a sudden, silent intake of breath. The filaments within the lining seemed to writhe with a faint consciousness, drawing tighter like a web sensing the vibration of its prey.

He did not sleep. He waited. He listened to the familiar sounds of the city dying its slow death outside. And he listened, with every fiber of his being, for the one sound that did not belong, his body a coiled spring of taut vigilance, remembering a different kind of watchfulness in this very room, waiting for the specific cadence of a step on the stair that meant safety, release, home.

From the walls themselves, a sound manifested. Not a scrape. A whisper. Their voice, but filtered through a layer of static and wet earth. "...miss you..." It was gone before the sigh of it could fully form, dissolving back into the ambient creak of settling wood, but it lingered in his ears like a visual afterimage, a caress that had turned cloying and cold.

Simultaneously, the roots hidden beneath the floorboards began to tap. A soft, irregular rhythm that almost, almost matched the beating of his own heart, but was off by a half-beat, a dissonance that was more unnerving than any outright bang or crash. Tap-tap. Pause. Tap. It was a sickeningly precise echo of their old rhythm, the way their fingers would drum a private, comforting code onto his thigh during long, silent stakeouts. I'm here. I'm yours. Now it was perverted, its meaning inverted, the sound seeping up through the cracks in the stone and vibrating through the soles of his boots. The chapel itself seemed to breathe in time with it, the air growing perceptibly thicker, sweeter, thick with the cloying rot of false nostalgia.

The environment itself was now an active participant, the horror escalating step by deliberate step. The whispers multiplied, layering over one another until they became a faint chorus bouncing off the vaulted ceiling—disembodied fragments of old conversations they'd shared, their laughter warped into mournful sighs, a murmured repetition of his own name that twisted at the last second into a wet, guttural groan. Shadows detached from the walls, not retreating but advancing, slithering across the stone floor in patterns that were unsettlingly serpentine, coiling around the base of the splintered altar like possessive vines claiming new territory. The coat on its nail swayed gently, as if stirred by a breath that originated from within its own fibers, its empty sleeves drooping with a sudden, profound weight, like limbs exhausted by a longing they could not fulfill.

Rael's skin prickled everywhere. The temperature in the chapel dropped several degrees in a matter of heartbeats, the new chill carrying the unmistakable, acrid tang of a fungal bloom. The tapping of the roots grew more insistent, syncing itself now with the frantic pulse hammering in his temples, becoming a rhythmic, seductive invitation. It pulled at the already frayed edges of his sanity, urging him with a psychic pressure to remember, to yield, to come home.

He lit another cigarette from the ember of the first, his hands unnervingly steady. The sharp pain of the burn was an anchor, a tether to a reality that was rapidly dissolving. The first drag seared his lungs clean. The second taste that spread across his tongue was wrong. Underneath the familiar burn of stale tobacco was a new, underlying flavor, sweet and dark, like damp earth after a rain. He exhaled a cloud of smoke that defied physics, refusing to rise. Instead, it drifted sideways in a slow, purposeful curl, moving directly toward the waiting coat. The thin green threads lining the coat stirred in response, lifting slightly, reaching for the offered smoke like a nest of hungry, blind mouths.

He watched this bizarre exchange happen, a grotesque parody of an offering, and did not move.

A softer memory surfaced, a smaller story nestled within the larger horror, a moment of grounding normalcy that somehow made the present worse. Them, younger, their eyes bright with a simple, uncomplicated mischief, proudly presenting him with the most ridiculous stolen trophy imaginable: a cheap plastic snow globe from a derelict gift shop on Europa. They'd shaken it, making the fake snow swirl violently around a tiny, perfect domed city. "For luck," they'd said, pressing the cold sphere into his palm, their fingers lingering against his skin. "Something to remind you the universe can still be small and ridiculous and ours." They had kept far worse things—locks of each other's hair braided with fine wire, a spent bullet casing from the first time they'd had to kill for the other, a faded photograph of the two of them in full, glorious drag on some forgotten pleasure station, lips painted a violent, triumphant red, arms slung around each other like a promise of defiance. He had burned almost all of it after they were gone, in a pyre of grief too vast to contain. But he couldn't bring himself to touch the stupid globe. It had sat on this very altar for months, gathering a coat of dust, until one night the silence became too loud and he'd hurled it against the wall in a fit of pure anguish, watching the water inside bleed out like tears onto the stone, the plastic city within cracking clean in half. The past was never truly gone; it was a munition, waiting for the right moment to be used against him.

As this memory crystallized in his mind, the roots beneath the floor paused in their tapping. A perfect, absolute silence fell, as if the entire chapel were listening, absorbing the story. Then the tapping resumed, louder, more aggressive, and the rhythm shifted into something new, something he recognized with a fresh jolt of dread. It was the knock. The specific one he was waiting for. But it was too early. It wasn't time yet.

He closed his eyes, letting the absolute blackness behind his lids take him for a single moment of false peace. When he opened them again, the fire in the brazier had sunk dangerously low, its light now tinged a sickly, unmistakable green at the edges. The coals themselves glowed with a faint, viridian light. Spores, thick and lazy, drifted upward from it like a foul, luminous snow. One landed on the knuckle of his scarred hand. It didn't just lie there; it bloomed. A tiny, perfect cap, terrifyingly delicate, almost beautiful in its intricate biology. He brushed it away with a quick, involuntary twitch of his finger. It left behind a pale, circular mark on his skin. Like a kiss from a ghost. A short, cracked laugh escaped him, the sound absurd and alien in the suffocating quiet.

The coat shifted again in response. This time, the movement was chillingly deliberate. One empty sleeve lifted slowly, unnaturally, from its side. It was the precise motion of an invisible hand sliding into it, settling into place. The fabric over where the fingers would be flexed, curling slightly. The torn lining gaped wider with the movement, and for a split second, something pale and smooth gleamed in the shadows within. It wasn't wool. It looked like skin. Rael's breath hitched in his throat, catching on the icy fist in his chest.

The whisper returned, clearer now, coming from much closer. It seemed to emanate from inside the coat itself. "...angel..." It was the name they had for him. Only theirs. No one else's.

He stood. The motion was slow, deliberate, his boots scraping gratingly against the stone floor. The second he moved, the roots underfoot fell completely silent. The slithering shadows froze in place. Even the dying fire seemed to hold its breath.

He walked the length of the aisle, each step an eternity. He passed the pews with their scars from unknown claws. He passed the altar with its half-completed, summoning sigil. He stopped directly in front of the coat. He reached out a hand. His fingers hovered mere inches from the spore-flecked collar. The fabric felt warm. Warmer than the chilled air had any right to be. He could feel a pulse emanating from within it, a low, patient, thump-thump-thump, like a heart that was slowly, painstakingly remembering how to beat.

He let his fingertips make contact with the collar. Spores immediately clung to his skin, adhering with a faint stickiness. The reaction was instant. The tiny green threads that formed the bizarre embroidery seemed to quicken, racing a few inches up his wrist in a wave of delicate, curious exploration. He did not pull away. Instead, he traced the familiar, faint smudge of oil on the cuff, the touch triggering another memory of their hands—stained black, sure, and capable, fixing his gun, fixing him.

Another memory surfaced, this one tender and brutal in equal measure, the final, crucial story that would define his resistance. An argument, here in the chapel's back room, after a job had gone spectacularly bad. Harsh words had flown, sharp and accusatory. They had pinned him against the rough wall, not with gentleness but with a fierce, terrifying intensity, forehead pressed hard to his, their breath mingling in the small space between their mouths. "You don't get to walk away from this," they'd growled, the words vibrating through his skull. "From us." Then, their voice had dropped, softening into something raw and vulnerable. "I'm not your ghost yet, Rael." The kiss that followed was nothing like forgiveness; it was a claim, a brand, a desperate reaffirmation of a bond that felt like it was fraying. He had yielded then. He always yielded to them, eventually. They had fought like they loved—fierce, filthy, and profoundly necessary. In the aftermath, they would lie tangled on the narrow cot, tracing each other's scars, both new and old, naming them like constellations only they could read. They possessed a complete map of each other's damage, knew with terrifying intimacy exactly where to press to cause pain, and exactly where to press to initiate healing. The awful truth dawned on him now: the Veil had learned that map, too. It had studied the archives of their love, and now it knew exactly where to press to make him break.

The empty sleeve of the coat brushed against his exposed knuckles. It was a mockery of a returned touch, a pantomime of affection. He felt the pull then, a deep, psychic undertow in the center of his chest, right where the folded note sat like a shard of glass, right where the endless, aching longing made its home. The Veil knew him. It knew the precise, intricate shape of his grief. It knew, better than anyone, exactly how to wear his love's skin.

He took a half-step closer. The thin green filaments lining the coat reached for him in response, not with threat, but with a dreadful welcome. The fire in the brazier chose that moment to sputter one last time, then die completely, not with a sigh but with a final, puffing expulsion of luminous green spores that billowed outward, settling over every surface—the pews, the altar, him—like a foul, glowing snow. They clung to his eyelashes, dusted his lips; when he inevitably licked them, they tasted of rich earth, of old smoke, and worst of all, of them. He did not try to wipe them away.

The roots under the floor resumed their tapping, this time with a faster, more excited tempo. The whispers swelled around him, becoming a dissonant chorus. It was a braiding together of old conversations, their laughter warped into shallow sighs, their old arguments, their fervent promises—all in their voice, all perfectly mimicked, and all utterly, profoundly wrong.

Then one voice cut through the cacophony with a clarity that was paralyzing. It was a memory he had not invited, one he had tried to bury. Them, on the night before they vanished, sitting right here on this very altar, rolling a cigarette with hands that shook slightly. "I saw something," they'd said, their voice low, their eyes avoiding his. "Out in the ruins. Past the bone-yards." They had refused to elaborate, their gaze distant, haunted by a vision they wouldn't—or couldn't—share. "Something that knew my name." He had laughed it off then, called it fatigue, and pulled them down into his lap, kissing the worry from their mouth until they yielded. But their eyes had never lost that shadow. Now, the whisper repeated that confession, feeding his own guilt back to him. It came from the walls, from the coat, from the inside of his own skull, a torturous echo. "...something that knew my name..."

The spore colony on his wrist chose that moment to unfurl further, the delicate gills beneath the miniature cap flexing softly. Breathing. Taking him in. He watched it, a horrifying fascination rooting him in place. The psychic pull strengthened exponentially. It wasn't a force, not a compulsion. It was an invitation, infinitely more dangerous. He could simply... step forward. Let the coat open and close around him. Allow the threads to stitch what was left of him back together with the ghost it offered. They would be one grove. One single, terrible bloom. Forever.

His hand moved without any conscious command from his mind. His fingers slid into the waiting sleeve. The interior was warm. Unnervingly familiar. The fabric tightened around his wrist and forearm in a precise simulation of an embrace. He could feel the distinct shape of another arm pressing against his own from within the coat, shoulder to shoulder, exactly as they had stood a thousand times before. A sigh of pure relief escaped him, a complete and total surrender to the illusion. The roots responded by curling up through the widening cracks in the floorboards, brushing against his ankles, his calves, with a sensation that was almost gentle, almost loving. He leaned his weight into the coat, into the memory, and closed his eyes. He breathed in the scent of sandalwood and spores. For one single, perfect, heartbreaking moment, it was real. They were back.

Then the moment stuttered. The heartbeat he felt through the fabric was wrong. Its rhythm was too slow, too deep, too vast to be anything human. The embrace surrounding his arm tightened with a sudden, crushing pressure. They were not arms. They were tendrils, strong and unyielding. With a guttural cry of revulsion, he wrenched himself backward, tearing his hand free from the sleeve with a savage twist. Several of the green threads snapped with a sound like tearing silk, leaving behind bleeding, burning welts on his skin. The coat fell empty again, swaying gently on its nail, looking for all the world like a victim of a terrible betrayal. He staggered back, his chest heaving, the animal sounds of his own breath loud in the sudden quiet. The whispers instantly turned sour, their tone shifting from invitation to offense. The warped laughter mutated into something wetter, hungrier. The roots beneath the stone began to thrash, slamming against the underside of the floor in a furious, denied rage.

He laughed then, the sound wild and feral and broken. He wiped the blood from his wounded wrist and smeared it across his mouth in a crude parody of war paint. "Not yet," he rasped at the empty air, at the memory, at the thing in the walls. His voice was raw. "Not like this."

He turned his back on the coat and fixed his eyes on the main door. He waited. The chapel seemed to hold its breath with him. Dawn was finally approaching, a grey, sickly light beginning to leak through the hole where the angel had fallen, illuminating the coat in a pallor that made it look like a corpse. The empty sleeve lifted one last time, the movement limp and final, reaching out for his face as if in a last, desperate plea. The fingers were almost fully formed now, almost... He smiled. It was a thin, cruel expression, all sharp edges and predator's anticipation. He knew what was coming next. He knew the rhythm by heart. He knew the knock. Three gentle raps. Tap. Tap. Tap.

It came. Exactly on cue. Soft. Polite. Unmistakable. The sound of a lover who knows the lock's combination by heart. The sound of someone who knows, without a doubt, that they are welcome. This was the inciting incident, the mythic door swinging open on its hinges.

Rael did not move a muscle. He just stared at the source of the sound, the cigarette between his fingers burning down to sear his skin. He welcomed the sharp, clean pain. It was real. It was his. It was the only thing that was.

The knock came again. Tap. Tap. Tap. It was more insistent now, intimate, layered with a knowing patience. The roots thrummed a constant, vibrating bass note beneath his feet. The coat breathed audibly behind him, a dry rustle of wool and growth. He saw, from the corner of his eye, the shadows cast by his own body begin to branch outward, reaching toward the threshold like eager limbs. The last of the fire vanished, the final puff of glowing spores rising to settle over his head and shoulders like a bridal veil, or a shroud.

He took one step forward. Then another. The note in his pocket felt like a stone. The mark on his wrist widened, the pale cap of the spore continuing to unfurl its delicate gills.

He reached the door. His hand rose, fingers settling on the cold iron of the latch. They were steady. The thing on the other side waited. He could feel its presence. It was wearing their skin. It had learned their voice. It was using their knock.

He leaned his forehead against the weathered wood, feeling the vibrations from the other side travel through his skull. He whispered to it. To them. To the emptiness. "I was good," he said, his voice roughened by smoke and unshed tears. "I waited."

Silence from the other side. Then, the softest of sounds filtered through the wood. A breath. Their breath. He knew the cadence of their inhalations better than he knew his own. Lazy. Smoke-rough. Laced with the phantom sensation of a smile he could still feel against his skin.

The latch trembled under his palm. The roots responded by curling higher, brushing against his calves, his knees, his thighs, their touch somehow gentle and deeply possessive all at once. He closed his eyes, letting the full, terrible weight of the old ache rise up in him—the queer, stubborn, magnificent love that had survived battle stations falling into stars, gods dying in back alleys, every ugly, beautiful thing the cosmos had ever thrown at them. It had survived everything. Except for this. This was the one enemy it could not defeat: itself, reflected back in a perfect, corrupted mirror.

His fingers tightened on the latch. The wood was no longer cold. It was warm. Pulsing. Alive. He could open it. Let it in. Let it take him, and in doing so, finally, finally end the pain. Or he could turn, find a canister of fuel, and burn this entire chapel to the ground with both of them inside, a funeral pyre for a love that refused to die correctly. Choices. There were always choices.

The knock came for a third time. Tap. Tap. Tap. Slower this time. Infinitely more deliberate. It was no longer just a sound. It was an invitation. A dare.

He smiled, his bared teeth pressing against the wood. This is the moment the plot officially starts. And he turned the latch.