“Tell me why the doors are breathing.”
Ryder’s voice carried in the abandoned temple as if it disliked the place and intended to break it. Stone columns rose like ribs cast in moon-bleached bone. Vines clung in patient nets, their leaves slick with dew that tasted faintly of iron. The floor had been swept, once, by hands that believed in order. Now dust lay in a film so fine each step wrote a sentence, and each sentence faded as the air shifted.
He did not cross the threshold at first. He stood in the doorway and counted the ways the temple wanted to keep him. He knew the scent of old sanctuaries: oil trapped in porous stone, the ash of prayers, the dry fragrance of vellum that had remembered every hand that touched it. This one smelled like an oath broken twice.
“Are you coming in,” sa
