THE DOOR UNDER THE DOOR
751 Words
Chapter 13
Raina woke to dripping.
Not rain.
Not a leak.
Something counting down.
The cold came first.
It sank past skin and muscle straight into bone before she even remembered her name.
Then came the darkness, so complete she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or shut.
When she tried to breathe, the air felt thin, like she was already halfway to being a ghost.
Her left arm was gone.
Not numb,not asleep.
Gone.
Where her shoulder should have been, there was only a strange, deep cold that didn’t hurt the way pain should.
Pain would have meant she was still whole. This was absence. It was worse.
Eli’s voice didn’t come.
But his fire did a small blue flame floating in front of her like a lost star, lighting nothing except the wet stone at her feet and the way forward that she didn’t want to take.
“Eli?” she tried.
Her throat was raw and the word fell flat, swallowed by dark that didn’t echo back.
Only dripping answered.
Only something moving far below her, dragging itself through water with patience that felt ancient.
She sat up.
It was a mistake. Ice bit into her spine and the place where her arm used to be lit up with a cold that felt like erasure.
Her sword lay beside her, snapped in half, the steel blackened and useless as a dead thing.
She picked up the broken half anyway because empty hands were a death sentence here.
The blue flame drifted forward.
Patient. Like it knew exactly where it was going.
She followed because there was nothing else to do.
The tunnel narrowed until her shoulders scraped rock and the dripping became a roar in her ears.
Then the flame stopped, hovering in front of a door that shouldn’t exist this deep under the ice.
The door wasn’t wood or stone.
It was made of the same black water that thing had been, solid and moving at the same time.
No handle. No hinges. Just a seam that looked too much like a mouth.
It opened without sound, and the absence that poured out made her teeth ache.
Raina lifted the broken sword.
Behind her, a voice spoke. Not Eli. Deeper. Older.
The kind of voice ice would use if it remembered every winter it had ever killed.
“Turn around,” it said.
She did, fast, sword raised, heart hammering.
There was nothing there. Only dark. Only the sound of her own breath and the dripping that had started again.
When she turned back, the door was wide open.
And standing in the doorway was Eli.
Except it wasn’t.
It had his face, his burned jacket, the scar above his left brow from when they were twelve.
But its eyes were flame with no pupils, and it didn’t breathe.
It smiled with Eli’s mouth and said, “Come home,” in Eli’s voice.
Raina’s fingers locked around the hilt until her knuckles went white.
“Eli’s dead,” she said.
The words felt like stones in her throat.
The thing tilted its head.
“Are you sure?” it asked.
It stepped forward. Where its feet touched the stone, frost spread out in a perfect circle.
Raina didn’t answer.
She charged.
The broken blade went through its chest like it was fog.
No blood. No resistance. Just cold that sank into her arm and tried to climb into her chest.
She staggered through it and fell hard on the other side, and the door slammed shut behind her with a sound like a coffin closing.
Silence crashed down.
Heavy and absolute.
Then, muffled, from behind the door, came laughter.
Eli’s laugh. The one he used when Kael told his stupid horse story.
“Raina,” the voice called.
“Don’t you want to come home?”
She pressed her palm to the door.
Cold burned her skin down to the bone and she didn’t pull away.
“Show me his body,” she whispered.
“Or admit you’re lying.”
The laughter stopped.
The dripping stopped.
The blue flame winked out.
In the dark, something below the door opened its eyes.
Raina stayed there, one hand on the door, the other clutching a broken sword.
Kael, Eli, Drayce. She whispered their names like a prayer and like a threat.
One wasn’t here.
But she wasn’t leaving. Because waiting was faith, and faith was all she had left.
The door didn’t open.
Not yet.
But it breathed.
- Writer
