The second bell struck from somewhere under the sanctum, deep enough to rattle dust from the rafters. The sound didn't travel; it arrived, as if the floorboards had learned to speak. Oil flames guttered in their niches and then steadied again, breathing with the temple.
Aama Gita's hand stayed on the rope of the hanging bell. "There you are," she murmured to the stones. "Wake properly."
The priest in white didn't flinch, but his eyes sharpened. "Keeper, stand aside."
"Yeshe," Arya whispered, "it's moving under us."
"Yes," the monk said simply. "Changu remembers what it was built to do."
Boots scuffed outside the threshold. Captain Sagar appeared in the doorway beside the priest, helm under one arm. Snow dusted his cloak as if he'd walked through a storm only he could see. His gaze took in the scene—the glowing grooves under Arya's palm, the trembling plinth, the keeper ringing the bell—and settled on the priest with a question he didn't voice.
"The hinge is waking," the priest said. "Seal him now and we control the opening."
Sagar's jaw tightened. " 'Control' is a generous word for what follows when doors to Narak swing."
Aama Gita cut across them with a look that could have quieted a courtyard. "You two can peddle your quarrels in the outer court. Inside the sanctum, the stones decide rank." She turned to Arya. "Boy. The leash you set is a promise. Promises like to be tested. Set one more before the door opens."
Arya swallowed. His bandaged palm sat in the cool groove, and the longer it stayed, the more the storm stopped pushing and started listening. He searched for words that were not bravado. No storm that harms those I stand beside… no storm on a plea… no storm for pride… One more.
He thought of Sagar's soldiers touching his lightning nets and not burning, of Mira's shoulder, bleeding and stubborn. "No storm that answers fear," he whispered. "Only will."
Heat braided through the grooves like thread pulled snug. The tremor underfoot steadied—as if the hinge had nodded.
The priest gave a thin smile. "Very pretty. Now take your hand off and come quietly."
Mira hooked her staff across the door. "No."
Sagar's voice was low. "If he opens a thing he cannot close, no staff will matter."
"I know," Mira said. "And I'm still saying no."
The third bell struck.
A long hairline crack winked open in the seam around the plinth. Cold air rose from it, the smell of rock that had not tasted wind in a thousand winters. The floor sank the breadth of a fingernail, then stopped—as if waiting for permission.
Aama Gita raised the bell rope for the fourth strike—and froze, head cocked. "Listen."
Arya held his breath. Beneath the bell's fading hum came another sound, faint as a fingernail on rice-paper: a scratching. Not claws. Not metal. Writing. The scratch traced its way along the crack, and wherever it passed, letters outlined themselves in dull gold before fading: a script he had never learned and somehow understood.
Not without witness.
Aama Gita's mouth twitched. "Old manners."
She touched the plinth with three fingers. "Witnesses present," she said to the floor. Her eyes slid to the priest and Sagar. "Even the unwanted ones."
The crack widened, stones sliding against one another with the frictionless sigh of well-oiled wood. Steps emerged where there had been none, a stair descending into cooled night. Incense smoke curled toward the opening, as if the sanctum itself exhaled.
The priest drew a breath that sounded like relief. "Good. We will supervise." He moved to step forward.
The bell rope whipped out. For an instant Aama Gita wasn't an auntie at all but a door lintel given shape; the rope caught the priest's wrist with a snap. Her voice was iron. "You will not put your foot on those stairs with greed in your mouth."
His face flushed. The Guards around him shifted, tridents half-lifting.
Sagar raised a hand. The Guard froze. "We observe from here," he said, eyes on Arya. "If the boy returns, we speak again. If he does not, the mountain decides."
Yeshe inclined her head once, as if a go player had placed a stone where she expected. "Fair."
Mira turned to Arya. "We're going down together."
He nodded, but fear squirmed in his ribs. The storm didn't shove now; it leaned. The difference felt like the gap between falling and stepping. He took the first stair. The stone was cold enough to touch through his boots.
Aama Gita tossed Mira a small clay lamp with a floating wick. "If it goes out, turn around," she said. "If it burns blue, keep walking."
"What if it burns black?" Mira asked.
"Run," the keeper said pleasantly.
They descended. The sanctum's light shrank behind them until it was a square no larger than a prayer window. The lamp in Mira's hand burned steady, yellow-gold, lighting carvings cut into the stairwell's walls: coils of nagas, the curve of Garuda's wing, a hand holding a conch. At landings, little alcoves held stone bowls scuffed by offerings long vanished. The air smelled of metal and riverbed.
The storm thrummed in Arya's palm. He kept it close to his chest and tried to match his breathing to Yeshe's cane taps above, imagined or remembered.
A landing opened into a chamber, low-ceilinged and round, the floor worn smooth by bodies standing and hearts changing. In the middle rose a waist-high pillar shaped like the suggestion of a trident. A slit ran down its center, glimmering faintly, as if light were trying to leak out and couldn't find the crack it made.
Mira lowered the lamp. "This is the door?"
"Only the latch," Yeshe said. "The door is worse."
Arya circled the pillar. Carvings ringed its base—men and women with their hands lifted, faces turned toward storm clouds. Some wept. Some smiled. A few knelt with heads bowed, the stone above their shoulders carved with lines that might have been chains or rays of light, depending on who was doing the seeing.
Not without witness, the old letters had said above. He glanced at Mira, at Yeshe standing straight despite the old wound in her voice he still sometimes heard when she said Narak, and at the keeper's lamp smoke curling into the cold. "Then watch me," he whispered—to them, to the stones, he wasn't sure.
He set his palm against the slit.
Cold flooded his arm. For a terrifying instant he was nowhere—no body, no breath—only the white-blue grid of the nets he had thrown across the terraces, now stretched out like a map covering something vast. And beyond the grid, pressure, patient as ice. It didn't feel like a beast. It felt like a weather. A season that would not take a hint from the sun.
A voice moved through that pressure. Not the herald's wet velvet. Not the storm's chest-weight. Something older, the way river rock sometimes says your name when you lean close enough.
Leash or chain? it asked.
Arya thought of his promises. No storm that harms those I stand beside. No storm on a plea. No storm for pride. No storm that answers fear, only will. He didn't speak them. He held them like a weight.
The pressure pressed back. Then bear.
The slit warmed. The lamp flame behind him shivered…and burned blue.
"Arya," Mira said softly. "It's doing the thing."
"Keep your hand," Aama Gita's voice drifted down faintly, impossibly, as if carried along the bell's note. "Let it learn what shape you are."
The chamber vibrated—a cat purring the size of a hill. Stone grains sang in their mortar. The slit widened the width of a fingernail. Cold wind breathed out.
On that breath, something else came: not a hand, not a shadow, but a feeling—like standing on a cliff and realizing there's ocean under the fog. A space too big to fit inside the world they knew.
Mira stepped closer, lamp high. "Tell me when to hit something," she whispered.
"Soon," Arya said through his teeth.
The wind shifted. From beyond the slit, a second pressure moved—the slick, slow feel of the herald's attention. It pressed not on his hand but on the back of his neck, the way a threat looks at you before you know it has a face.
The blue flame sighed, guttered, and steadied.
"Not today," Arya whispered to whatever listened. "Not your gate."
The slit stopped widening.
For a heartbeat, everything held: the pressure, the lamp, the breathing stones. Then the door did something Arya had not expected from a thing made of rock. It nodded. The warmth under his palm withdrew, leaving a humming like a plucked string.
The blue went back to yellow.
Behind him, footsteps—soft, cautious—rippled down the stair.
Mira's head snapped toward the sound. "We have company."
A figure stepped into the light. Not Sagar. Not the priest. A boy a little older than Arya, hair tied back, eyes bright with a kind of hunger that had nothing to do with food. He wore a Guard's cloak with no insignia.
He bowed too low, too eagerly. "Storm-bearer," he said. "The King sends help."
Yeshe's cane blocked his next step like a drawn line. "No," she said. "The King sent a spy."
The boy smiled without shame. "Then let me watch. Witnesses matter, do they not?"
The lamp flame jittered, throwing a jagged shadow across the boy's face that made his smile look like a mask cracking.
Arya didn't pull his hand away.
The door was listening.