The gatekeeper was not what Aren expected.
He had imagined something imposing. A warrior, maybe, or something that wore authority the way the Order of Helmond wore their emblems – loudly, deliberately, making sure you understood the hierarchy before anything else was established.
At the entrance of the passage carved into the mountain stood a woman who seemed to have been waiting there since before the rock around her decided to become a mountain.
Still, in the way that suggested she had simply stopped needing to move a long time ago.
She looked at Soryn first, then Elias, and then her eyes settled on Aren and stayed there for a moment longer than they had any reason to, and something in her expression shifted in a way he couldn't name before it was gone.
She spoke without preamble. "One at a time… What the mountain shows you is yours alone. You don't share it, and you don't carry it out as a weapon against each other."
Her voice was dry and even, the voice of someone who had given these instructions so many times they had become simply sound.
"Encouraging," Elias said quietly.
"Elias," Soryn spoke.
Elias straightened. "Apologies."
The gatekeeper's black eyes hadn't moved from Aren. He met them without flinching, which seemed to satisfy something in her because she finally looked away and gestured toward the passage.
"Youngest first," she said.
Elias blinked. "That would be–"
"Me," Aren said, and walked forward before anyone could say anything else about it.
The passage was narrow enough that his shoulders nearly brushed both walls and dark enough that after the first turn, he was navigating by the sound of his own footsteps and the feeling of cold stone close on either side. The chains beneath his cloak were still. Whatever this place was, it wasn't interested in them.
Then the passage opened up, and Aren stopped walking.
He was standing in Helmond City.
Not the Helmond City he had been thrown out of at seven years old, marched through the gates by Order soldiers while the people who had been his neighbors watched from behind their curtains and said nothing.
Not the Helmond City of his memory, cold and indifferent and smelling of coal smoke and fear.
This was a different version of the same place, one that existed in the space between what had been and what could have been, and the difference was immediately and brutally apparent.
The streets were clean. The buildings had light in their windows. Children ran between the market stalls with the specific carelessness of children who had never had a reason to be afraid.
The sound of it, laughter, actual laughter, in a city that Aren had only ever known as a place that watched him with suspicion, landed somewhere in his chest like a blow he hadn't braced for.
He stood very still and looked at it, his eyes slightly widened.
A woman came out of one of the buildings nearby, and Aren's breath caught before he could stop it.
She was younger than he remembered her. Her hair was the same chestnut color as his, worn loose, and she was laughing at something someone inside had said. She looked like someone who had never had a reason not to.
She turned and saw him, and her face changed into something so simple and so devastating that Aren had to look away.
She looked proud.
He looked at the street instead. At the clean stones and the warm windows and the children who didn't know what the Long Night felt like from the wrong side of a city wall.
At the version of Helmond that existed in this place and nowhere else.
'This isn't real,' he told himself.
He knew that. He had known it the moment he stepped through the passage, and the mountain showed him its hand.
This was the trial. This was what the mountain had decided he needed to face, which meant the mountain understood something about him that he would have preferred it didn't.
A boy came running down the street and stopped in front of him, out of breath and grinning.
Maybe eight years old with chestnut hair. Narrow eyes that caught the light differently than normal eyes did, that particular quality that the people of Helmond had always called wrong, and the boy himself had spent years trying not to think about.
The boy looked up at him and said, "You're back."
Aren looked at him for a long time.
The mountain was offering him something. He understood the shape of it without needing it explained. It was saying one thing – stay.
This is what he could have had. This is what was taken from him, and here it is, returned. All he has to do is accept the fate that was assigned to him, and it's his.
The mother looked proud.
All of it is waiting on the other side of one decision.
Aren crouched down until he was level with the boy and looked at him properly at the narrow eyes and the chestnut hair and the specific tension in the boy's small shoulders that came from years of being watched and found wanting.
The boy who had stood in a courtroom at seven years old and been told he wasn't human enough to stay.
He put one hand briefly on the boy's shoulder.
"You're going to be fine," he said quietly. "Not because it gets easier… Because you don't need it to."
He stood up and walked back toward the passage without looking at his mother again.
The mountain let him go.
He came out into the cold, and the gatekeeper looked at him and said nothing.
Elias was sitting on a rock a short distance away with his elbows on his knees, staring at the ground. He looked up when Aren emerged, and something passed across his face briefly before he put it away.
They didn't speak about it. That was the agreement, stated or not.
Soryn went in third. He was inside for longer than either of them. When he came out, his expression was the same as always.
Composed and unreadable, giving nothing. But he stood still for just a moment before he moved, like he needed one second to make sure the floor was still solid under him.
Aren noticed, but he also said nothing.
The gatekeeper looked at all three of them and then stepped aside from the entrance to Torshavn.
"You may enter," she said. Then, as Aren passed her, she spoke again in a voice low enough that only he could hear it. "The mountain doesn't show you what you want. It shows you what you're afraid of losing."
Aren kept walking.
'I know,' he thought. 'That's the problem.'
Torshavn received them the way a city received people it had already decided about.
The gate was stone and iron and old enough that the iron had taken on the particular darkness of metal that had been cold for centuries, and beyond it the city opened up in a way that made Aren stop for the second time that day.
It was carved directly into the mountain.
Not built against it or sheltered by it but carved from it, the buildings emerging from the rock face like they had always been there and someone had simply removed the stone to reveal them.
Bioluminescent minerals ran through the walls in veins of pale blue and green, providing light that had no source and cast no shadows in the conventional sense, just a steady cold glow that made everything visible without making anything warm.
The people moved through the carved streets with the purposeful efficiency of a population that had decided long ago that anything not necessary for survival was probably not necessary at all.
They looked at the three newcomers with the frank assessment of people who had no interest in pretending they weren't looking.
Elias leaned slightly toward Aren as they walked. "Try not to look like you've never seen anything like this."
"I haven't," Aren said.
"I know. Try anyway."
They were given a room carved from the rock, three narrow beds, and a single bioluminescent vein running along the ceiling that provided just enough light to navigate by.
Aren sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his hands for a while, the chains loose around his wrists, the faint inscriptions catching the pale glow from above.
Elias was already horizontal, one arm over his eyes.
Soryn stood at the narrow window cut into the rock face, looking out at Torshavn's carved streets below.
The silence between the three of them had a different quality than it usually did. The trial did that, Aren supposed. Put something in the air that nobody wanted to name.
He stood up and moved toward the wall beside his bed, and that was when he saw it.
Carved into the rock, at roughly chest height, in characters that should have meant nothing to him – it was his name.
Not his full name. Only Aren, in a script he had never been taught and had no reason to know, could read as clearly as if it had been written in the plainest language of Helmond City.
He stood in front of it for a long time without moving.
Behind him, Soryn spoke quietly from the window. "Try to sleep. Tomorrow will ask more of us than today did."
Aren put one finger against the carved letters and felt the cold of the stone.
"Yeah," he said.
He didn't sleep for a long time.