"Rin."
The voice came from the other side of the sealed door.
It was not loud, yet the sound passed through the chamber as though the walls had been made of paper. The silver thread around the book tightened. Every page trembled, and the ink spelling KAELITH began to bleed into the paper.
Rin could not move.
He knew that voice.
Not from his life on Earth, nor from the memories preserved beneath the sanctuary. He knew it from another existence, from the story he had read before everything changed.
Kaelith.
The demon king. The man who had spent lifetimes searching for someone who never returned.
Except this was not the voice Rin remembered from Betrayal. That voice had been described as cold and merciless, a ruler whose name made entire kingdoms tremble.
This voice sounded exhausted.
As though the speaker had crossed an impossible distance and discovered that the person he sought was standing on the other side of a door he could not open.
"Rin," it repeated. "Please."
