Write a Complete Novel
This Weekend

The tower had no door. Seren had circled it three times before she accepted this impossibility, her boots sinking into ash that had once been a garden. The walls were smooth obsidian, cold as a drowned man's skin, and they reflected nothing — not the twin moons, not the fire that still burned in the distance, not her own face when she pressed close enough to feel the stone's hum against her cheek.

“You could knock,” said a voice behind her, and she turned with her knife already in her hand. The creature sitting on the fallen pillar looked like a man who had been left out in the rain for a very long time. His features were sharp but blurred at the edges, as though someone had begun an oil painting and lost interest halfway through.

“I knocked on the silence,” Seren said, which was the kind of answer her grandmother would have called a riddle and her mother would have called a lie. The blurred man smiled. It was a terrible smile — not because of cruelty, but because it was the most sincere expression she had seen in weeks.