It was like a pond, still and heavy all around her, punctuated only by the occasional distant drip of water that rippled outward through her thoughts. Dimly, she was aware of the shadow realm, of her world, and all those layers of possibility between them. What was she looking at? Why had the shadows guided her here?

Look.

The faceless figure was beside her again, its countenance solemn and lowered. That pressure in her mind steered her forward, toward a broken circle of stones.

As she stepped into them, they lit up, like a spotlight piercing a dark stage. The air around them warped. She was seeing this land’s past; she was seeing her world’s present, and they were all entwined.

Look. If you take too much darkness, this is what you will become.

The sight shifted again until she was peering back into her world through a darkened scrim. But she was no longer in the cabin. The shadows had ushered her somewhere else. A pathway winding through lonely forests, shuttered houses. A castle’s tower on the hill.

She moved across rain-slick cobbles toward the shaft of light until she reached a stone archway. Not rough and wild like the shadow realm—human hands had built it. The spotlight, she saw now, was streaming down into the room beyond the arch, filling the chamber within.

She rested her hand on the archway and stopped. There was something too ritualistic about this room’s design. It was bell-shaped, rising up toward a round opening with an intricate carved design, a lattice, laid over it. Four sectors, four arms, bent and then bent and then—

Her throat felt swollen then, buzzing. A Hakenkreuz. When simplified, it became a swastika.

Menacing busts dotted the chamber’s periphery, twelve in all. Faces in white marble that she only knew from grainy photographs in Der Stürmer. Stoic, as if they were Roman gods. No. Aryan ones. Arrayed around the central depression in the room as if awaiting a ceremony.

And in the center of the depression—a lectern. A book.

Look, Rebeka, the Faceless whispered. Do not miss what is coming. Another watery vision—a reminder of Sicarelli wrenching the life force away from the Faceless and its people. What has already come for my kind.

She reached the pool of light. A handwritten manuscript, bound in deteriorating leather, rested on the lectern, the light glinting off its gold-edged pages. The book’s cover had been pressed with a symbol not unlike the Hakenkreuz, but this one had a dozen jagged arms, like rays of a sun, reaching out of a doorway. The Black Sun: some fabrication of Aryan lore teased out of half-remembered historiographies and misinterpreted wood carvings and ledgers that didn’t get burned with witches. (Oh, how those Europeans did love a good witch hunt, a convenient bin for disposing all their woes.)

Dread bubbling in her stomach, Rebeka opened the manuscript cover.

Porta ad Tenebras.