They had not expected to find people.
Not so soon. Not *here.*
But on the thirteenth day since stepping through the unnamed door, they saw smoke in the distance—gentle, white, rising in rhythm. Not fire. Not danger.
*Cooking.*
---
The settlement was small—six tents in a circle, strung together with thread that shimmered faintly when touched. Children laughed in a tongue none of them recognized, but the laughter itself needed no translation.
A woman stepped forward. Her cloak was woven from breeze and birdsong.
She looked at Elara and smiled.
"We wondered when you would arrive."
Elara blinked. "You were... waiting?"
"No," the woman replied. "We simply *hoped.*"
---
Around the fire that night, they shared names.
The settlers were descendants of *Wanderers*, people who had once slipped through smaller tears between worlds—traders, dreamers, even outcasts who had found a thread and followed it. Unlike the Keepers or the Ashbringer, they had never sought to control Elsewhere.
They had chosen to *belong to it.*
---
The woman's name was Ariven.
She touched the air like it was a page. "This land doesn't just respond to thought. It responds to *trust.* And you've brought trust with you."
Maris leaned forward. "How do you know?"
Ariven gestured to the horizon, where strange trees now bent in the shape of the sigil Elara once carved into her staff.
"Because it listens."
---
That night, the wind changed.
It carried a sound—not song, not language.
*Writing.*
Not on paper. In air, in light, in the shape of petals as they fell.
Rin stood slowly. "It's... answering us."
"What did we ask?" Kael murmured.
Thalen replied quietly, "That there could be something more."
---
Elara walked into the field beyond the tents and raised both hands. The sky responded—swirling open like a curtain parting.
Beyond it: darkness.
But not empty.
Alive.
Breathing.
Inviting.
---
"We're not the end of a story," she whispered. "We're the edge of its beginning."
And as the others gathered beside her, the petals on the wind began to form a shape—
A new door.
No wood, no hinges, no frame.
Just light, memory, and will.
---
They did not step through it.
Not yet.
Because this time, they weren't just walking into a mystery.
They were *bringing* something with them.
A story.
A seed.
A sky that had once broken, and still dared to dream.