Chapter 315: The Other Side
The door disappeared before Liam could reach it.
One moment the pale maintenance panel remained behind him, its edges burning with the gold-white formation Narissa had activated. The next, light washed across the stone and erased every seam, hinge, handle, and locking mechanism until Liam faced an uninterrupted wall.
He stopped with one hand raised.
For several seconds, he simply stared.
Then he pressed his palm against the stone.
"Narissa?"
His voice carried farther than it should have.
No answer came from the other side.
No guards struck the door. No alarm sounded. He could not hear the engineers twenty meters away or the distant mechanical hum of the extraction turbines.
Nothing.
Liam slowly turned.
The maintenance room was gone.
That was considerably worse.
A corridor stretched ahead of him, formed almost entirely from golden ether.
The walls had enough substance to define space, but their surfaces shifted continuously beneath a translucent glow. Threads of gold moved through them like currents inside deep water, joining overhead to create a vaulted ceiling that disappeared into luminous haze.
The floor beneath Liam’s boots looked solid.
He crouched and touched it anyway.
His fingers passed over something that felt almost like polished stone despite the fact that he could see light moving beneath his hand.
"Wonderful."
He stood and checked himself. His tablet and communication device were gone.
The engagement ring remained on his left hand, dark gold and crimson reassuringly physical against the impossible corridor.
His containment formations were still active.
The mark beneath his collar felt warm but no longer burned.
More importantly, the bond remained.
Arik was there. Far away.
Muted enough that Liam could not identify individual emotions but present.
That stopped the first real thread of panic before it could develop.
Arik would notice eventually.
Knowing Arik, eventually meant approximately thirty seconds after discovering Liam was not where his schedule claimed he should be.
Liam looked back at the featureless wall.
There was no exit.
Forward, then.
He adjusted the dark green overshirt he had worn for the maintenance inspection, pushed one loose strand of brown hair behind his ear, and started walking.
His boots made almost no sound.
The golden passage curved gradually downward, although Liam could not tell whether he was physically descending or whether the shifting light merely created the impression. There were no doors, intersections, or markings he recognized.
After several minutes, the corridor widened.
Ancient runes appeared in the walls.
Liam slowed.
They rose from floor to ceiling in long vertical sequences, disappearing into the haze overhead before reappearing farther along the passage. Some resembled symbols he had seen in the oldest Nurian technical texts. Others were so unfamiliar he could not even identify where one character ended and another began.
He reached toward one.
The rune blurred before his fingertip touched it.
Liam withdrew his hand immediately.
He had learned at least one thing from being shocked by mysterious ether.
The corridor ended without warning.
The golden walls opened into an enormous circular chamber.
Liam stopped at the threshold.
For one disorienting moment, he thought he had somehow returned to the Golden Court.
The proportions were almost identical.
A vast round floor.
Tiered outer walls rising toward a ceiling obscured by light.
A central space left deliberately empty, as though everything in the architecture existed to frame whoever stood there.
But the Golden Court was stone, metal, ancient craftsmanship, and carefully maintained imperial power.
This place felt older.
The walls themselves seemed unfinished, constructed from alternating layers of dark material and hazy gold. Runes flowed continuously upward and downward across them, never settling long enough for Liam to read. Some vanished midway before returning several meters away. Others seemed to sink beneath the wall and emerge from the floor.
There was no throne.
No furniture. No obvious machinery. No door behind him anymore either.
Liam turned fully.
The passage through which he had entered had vanished into the same shifting wall.
He rubbed both hands over his face.
"This is fine."
His voice returned to him faintly from somewhere near the ceiling.
It sounded unconvinced.
Liam lowered his hands.
Maybe he was unconscious.
Narissa had shoved him into a maintenance room. Perhaps he had struck his head. Perhaps the strange formation had overloaded the containment around Felix’s ether, and he was lying unconscious on a floor while the guards attempted to break down the door.
That would almost be preferable.
A stress-induced hallucination was also possible.
He was learning another language, rebuilding a future imperial office, investigating Felix, trying to understand sovereign ether, and pretending most days that being trapped behind the Gate did not bother him nearly as much as it did.
Perhaps his mind had finally filed a formal complaint.
Liam looked across the empty chamber.
"If this is a breakdown, the architecture is excessive."
No answer.
He thought unexpectedly of home.
Enia would have called the entire situation ridiculous and then demanded a full medical examination.
Henry would have stood behind her trying to look reasonable while quietly agreeing with every excessive precaution she proposed.
Aunt Mirelle would have wanted to know exactly how Liam had managed to become trapped in another impossible political disaster.
Rex—
Liam smiled faintly.
Rex would probably blame Arik first.
Mara would skip the blame entirely and ask for sensor data.
That thought hurt more than the others.
He missed his laboratory.
He missed Mara appearing beside him with results before he finished asking for them. He missed Wrohan’s familiar systems, arguments with technicians who already knew his habits, and the certainty that if he walked through the right door, someone he had known for years would be standing on the other side.
He missed his family.
Not in the abstract way he allowed himself to admit when Arik spoke about Agaron.
Actually missed them.
Their voices.
Their irritation.
The ordinary ability to call someone because he wanted to hear them rather than wondering whether an impossible Gate would ever open again.
Liam exhaled and looked up at the moving runes.
"Yes. Definitely stress."
The haze thickened.
He narrowed his eyes.
Something had changed on the far side of the chamber.
At first, he thought it was another formation gathering against the wall.
Then the gold separated around it.
A person stood there.
Liam went completely still.
The man was far enough away that the shifting ether obscured his face, reducing him to a dark silhouette against the luminous wall.
But Liam could see his proportions.
He wasn’t anyone physically imposing enough to explain the scale of the room.
The stranger was Liam’s height.
His build too.
Slim.
Narrow through the shoulders and waist.
Almost exactly the same shape Liam would have cast against that wall.
The man lifted his head.
And Liam forgot entirely about the possibility that he was dreaming.