Ethan Kai surged forward. Soft cheap store-bought shoes scraped against ancient stone. His body coiled tight with the memory of a thousand drills, of near-death in operations from around the world, his world. Reflexes that had not entirely been forgotten by the years out of service, carried him forward. No time to think. No time to hope. Only motion and the violence it carried.
He drove his weight explosively, shoulder low, eyes locked on the narrow line between Elan Morin's temple and jaw. The Forsaken's head was still turned, drawn toward the cry of the man his master had broken. His body remained relaxed. Unconcerned.
I'm so slow now, Ethan thought. Please, God, let him be slower.
He struck. His fist landed flush against the side of the Forsaken's head—a clean connection with all the torque and momentum he could muster. He was still strong for a man at the other end of middle age. It was not a strike meant to bruise. It was meant to break—to kill if it could.
Ethan followed through with his entire weight, pivoting into a second blow, a brutal kick aimed at the man's left knee. He meant to collapse the bone and ruin the man's ability to pursue him if he could. For the barest instant, he felt contact. Real. Solid. Elan Morin's body had shifted from the impacts.
And then...
It was like hitting rock that remembered it had once been flesh. There was give. Then resistance. Then something colder, deeper. The air seemed to bend—some darkness folding inward, as if space itself had decided to protect its occupant.
Elan Morin staggered a half-step. Not from pain. Not from surprise. From amusement. He touched his head and shook his leg where he had been struck. There had been a crack in the leg, but that shake indicated it was far from disabling.
But that was all Ethan needed. Because behind Elan Morin, Lews Therin was still on his knees. Power suddenly streamed from him in wild, uncontrolled threads that Ethan could still not see. The man's scream had not ended; it had only grown only more focused, pulled inward, into the trembling bones of the world. The effect of those bursts of power were immediate. The floor buckled around him, veins of light racing outward like fractures in reality.
Ethan did not look back. He ran. Stone seemed to ripple beneath his feet. The corridor warped with each stride, twisting under pressure that bent the very substance of the air. Behind him, the world was no longer quiet. The scream had become something else-twinned now with laughter.
Elan Morin was laughing.
The sound echoed through the crumbling palace. Sharp. Cold. Clear as an open grave. It wove through the deeper roar that came from Lews Therin; a scream that had grown into something no human throat should carry. The two voices clashed like sword and hammer, their opposing powers rattling the foundations of the ancient structure.
They echoed through stone and smoke, mocking and effortless; as if the destruction of the world were an old joke both of them had grown tired of telling. The floor opened in front of Ethan's feet. He dodged the gaping rents. Walls rippled, groaning under the weight of power no building was meant to contain. A statue split clean down the middle as he passed it. The air reeked of ozone and madness...if insanity could be said to have an odor. A column fell in slow motion behind him. Not with the force of gravity—but as though reality itself was losing its footing.
The cracks that had splintered the floors leaked lava in molten veins. More pillars buckled. The corridors shifted around Ethan like the intestines of some great beast. Dust fell in choking clouds. The walls warped inward, groaning beneath the strain of two impossible forces colliding behind him.
He pressed forward. The mark on his palm flared again. White heat this time, not cold. Relentless. It pulled at him. Urged him. Screamed in silence that there was still a way out.
He obeyed. He veered through a side archway he had not noticed a moment before, reacting on instinct, moving on the sensation of where the mark hurt more depending on the direction he ran. Then the pain in his right hand intensified. The heat surged like a fiery brand, fierce and brutal. The mark had ignited again; the pull stronger than before. He turned a corner, nearly skidding on loose stone, and stopped.
He finally saw it. A door. No trick of the mind. No symbol carved into light. Just a door.
The door stood there. Not ancient. Not carved from magic or mystery. Not part of this world at all. It was plain. Grey. Steel-framed. The same kind of door he passed every shift at the Dispatch Center. The kind that clicked quietly when it locked. The kind you stopped seeing once you had opened it enough times. It did not belong in this palace. That was what made it easy to spot; that and the ever-increasing heat in the mark on his hand. The closer he stepped, the hotter his palm burned. The mark pulsed, then steadied, as if waiting. A final warning. A final chance.
He reached for the handle. And behind him, above the rising shriek of fractured powers and collapsing stone, Elan Morin called out.
"Flee if you must, little interloper. It is too late. I have noticed you. The Shadow will find you, no matter where you go."
The door opened. It should not have. Not in a place like this. It swung inward on steel hinges. Heavy. Modern. Absurd in the middle of crumbling ruin. The roar of destruction pressed against it; fire and power and madness trembling just behind him. Wind howled through the crack. Dust whipped around him in spirals. Behind him, a scream of grief still echoed, unrelenting. Elan Morin's laughter cut through it like a blade.
Ethan did not hesitate. He jumped through. The transition hit like pressure loss in a sealed chamber. The light changed. The temperature shifted. Then came the rush. Dust and fire exploded into the hallway with him—choking, dry, laced with flecks of shattered and burning stone. Bits of debris struck the walls, bouncing off painted cinder block. A smear of soot streaked the floor behind his shoes. The door frame hummed under invisible strain. A faint red glow outlined the edges, flickering.
Ethan did not hesitate. He jumped through. The shift hit like decompression—pressure vanishing in an instant. The light changed. The air flipped cold and sterile. Then came the burst. Debris followed him.
Dust and ash exploded into the hallway, carried by force and fire. Splinters of blackened stone bounced off the walls. The air cracked with heat and wind. Ethan hit the opposite wall hard. His shoulder struck first, then his hip. The pain shot through him as he collapsed to the carpet.
The hallway shook beneath and above him. Fire alarms screamed to life overhead. A shrill mechanical cry echoed down the corridor. A second later, the sprinklers kicked in. Thin jets of cold water sprayed from ceiling panels, hammering the floor, hissing against the lingering heat.
Ethan gasped, staggered to his feet. Smoke poured through the still-open door, curling around his legs, thick with the reek of ruin. He turned. The heat licked at his skin. Inside the door frame, firelight danced, not from flame alone but from something more potent—energy, power, madness still writhing in the space beyond. Something popped behind him. A warped ceiling tile buckled. Stone from the palace beyond the open doorway glowed with gold streaks.
He reached for the door. The metal handle was hot on his fingers. He clenched his teeth and held on, yanking with everything he had. For one second, it resisted. It felt like the other world had wrapped hooks through it, refusing to let go. But he pulled again, and it gave. The door slammed shut with a shuddering clang. A pulse of pressure rippled through the hallway as it sealed.
Ethan backed away, soaked now, breath heaving. His legs hit the wall again, and he let them. He slid down, water cascading over him from the sprinklers above. Across from him, the door looked impossibly normal.
Steel frame. Grey paint. A shallow dent from where something had hit it just before it closed. Two doors down stood the one he had walked through earlier—the Dispatch Center door. The one that had taken him in. This one had brought him out.
He looked at his right hand. The bandages had unraveled in his flight. The mark was still there, but it no longer burning. No longer guiding. Only there. An ember's ghost. Quiet.
The building was not.
A haze of smoke clung to the upper corridor, fighting with the water now pooling on the floor. Fire alarms strobed with red and yellow flashings, painting the hallway in pulses. The overhead lights flickered beneath the strain. Somewhere behind the wall, a fuse box buzzed like it was trying to make sense of two realities at once.
Chunks of debris lay scattered near the door. Ancient mortar. Carved stone. Black smears radiated outward from the frame, etched into the floor like the memory of an explosion.
One ceiling tile hung by a corner, dislodged by the blast of pressure. Water trickled down its edge in steady streams. A flickering florescent tube swung overhead, its ballast straining to hold steady against something it could not name.
The air smelled wrong.
Smoke, yes, but more than that. The scent of something from far beyond here. Something old. Burned. Tainted by power. The odor of a place where grief and a Dark One had broken the will and spirit of men and women. A scent that should never have been allowed to follow him home.
Ethan sat still, water raining down on him, the sound of alarms echoing all about him. Two doors down, everything remained as it had been. But here, near this door, something had torn open. Not just the world behind it, his world. His reality.
He had closed the door. He had escaped. . .for now.
But there would be no explaining this. Not to his supervisor. Not to the agency. Not to the police, if it came to that.
The hallway was scorched. Fire alarms screamed. Sprinklers gushed from the ceiling. And across the soaked, fluorescent-lit carpet lay ancient stone debris; chunks of fiction made into reality where none should exist.
Surveillance footage would show him emerging from a door that, moments earlier, had led to the Shuttle Department and now resembled the aftermath of a pipe bomb.
He would be fired. Maybe arrested. Maybe locked away for stress-induced delusions or suspected workplace sabotage.
The building had evacuated for less, and that was before anyone even asked what happened to the door.
But none of that was the worst of it. The worst was this: one of the greatest villains in the Wheel of Time, on the other side of that door, had noticed him.
Elan Morin had spoken. Had named him interloper. Had promised the Shadow would follow. And Ethan believed him. If he could go there... then something could come here. The Betrayer's voice had not sounded like a man shouting through a crumbling palace. It had sounded like a verdict. He served a force that was real now, no longer bound to fiction, no longer just the imaginings of a dead author.
And it would not forget.