The journal ended. No signature, just a pressed oak leaf, still holding a whisper of green.

L. Lilly.

And then she saw it: a gap in the stone wall at the glade’s edge, where the mortar had crumbled. Not a door. Not a hole. In between.

It was the smell that hit Lilly first—not the sweet perfume of pressed flowers or the sharp tang of old paper, but something deeper, earthier: the ghost of a thousand forgotten things. The attic of Blackthorn Manor was a cathedral of dust, and Lilly Adick, age sixteen with hair the color of rust and eyes that missed nothing, had just become its accidental priestess.