The Door That Knocks Back

The wards flared again before dawn. Not alarmingly. Not violently. But enough to wake Rei without noise. Enough to shift the pressure of the air, like a storm had paused outside the gate, undecided.

He stepped outside into the early mist and found Fluff already waiting by the gate. The ground was dry. The air was calm. But Rei could feel it. Something massive was close, but not present. Watching, but not seeing. Waiting to be seen.

He knelt and placed one hand flat on the stone just beyond the boundary line. The stone vibrated, faintly. A pulse. Slow. Measured. Old.

When he stood, Fluff was gone. Not in alarm. Just… gone. Slipped between the moment and the moment after.

Rei didn't follow. He returned inside and lit the tea stove. Today, they would not serve customers. Today, they would wait.

By midday, the wind shifted. Not eastward. Not westward. Upward. The clouds curved. Birds flew around the perimeter of the shop rather than over it. Even the garden seemed unsure, the sun-thistle curling protectively over the sleeping moss-hares.

And then, the door knocked. Once. No bell. Just the sound of knuckles on wood.

It knocked again. And then a third time, not louder—but from inside the doorframe.

Rei opened it. There was no one there. Except the door. The door had changed. It looked the same. It stood the same. But he could feel it now—not as wood, not as frame, but as something watching back.

A third knock echoed from behind him. He turned. Nothing.

And then Fluff returned, stepping calmly out of thin air with a beetle-shaped leaf on his head like a crown. He walked in. Sat by the stove. Stared at the tea leaves Rei had not yet opened.

Rei joined him. Together, they waited.

The knock didn't return that day. But others did.

By nightfall, a delegation of wind spirits hovered near the garden fence. A silence elk walked through the hedge without disturbing a single branch. And the soot-fox brought a message written in ash along the walls of its den:

"You are the gate."

Ellyn, watching the skies from the roof, finally said what they all felt. "This isn't a visit. This is a trial."

Auron had spent the day redrawing every protective rune he knew in chalk across the floorboards. Kreg baked something he refused to name.

Rei didn't stop them. But he didn't add to it, either. Because the trial wasn't against them. It was for him.

Later that night, the air shifted again. Not pressure. Not temperature. Direction.

It was no longer waiting outside. It was passing through.

Rei stood and walked to the back door—the one that faced the old trail. There was no knock this time. Only a presence. And then, like a stone dropped gently into a pond, reality rippled.

And the Untethered stepped through.

It wasn't a beast. Not in the way the others were. It wasn't a spirit. It wasn't even shaped right. It was tall, but its proportions stretched wrong. Its presence stung the air like cold lightning. It didn't cast a shadow. It suggested one.

But its eyes… Its eyes saw too much and too little at once. Like it was looking through Rei. Past him. Into something else entirely.

Rei didn't speak. Neither did it.

They stood like that for a long moment. Then, the Untethered raised a hand. Not threatening. Not inviting. Just lifting, as if showing something held in an invisible palm.

Rei stepped forward and reached out. And touched it.

His vision split. Not his sight—his vision.

He saw possibilities unravel, threads of time twisting around his body like wind.

One thread showed the shop burning.

One showed him alone, aged, in a mountain hut.

One showed Fluff growing into something unrecognizable.

One showed silence. Just silence.

Then it all snapped back.

The Untethered lowered its hand. And turned away. Not in fear. Not in failure. In recognition. As if the judgment had been passed. And the verdict had been known from the start.

Rei closed the door. It didn't knock again.

The next morning arrived unnaturally still. Even the mist hung lower than usual. Rei rose early and found Fluff watching the garden from the rooftop. He joined him in silence.

Far below, the moss-hounds paced in slow, counterclockwise circles. Auron sat cross-legged on a boulder with his eyes shut, whispering a poem to himself. Ellyn polished every tool twice. Kreg burned an entire batch of pepper-root cookies without noticing.

None of them said a word. Because they all knew something had shifted. Not just passed, but left a mark. A doorway in the world had opened, considered them, and decided not to enter. That was both mercy—and warning.

That evening, Rei received another scroll. This time, hand-delivered by a creature that looked like a stone raven sculpted from fog. It dropped the scroll gently on the tea table and vanished before anyone could ask a single question.

Rei opened the scroll. One line.

"Confirmed. Gate passed. Watch maintained. Next movement: internal."

He folded it neatly and placed it in the drawer with the Hollow Accord's coin and the disc labeled "Breathless."

Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, he sat on the back step and poured tea into two cups. One for himself. One for the quiet that now lived in the floorboards.

It drank nothing.

But stayed anyway.