Sonder stood in the butcher's room for a moment longer than she needed to.
Her eyes moved across the tools. The hooks. The stained grooves in the stone where things had been drained.
But she went past the horror and moved through it.
The thread pulled her to the far wall, where another door waited. Smaller than the last. Newer, she thought, or at least better kept. The wood was dark but unwarped, the hinges clean of rust.
She opened it without ceremony.
Beyond was a corridor, short and narrow, the ceiling lower than the chamber behind her.
The sting of blood was less here; thinner, replaced by deep earth and minerals.
Cold, like this place had never been touched by the sun or even just light.
She followed it.
The corridor ended at a final door.
Stone, not metal or wood.
There was no lock.
Only a bar across the front, set in iron brackets.
She lifted it.
It was heavy, and the sound of it shifting echoed back down the corridor, back through the butcher's room, back through all those cells.
She didn't think about that.
She pushed the door open.
And the room beyond was unremarkable.
That was the first thing she noticed.
She didn't know what to expect.
An altar, or a giant vault. But there was no ceremony about it.
It was storage.
Shelves lined the walls, practical, stacked with things that had something to do with the cells or the room behind them. Crates. Sealed containers.
A few rolled documents bound with cord. Objects wrapped in cloth, their shapes indistinct.
Valuables, maybe. Or things that simply needed to be kept dry and undisturbed.
It was almost ordinary.
Almost.
Because the thread didn't care about any of it.
It pulled her past the shelves, past the crates, to a small chest on the lowest shelf. Plain. Unadorned. Not even locked.
Just sitting there, as if it had been set down and forgotten.
She crouched in front of it.
Her hand rested on the lid for just a moment.
Then she opened it.
And there it was.
Wrapped loosely in dark cloth that had partially fallen.
It wasn't large or radiant or terrible. Just a small piece.
But she felt its power.
She reached in and picked it up.
The wanting hit her immediately.
Enormous, already filling every part of her.
She wanted it. She already had it in her hands, and she still wanted it. More than before. More than she had outside the door. More than she had when she first followed it.
It wasn't enough. And it would never be enough.
She knew that, clearly, the way you know something true and terrible, and she held the shard anyway.
She wrapped her fingers around it, and the wanting deepened.
All that hunger and the pull.
And it had just been waiting in a box on a shelf.
She closed her hand around it.
A sadness moved through her then, settling.
For herself, because she had to act now.