Beyond The Door

Every night, Blair dreams of a white door hovering over a black lake. Starlight scatters across the water, fireflies drift in slow spirals, and a single star burns brighter than the rest. A man waits there with sharp, watchful eyes and rugged features that should not be beautiful and yet are. Every morning, she wakes strapped to a bed in the Onodad Institute, ribs aching, veins burning, mind fogged from whatever they have pushed through her. The staff call it treatment. The darkness coiled in her thoughts calls it something else, and it is getting harder to ignore.

When an escape finally tears open her cage, Blair runs with nothing but a shattered memory and the echo of the door in her bones. On the road, she stumbles into strangers who should be enemies and becomes something like family instead. She is reunited with the best friend she never should have remembered, pulled into odd and grotesque corners of the world, and forced to accept that the thing shadowing her is not leaving. In the middle of it all stands Hale, the man from her dreams, very real and very dangerous, his steady gaze and rough-edged kindness cutting through her defenses even when she knows she should not trust him.

Blair is not the only one bound to her fate. A small white creature she names Marshmallow chooses her and refuses to let go, their bond bright and impossible in the dark. When he is taken, Blair's journey becomes a hunt. To get him back and to untangle what was done to her, she must step closer to the myths that ruined her life and to the people who still want to own it. The Drifters who wander without memories, the hunters who use them, and the shadow inside her are all pieces of a truth she is no longer sure she wants to know.

The answers wait inside the Fourfold Trials, ancient tests that promise either clarity or ruin. Each trial peels away another layer of who Blair thought she was and what she feels for the man who keeps being placed in her path. With every choice, her bond with Hale twists tighter and more fragile. Surviving the trials might give Blair back her stolen life, but it may also cost her the one person who has haunted her dreams since the first night the white door appeared.