Once, when first teaching Annika about the cosmology of everything around them, Jack framed it with the lens of Earth's seasons. There were places reminiscent of Spring, in which life flourished and was emphatically [i]new.[/i] Nebulae that recently collapsed with metaphysical beings actively taking shape, demiurgical planes under construction. There were places of Winter, barren and forgotten, with memories waiting to be thawed and reintroduced to the world. Under that analogy, the Everdark was Autumn. It changed, it shifted, and so many things came into a place where they were on a threshold between one chapter and the other. All things come, and all things go, he would say. That was, in many ways, what made this realm and life itself beautiful.

There was a fourth element of this analogy that Jack had taught to her. Summer.

It was not the shadows that answered Annika's question. It wasn't even the house itself, it was something else. She images she saw began to race forward. Through her years spent in this place, it was easy to make out the face of a young Jack Hawthorne among the reflections. A look far less tired, scars more pronounced, less of the wise and imperious image she knew he presented to the world. He's not much older than her in those afterimages, and in a scarce few, he isn't alone.

There's someone else in them, a young man his age, and he's brighter than Jack. There's a contrast, where he's in tune with the watercolor imagery Annika can see, and this stranger is sharper, more defined.

The images in the shadows give way until there's something at the very end of the hall. A hatch made of wood, set into the floor and reinforced with bars of iron. There's a light underneath it, leaking out into the environment.

And the light is [i]warm.[/i]