You bite your lip until you taste blood. You remember the weeping tapestry. The armor that could not see. The door that asked for grief.
“The Staff of Ages,” you say.
The door laughs. “You cannot destroy what you do not understand.”
You find a sconce. A faint, flickering light is better than none, but the castle hates light. You pass a tapestry. It weeps. Not water—blood. Dark, sluggish, and smelling of iron. You ignore it. You learned to ignore weeping things in the first hour.
And you begin to run.