Chapter 22: The Warden Comes Down from the Lighthouse

The Warden was simply there.

No door had opened. No sound preceded him. One moment the chamber contained four people and the dark attentive surface and the cold mineral light, and then it contained five, and the fifth had been standing at the chamber's center long enough that the bioluminescent stone beneath his feet seemed to know him, seemed to have adjusted itself to his presence the way stone adjusts to the particular weight of something that has stood in one place for a very long time.

He was not what Maren had imagined.