Eight Doors

Tonight the city keeps still long enough for Senna to ink the eighth door, and she lets herself, for one careful breath, feel something like finished. The lamp gutters. Her hand is steady. On the vellum the city of Orrin lies flat and obedient and complete, eight doors charted, eight ways the place can be entered by someone who knows where to stand. She has given six years to this map. She does not yet let herself think the word that comes after finished, because the word that comes after finished is always, in her experience, another door.