Chapter 37: The Amyr’s Door

BREDON CAME FOR ME at midnight.

He didn’t knock. Didn’t announce himself. One moment I was alone in my chambers, studying the silver key from the Lackless box by candlelight, and the next he was there—standing in the doorway like a shadow that had learned to walk. His white hair was uncovered, his walking stick absent. Without his usual trappings, he looked like a different person entirely. Harder. Older. More real.

“Get dressed,” he said. “Dark clothing. Nothing that catches light.”

“Where are we going?”

“To see something that hasn’t been seen in three hundred years.” His eyes held no amusement. No warmth. Just the flat, patient intensity of a man who has waited a very long time for this moment. “The Amyr’s proof.”

I dressed without speaking. Dark trousers, dark shirt, soft boots that made no sound on stone. I slipped the silver key into my pocket and my knife into my belt and followed Bredon out into the corridor.

He moved through the Maer’s estate like he owned it. Not the way a guest moves—carefully, deferentially, aware of the invisible boundaries that separate visitor from resident. Bredon moved the way the walls moved: as if he had always been there. Corridors I’d never noticed opened at his touch. Doors that should have been locked swung silently aside. Stairways that I would have sworn didn’t exist revealed themselves in the gap between one shadow and the next.

“How do you know this place so well?” I asked, as we descended a spiral staircase that seemed to have been carved directly into the bedrock beneath the estate.

“Because I built it.” He didn’t look back. “Not personally. But the Amyr designed these passages centuries ago, when the Lackless estate was constructed. Before that, when this was just land—hills and rivers and the old stone bones of the earth—there was already a chamber here. A sealed place. We built the estate around it.”

“The estate was built to protect the chamber?”

“The estate. The gardens. The walls. The placement of every stone and every window.” His voice echoed strangely in the narrow stairwell. “You think of the Lackless family as old nobility. They are. But before they were nobles, before they were Lackless, they were guardians. Placed here by the Amyr to protect what lies below.”

“What lies below?”

He stopped. Turned. In the dim light of the stairwell, his face was all angles and shadows, and for the first time I saw him clearly—not as the charming noble, not as the tak-playing friend, not as any of the dozen faces he’d worn in my presence. I saw the Amyr beneath the skin: ancient, driven, and utterly certain.

“The truth,” he said. “About everything.”

The chamber was deeper than I expected.

We descended for what felt like twenty minutes, the spiral staircase boring through layers of stone and clay and something darker that I couldn’t identify. The air changed as we went down—growing colder, drier, and then, at the very bottom, warm. Blood-warm. The warmth of a living thing.

Bredon produced a key—not metal but something organic, carved from what looked like ancient bone—and pressed it into a hollow in the wall that I wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t shown me.

The wall opened.

Not like a door. There were no hinges, no seams, no mechanism of any kind. The stone simply… became less solid. For a moment it was translucent, like ice. Then it was gone, revealing a chamber beyond.

“After you,” Bredon said.

I stepped through.

The chamber was round. Perhaps thirty feet across, with a ceiling that arched upward to a point, giving it the feel of standing inside an inverted bowl. The walls were smooth—not carved smooth, but naturally smooth, as if the stone had been liquid once and had solidified around the shape of the room.

And the walls were covered in writing.

Not carved. Not painted. The words were in the stone itself, as if they had grown there—letters and symbols and diagrams in a dozen languages, some of which I recognized and most of which I didn’t. Yllish. Siaru. Tema. Languages so old they made Yllish look modern.

In the center of the room stood a table. Stone, like everything else. On the table lay three objects.

A book—massive, leather-bound, its pages so thick that the entire volume was nearly a foot tall.

A map—spread flat, held down by polished stones at each corner, showing a geography I didn’t recognize.

And a painting. Small, no larger than my two hands together, executed with a precision that bordered on obsessive. It depicted seven figures standing in a circle around a door made of stone.

Seven figures.

The Chandrian.

But not as I had ever imagined them. Not as monsters. Not as destroyers. In the painting, they looked… tired. Resolved. The expressions on their faces were the expressions of people who are about to do something terrible because all the alternatives are worse.

And behind them—surrounding them, watching from the shadows at the painting’s edge—stood others. Men and women in grey cloaks, their faces partially hidden. Each wore a mark on their breast: a burning tower.

The Amyr.

“This painting is three thousand years old,” Bredon said quietly. “It was made by someone who was there.”

“The Amyr and the Chandrian,” I said. “Together.”

“The same order, once. The seven most powerful, chosen to perform the sealing because they alone had the strength.” He pointed to the painting. “Look at their faces.”

I looked. And what I saw was sacrifice. People about to give up everything—their names, their natures, their connection to the world they loved—in order to save it.

“The doors couldn’t simply be closed,” Bredon said. “They had to be held. Seven anchors. Seven living beings who would bind themselves to the doors through the force of their own existence.”

“The Chandrian are the seals.”

“The locks. Their curse—the signs, the destruction, the hatred—that’s not punishment. It’s consequence. They gave up their names to become part of the binding, and the world rejects them for it.” He met my eyes. “You already know the rest. What Cinder has become. Why he killed your parents. What I told you in the garden still holds.”

I stood there for a long time, staring at the painting.

Seven faces. Seven sacrifices. Three thousand years of suffering, and at the end of it, the very thing they’d sacrificed to prevent was happening anyway.

“If the Chandrian are the seals,” I said slowly, “then killing them—”

“Breaks the binding.” Bredon nodded. “That’s what the Cthaeh wants. That’s what it’s always wanted.”

The floor shifted beneath me. Not literally—the stone was solid, unyielding. But the conceptual ground on which I’d built my life, my purpose, my entire reason for existing—that ground cracked and fell away, and I was standing on nothing.

I had spent years hunting the Chandrian. Years burning for revenge. Years convinced that if I could only find them, destroy them, make them pay for what they’d done to my family—then justice would be served. The wrong would be righted. My parents’ deaths would mean something.

And now Bredon was telling me that killing the Chandrian would open the doors.

That my revenge—the core of my identity, the fire that had sustained me through Tarbean and the University and every dark night when I’d wanted to give up—was exactly what the enemy needed.

“The Cthaeh,” I said. My voice sounded strange in my own ears. Hollow. “When it spoke to me in the Fae. It told me about the Chandrian. About Cinder. It made me angry. Made me want to find them.”

“Yes.”

“It was steering me.”

“The Cthaeh steers everyone who speaks with it. That’s its nature. It sees every possible future and chooses its words to create the maximum damage.” Bredon opened the book on the table. The pages were handwritten, the ink faded to brown. “But the Cthaeh doesn’t merely want chaos. It has a specific goal.”

“The doors.”

“The doors.” He turned pages. “Three thousand years ago, when the world was sealed and the Fae realm was separated from the mortal world, the Cthaeh was imprisoned. Not behind the doors—in its tree. The Sithe were assigned to guard it. But the Cthaeh is patient. More patient than anything else that exists. And over three millennia, it has been working toward a single moment.”

“The moment the doors open.”

“The moment everything opens.” His voice was flat. “All the seals. The Chandrian’s binding. The barrier between Fae and mortal. The Cthaeh’s cage.” He opened the book, found a page, turned it toward me.

The text was old Tema, dense and formal. But the message was brutally clear: the Cthaeh desired the dissolution of every binding. The Chandrian were the keystone. Remove them, and the entire architecture collapsed. The Cthaeh walked free — a being that sees all futures and chooses the worst, given freedom to act rather than merely speak.

The Chandrian must endure. The bindings must hold. Whatever the cost.

“The last of the true Amyr wrote this,” Bredon said, closing the book. “The church’s Amyr hunted the Chandrian because they believed them evil. They never understood the Chandrian were necessary.”

The irony was staggering. The Amyr — protecting the very beings the world believed were monsters. For three thousand years.

I walked around the chamber, reading the walls. The writing told a different history than any I’d heard before—one where the Chandrian were tragic heroes and the Amyr existed to protect them.

Every step I’d taken in pursuit of the Chandrian had been exactly what the Cthaeh wanted. I’d been a weapon aimed at the seals, too angry to realize what I was being pointed at.

“You should sit down,” Bredon said.

“It withheld this,” I said. “The Cthaeh told me about the Chandrian but not about the seals. Not about the Amyr. It gave me the anger but not the context.”

“Because the context would have changed your behavior.” He met my eyes. “Now you have it. The question is what you do with it.”

I looked at the map on the table.

It showed a world I didn’t recognize—or rather, a world I recognized but couldn’t reconcile with the one I lived in. Two realms, overlapping. Mortal and Fae, not separate but intertwined, with the Doors of Stone marked in seven locations across the combined geography.

Seven doors. Seven seals. Seven Chandrian.

“If the Chandrian die, the doors open,” I said. “But Cinder is already trying to break free of the binding. If he succeeds—”

“Then his seal fails, and the door he guards begins to open. Which puts pressure on the remaining six seals. Which makes the other Chandrian weaker. Which makes them more vulnerable to attack.” Bredon traced the map with his finger. “It’s a cascade. Once the first seal breaks, the rest follow. Not immediately, but inevitably.”

“How do we stop it?”

“We can’t stop it. The seals are three thousand years old. They were never meant to last forever. The original Amyr knew that—they expected future generations to find a better solution, a permanent solution, something that didn’t require seven people to suffer for eternity.” His voice turned bitter. “But no one ever did. The knowledge was lost. The Amyr were persecuted. And the Chandrian—the very beings who held the world together—became the most hated figures in history.”

“So the seals will fail.”

“Eventually. Yes.” He straightened. “But there’s a difference between eventually and now. Between a controlled opening and a catastrophic one. If the doors open slowly, the world can adapt. The Fae can bleed through gradually. The things behind the doors can be dealt with one at a time.”

“And if they open all at once?”

“Then everything the Cthaeh has ever wanted comes true at the same moment.” Bredon’s face was grim. “The Chandrian die. The Fae realm collapses into the mortal world. The Cthaeh walks free. And whatever remains of reality becomes a playground for a being that can see every possible future and will choose the one that causes the most suffering.”

The weight of it settled on me like stone.

My entire life, I’d been running toward the wrong thing. Fighting the wrong enemy. Pursuing the wrong justice. And the creature that had set me on that path was sitting in its tree in the Fae, patient as time, waiting for me to finish the job.

“What do I do?” I asked. Not rhetorically. Not dramatically. I asked the way a child asks a parent: genuinely, desperately, needing an answer I couldn’t find on my own.

Bredon looked at me for a long time.

“You do what you’ve always done,” he said. “You find the truth. You learn. You adapt. But this time, you do it with open eyes.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “You are not the Cthaeh’s weapon, Kvothe. Not anymore. From this moment on, you know what’s really at stake. And knowledge—true knowledge, the kind that changes what you are—is the one thing the Cthaeh can’t account for.”

“Because it withheld this knowledge from me.”

“Because it assumed you’d never find it.” A thin smile. “It underestimated you. And it underestimated us.”

I looked at the painting one more time. Seven faces, tired and resolved. The Chandrian, in the moment before they became the Chandrian. Before the binding. Before the curse. Before three thousand years of hatred and fear and the slow erosion of everything they once were.

“I need to think,” I said.

“You need to think,” Bredon agreed. “But think quickly. The seals are failing. Cinder is moving. And the Cthaeh’s patience is very, very close to being rewarded.”

He led me back up the spiral stairs, through the hidden passages, to the surface of the estate where the ordinary world continued its ordinary business—courtiers scheming, servants bustling, the Maer dying slowly in his bed.

I stood in the corridor outside my chambers and felt the weight of three thousand years pressing down on me like water.

Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

And I had no idea how to be right.