The lost daughter

Previously

…The pages fluttered open and the wind caught them and scattered notes across the wet planks—years of research sailing away on the breeze—and nobody moved to catch them because everyone was staring at Elise, at her belly, at the mark that was humming with a frequency none of them had ever heard before. Beneath the Celestine, fathoms down, the door pulsed once. Bright. Insistent. Open. And the First Conduit's voice—ancient, enormous, resonant with the weight of centuries—rose through the water and the hull and the deck and the soles of Elise's boots and spoke a single word that wasn't a word but a sensation, a pressure, a truth delivered directly into her bones: Come.