The forest swallows her on the third day.

Yara enters the woods with blood on her hands and one question burning in her chest:

What am I now?

She was a midwife's apprentice trained to stand at the threshold between life and death. Then she killed a man who deserved killing and learned how thin that threshold truly is.

She isn't seeking forgiveness.

She's seeking Baba Yaga.

The witch in the house on chicken legs is meant to be a monster. A trial. A warning.

Instead, Yara finds something far more dangerous: a woman who has spent centuries guarding the space between worlds. A keeper of doors. A witness to those who are ready to cross and those who are not.

When Yara asks not to survive the witch, but to stay and learn, she must confront a harder question:

If you can open the door both ways...
what kind of threshold do you choose to become?

The Doorway is a dark reimagining of the Baba Yaga myth a literary fairy tale about violence, responsibility, and the cost of holding power over life and death.

For readers of Naomi Novik, Katherine Arden, and Madeline Miller.