(SASHA)
There were moments the world felt unreal—like a layer of fabric was being pulled back, and underneath it, something ancient breathed.
It had started again last night.
The
pendant, warm against my skin,burned without cause. I'd been brushing my hair, getting ready for bed, when a wave of dizziness struck me. And then, the vision: red thread unraveling in a forest, tied to wrists, necks, and ankles of women walking silently into water.
When I gasped myself awake, I was on the floor , candle wax dried into the floor beside me. I had written nothing.
But the story had been told.
It was in me.
The girl in my vision looked like someone I'd once known. Her eyes were shaped like mine. Her lips moved in the same way when she whispered words to the wind.
Except she wasn't me.
Or was she?
My journal pages from that night were filled with scribbled words I didn't recall writing. Lines like:
"Do not untie the red thread. Once loosened, desire becomes blood."
"One always dies. One always remembers. One always returns."
"He carries the wrong name. The priest is not just a man."
Sasha couldn't ignore it anymore—not after Lex's ordeal with the jar. And now that his grandmother had mentioned how the jar come to existence mentioning, something about "the seal breaking"… Sasha had t press him.
She found Lex in his aprtment, apron on and cooking gloves. He was making himself some meal.Pretending not to flinch when she said, "We need to go see her."
His hands stilled.
"Now," she added.
They didn't speak much on the drive. Outside, the sky looked like old film,faded, a little haunted. Lex's jaw tensed the closer they got to the outskirts. His grandmother's house sat like a king's palace secret at the edge of a field that hadn't aged in decades.
Whatever truth waited behind her door, it had roots.
(TASHA)
The first night, it felt like déjà vu.
A trail in the woods. A cold wind at her back. And the sound of bells not ringing, but shivering.
She woke sweating.
The second night, it returned.
The same path. The same silver light. And this time, a figure, just at the bend of the trail. Not moving. Just… waiting.
By the fourth night, Tasha wasn't scared anymore.
She was curious.
Who was leading her?
And where did the trail end?
(MISHA)
In another part of the city.
I stared at the old Mapatoni estate sketch Maari had pulled from her archives. A drawing of the first binding ritual,three women, three threads, one man whose face had been torn from the parchment.
But the sigils?
They matched the markings on my back and the one Sienna had drew once on the sand when she was barely five.
"She doesn't remember drawing it," I told Maari.
"She wasn't meant to," Maari said. "But the thread pulls tighter when the circle begins to close. And Lex?"
"What about him?"
Maari gave me a look that twisted my stomach.
"He is not just remembering. He is awakening."
(SASHA & LEX)
At the Lex's grandmother's the butler led them to her bedroom,but she wasn't at her room so Lex signaled Sasha to follow him upstairs where there were no servants abd he knocked at an old dusty green door and waited for response.
Lex's grandmother didn't open the door right away.
She just called from inside.
"Lex. You brought her."
Sasha exchanged a glance with him. "She was expecting me?"
Lex didn't answer. He pushed open the door.
Inside, the air was thick with something unspoken. The old woman sat in a worn armchair, her eyes cloudy but piercing.
"The jar," she rasped. "It's not sealed anymore, is it?"
Lex stiffened. Sasha stepped forward.
"What's in it?" she asked.
The old woman laughed, bitter and cracked.
"Not what, girl. Who."
She leaned forward, a tremor in her hands. "The jar doesn't hold something. It remembers. It binds what was torn apart."
Sasha's skin prickled. "Who was torn apart?"
The woman's eyes locked onto hers.
"You. Him. And the one who walks in dreams."
(Tasha)
The fifth night, she followed the figure.
Through the trees, her bare feet silent over moss and stone, deeper and deeper until the air itself felt woven from whispers.
The figure never turned.
But the trail led her to a clearing—a circle of white ash and red string, strung like veins across the forest floor.
At the center: a jar.
Small. Cracked. Humming.
When she reached out, the dream fractured like glass breaking underwater—and she woke up gasping.
This time, the air around her smelled like burnt cedar.
And in her palm, a red thread had appeared.
Thin. Tied tight. And bleeding.