The silence Mina's faded voice left behind was heavy with impossible truths. Lio stared at the red mitten on the empty chair, trying to reconcile the sister he had known and lost with the sentient, walking memory she claimed to be.
His gaze drifted back to the horrific tableau at the table, to the still, grey face of the boy who was him. He leaned closer, drawn by a morbid curiosity, and looked into his own dead, closed eyes.
And that's when the dam broke.
It was not a thought or a realization. It was a violent, psychic flood. The dusty dining room dissolved, and Lio was plunged into a dizzying torrent of memories that were not his own, yet felt as real as the floor beneath his knees. He was experiencing his own death. Over and over.
The first memory was of water. He was in the house, but it was a different loop, a different failure. Water was not seeping, but pouring through the windows in thick, green sheets. The roar was deafening.
He felt the icy, shocking cold seize his limbs, the crushing pressure of the water against his chest. He felt the raw, animal panic, the desperate, burning need for air.
He felt his lungs give out, the involuntary gasp, and the final, dark, quiet peace of drowning.
Before he could process the horror, the scene shattered and reformed.
Fire. The air was thick with black, acrid smoke that clawed at his throat. The world was a vortex of orange and red. He felt the searing heat on his skin, the roar of the flames devouring the house around him.
He remembered the splintering crash as the ceiling gave way. He experienced the sharp, blinding pain and then the merciful darkness. This was the memory of the charred house in the garden.
The vision fractured again.
Silence. He was in his bed. The house was cold and still.
A strange, sweet, cloying scent, like the smell in the dining room but stronger, hung in the air. A deep, pleasant drowsiness washed over him, a lethargy so profound he could not lift his own head from the pillow. He remembered hearing his mother call his name from her room, her voice thick with the same sleep, before she fell silent. He experienced the slow, gentle, inexorable drift into a death that felt like a dream.
The memories came faster now, a horrific, flashing montage of their failures. A version where a Pulse hit directly, the walls of the house cracking and collapsing inward, the memory a sharp, percussive impact and then nothing.
A version where the Hollows finally breached their door, not to steal memories, but to drain them of all warmth and life, the memory a feeling of profound, soul deep cold. Drowning, burning, sleeping, crushing, fading.
And with the memories came the sound. It was the sound of their family's death, a chorus of every final moment they had ever endured. It was his own last, desperate scream for air, his mother's weeping, his father's final, bitter curse at his useless maps, all layered on top of each other, overlapping into one eternal, horrifying chord of failure.
The onslaught ended as abruptly as it began. Lio found himself back in the present, on his hands and knees in the dusty dining room. He was gasping, choking, his lungs burning as if he had actually just drowned. He was drenched in a cold sweat, shaking violently.
"Lio!" It was his mother's voice, sharp with alarm.
He looked up. Sera and Ira were staring at him, their faces etched with concern. They had seen him collapse, cry out, shudder on the floor as if in the grip of a grand mal seizure.
He looked past them, at his own still body at the table. He looked at his dead mother, his dead father. He now understood. That boy in the chair hadn't just died once. He had died every way. The garden of houses was a garden of graves, and he had just experienced a flash of every funeral. The house was not just a trap; it was a library of their own demise, and he had just been forced to read the last page of every volume.
He looked at his living parents, at their worried faces, and saw them not just as they were now, but as the countless ghosts he had just watched die. The journey wasn't about surviving one loop. It was about ending a cycle of infinite death that he now, in his own mind, viscerally remembered.