"Are you lost, kid?"
It came from the front door, which I knew was shut. I had not heard it open. I froze, the business card crumpling in my fist.
Slowly, fighting the stiffness in my neck, I turned.
I saw the hallway.
But not my hallway.
The change was not a blink, not a fade. It was a cut.
There was no transition. No dizzy spin or feelings. One moment ago, there my worn wooden floor was beneath my socks. The next, there was nothing. The walls, the ceiling, the very floor of my home were simply gone, erased as if they'd never been more than a painting on a curtain now torn away.
I stood transfixed, a gasp dying in my throat. My bare feet were not on laminated wood, but on something smooth, cool, and solid. I looked down.
Water
---
A transparent, layer of it, like thick, flawless but glass smooth, endless plane of water, ankle-deep and impossibly clear. I looked down and saw my own terrified reflection staring back from an abyss that had no bottom.
The sky was a dome of bruised violet and deep indigo, streaked with the last embers of a sun that wasn't there. Silence, thick and absolute, pressed against my eardrums. No wind. No waves. Just the terrifying, perfect stillness of an ocean that went on forever.
Behind me, maybe twenty steps across the glassy surface, it ended in a shore of pale, soft sand. Beyond that, the island began, a mess of dark, whispering trees.
I was standing on the sea itself.
The hollowness in my chest didn't just ache, it sang. A low, humming sound that harmonized with the silence. This place knew me. It recognized the emptiness I carried.
The silence was not only physical pressure, it was mental. It was breaking me bone by bone. But in this silence I heard it.
The Siren's Song.
It drifted from the heart of the island, moving through the still air. The same wordless, haunting song from my dream, the one my mother had hummed. But here, it was clearer. It wasn't a memory or an echo. It was a presence. It pulled at the shattered pieces of me, promising wholeness if I just followed. It was a pulling, a yearning so profound it made the hollow in my chest shiver in sympathy. It called to the missing pieces.
My feet moved on their own. I walked across the solid, dream-like sea toward the shore. The water was neither warm nor cold; it was simply absent of temperature, like touching a concept rather than a substance.
With each step, the island grew, its details getting sharper. My feet touched sand, then soft, damp earth. I didn't look back at the impossible ocean at my back. The music was a string, and I was pulled into the forest.
---
The island's forest was a quiet, holy place of shadows and silver moss. The music was clearer as I went deeper towards the heart of the island, it felt like a string I could follow. I pushed through ferns that sighed at my touch, past trees whose bark seemed to move with half made faces.
And I saw them.
Two of them. They were not fully real, not solid. They were like shadows given life by stray bits of light, see through, shaking at the edges. A boy and a girl, chasing pinpricks of light that floated like captive stars.
The boy's laugh was an echo of my own, from a time before my throat knew how to tighten with fear. The girl's giggle was the sound of a key turning in a lock deep inside me. Lyria.
She caught one of the lights, her shadowy hands holding it gently. Her voice, when it came, was made from breeze and forgotten afternoons.
The girl stopped, grabbing the boy's hands. Her voice, when it came, was young and strong with a love so complete it cut a new hole right next to the old one.
"So we'll be together? Promise? Even if… even if something bad happens? Even if we die?"
The boy shadow stopped. His form became solid for just a second. The set of his jaw, the way he held his head.
It was me.
A me untouched by being erased.
"Always,"
He said, his voice clear and sure, a promise cut in stone.
"Even if we die. We'll find each other after."
The scene was a comfort and a cut. It was proof. It was my stolen past, playing on a loop just for me. A sob caught in my dream throat.
My gaze, pulled by a subtle movement, found the third child.
She sat apart on the thick, knotted root of an old tree, knees drawn to her chest. She wasn't playing. She was observing. Her shadow form was different from other two, it's denser, darker, as if she was composed of the silence between musical notes.
As the two playmates linked their little fingers in their pact, the watching girl slowly, deliberately, lifted her own hand. Not toward them. She held it out to the empty space beside her on the root. Her small, dark fingers curled, interlacing with invisible ones. She was making a promise, too. A private gesture. A vow made in silence, to someone unseen. Or to herself.
Who was she promising? What was she swearing?
"Hey!"
My voice ripped from my throat, rough and too loud in the dream-like forest.
"Who are you?"
The playing children didn't flinch, locked in their own world.
But the watching girl's head turned. Not toward them. From within that darkness, two points of cool, silver light ignited eyes that saw through the veil of memory and into me.Her look didn't just see me. It poured into me.
I felt her sorrow not as an emotion, but as a physical void, a deep, heavy emptiness that settled in my own hollow spaces, making them echo with a loneliness that wasn't my own.
A headache exploded behind my own eyes. It wasn't pain, it was an invasion.
I screamed, my hands flying to my head, my knees buckling into the soft, mossy earth. I was being unmade from the inside, the memory rejecting my intrusion
Then, arms wrapped around me from behind.
The touch was immediate. Solid. An anchor in the shattering storm. But it was all wrong.
It was cold.
Not the chill of fear, but the deep, going in cold of a shadow that has never known sun. Or a space between stars.It was a different cold than the void inside me. This was different. This was a claim. The arms tightened, not offering comfort, but exerting possession. A frozen chain anchoring me to the depths.
This wasn't Lyria.
Lyria's presence had been a warm sorrow, a missing piece. This was the grip of a guardian who lived in the cracks.
Elara.
The name echoed in me, but the echo wasn't mine. It was someone else's memory finding my hollow places.
I tried to twist, to see the face of this cold comfort, but the movement sent a final, blinding bolt of agony through my skull.
With a groan that tore from the bottom of my chest, I used every bit of will I had left. I fought against the pain and the cold, forcing my head to turn, my blurring sight to look for the source of the hold.
I saw only a shape of deeper darkness against the fading forest. But within it, for one broken second, two silver points shone not with light, but with a wet, shiny wetness. Tears. And then the arms moved, and a whisper of long, silver hair brushed my cheek.
It was all I could process before the agony crested. My vision tunneled to those two liquid silver points, and then everything was swallowed by a wave of numb, silent black.
---
I woke up with a gasp, my cheek pressed against the rough weave of the hallway rug.
I was on my back on the hard wooden floor of the dining room. The endless sea, the forest, the children all gone.
The world was dark. Not evening dark. The deep, velvety black of the middle of the night. The clock on the wall ticked, loud in the silence.
2:17 AM.
I pushed myself up, my body aching as if I'd run for miles. My head pounded with a dull, lasting ache, a ghost of the dream breaking pain.
The card was lying beside me. It was hard inside my palm.
The hollow feeling flooded back, not as an ache, but as a vast, empty chamber. I felt scraped clean. Haunted.
I sat there in the dark, the questions swirling like vultures.
What was that place? A memory so strong it became a place? A piece of the Shatterline, manifesting inside my home?
The children… the promise… 'Even if we die.' What kind of children make such a vow?
Who were the children? The playing boy was me. The girl was Lyria. Our promise.
The third girl. The watcher. The one who promised to no one. Her silver eyes. Was that Elara's memory? Or is Elara the one she was promising to?
Lyria's absence was a warmth I missed. This Elara… her presence was a cold spot in the world. A silence with intent.
I stood, legs unsteady, and stumbled to the front window. The night outside was a solid wall of black. But I could feel it. The observation. Not the hawk's fierce guardianship, not Lyria's mournful pull from the past.
This was a patient, figuring-out watchfulness. A cold someone, woven into the cloth of the dark itself, holding me not with warmth, but with the scary sureness of a debt not paid. It was a comfort only because it was a known thing in the mess. I was not alone in the bad dream. I was being carefully looked at.
A shake that started in my soul moved through my body. I stepped back from the window. I didn't dare turn on a light. The dark now felt like the only true thing a blanket under which I could hide from the eyes outside and the confusing, fighting presences inside.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor again, my back to the solid, real wall. From my pocket, my shaking fingers pulled out the picture of Lyria and me.
In the darkness, the picture was just a dark piece of paper. But I didn't need to see. I traced the shape of Lyria's smile with my thumb, felt the ghost pressure of her shoulder against mine in the drawing. The simple, hard truth of us.
But that truth was now broken, a mirror dropped on stone.
My mother, humming the Siren's sad song with empty eyes. Dr. Kael, a ghost in a suit who left no footprints. The Weavers and their twisted mark. Tests. Erasure.
What did they take from us? What were we before I lost everything?
And the one who promised in silence. The one whose presence was a cold hold in the after time. Why does her empty space feel different from mine? A promise made in the shadows that is now coming due?
Now I wasn't just looking for a missing piece of myself anymore.
I was caught between two echoes, one of warm, lost love, and one of cold, watchful loyalty. And I had no idea which one was really mine. Or were they both?
The cold spot in the room moved. I couldn't see her, but I knew she had moved from the corner to a space just behind my shoulder. Not Lyria, who was a ghost in my heart. This was a ghost in my bones.
A soft, papery sound. Not a sigh. The sound of a single page, turning in a book that lived only in the empty space of the dark.
Then, a whisper. It didn't enter my ears. It formed right in the middle of my mind, a voice of frozen silver and forgotten starts.
"Some promises are cages. But some... some are sacred. And breaking a sacred vow unmakes the world"