The petal did not wither.
For three days, it lay on my windowsill, a small, defiant bruise of purple against the bleached wood. It should have curled into a dry, forgotten scrap. Instead, it remained, holding its color like a secret, its surface cool to the touch no matter how the afternoon sun pressed against the glass.
It was an Anchor. I didn't know the word for it then, but my soul did. It was a proof that defied physics, a point of connection between my world and... hers.
I began to see the fraying at the edges of my reality.
It happened at 4:17 PM, in the dead hour between the rush of schoolchildren and the first wave of office workers heading home. I was buying oranges from Mr. Halev's stall. The fruit felt solid, real, their dimpled skins smelling of sun and distance. As I handed him coins, my gaze drifted to the polished side of his brass scale.
And I saw her reflection.
Not a glimpse. Not a trick of the light. She was there, clear as day, standing just behind my right shoulder in the reflection's world. She was looking at me, her expression a heartbreaking mix of hope and fear. Her mouth moved, shaping a single word I couldn't hear.
I spun around.
The space behind me was empty,occupied only by the city's indifferent flow.
"You alright, Aren?" Mr. Halev asked, his brow furrowed. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
Not a ghost, I thought. Something more dangerous. A memory that hasn't happened yet.
"I'm fine," I lied, the coins feeling suddenly cold in my palm. "Just… tired."
That night, the dream was different. It wasn't the sun-kissed hill. It was the Silverwood.
We walked under a canopy of trees whose leaves were not green, but a shifting silver, like liquid mercury catching a hidden light. They didn't rustle; they chimed, a soft, crystalline music that seemed to tune the very air. The path beneath our feet was soft with moss that glowed with a faint, blue bioluminescence.
"This is new," I said, my voice swallowed by the enchanted quiet.
"It's always been here," Lyra replied, her fingers trailing through the air, making the silver leaves shiver into a brighter chorus. "You just haven't remembered the path."
She stopped and pointed to a tree whose trunk was woven not from bark, but from what looked like solidified smoke. Carved into it were names. Our names. Aren & Lyra. But beneath that, faintly, were others. Elian & Caelia. Kael & Sora. Dozens of them, layers upon layers, a palimpsest of pairs.
"The Weepers don't like it when we come here," she whispered, her voice tinged with a fear I hadn't heard before. "They say it makes the walls too thin."
"The Weepers?"
Before she could answer, the chiming of the leaves sharpened into a warning. The gentle light of the moss flickered. A cold wind, smelling of static and forgotten things, swept through the wood. From the corner of my eye, I saw them—tall, slender figures moving between the trees, their forms shimmering like heat haze. Their faces were blurred, but I felt their gaze, a pressure that was both mournful and furious.
Lyra's hand tightened in mine. "They're coming. You have to wake up."
"I don't want to."
"You have to. Find the thread."
The Silverwood dissolved into a shower of silver dust, and I was jolted back into my bed, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The digital clock blared 3:02 AM. The room was silent. But my left hand was cold, so cold it ached, as if I'd been holding a shard of ice.
I stumbled out of bed and into the main room, turning on the light. I half-expected to see frost on my fingertips. There was none. But on the kitchen table, lying across the page of my open notebook, was a single, perfect silver leaf.
I picked it up. It was cool, metallic, and hummed with a faint, vibrational energy. It was real. More real than the table, the floor, my own trembling hands.
Find the thread.
I looked at the fragment I'd written days before. "She exists where the rain forgets to fall." I picked up my pen, my hand moving almost on its own, and wrote beneath it:
"The world is thin where you are. I can hear the silence between your heartbeats."
As the ink dried, the silver leaf on the page seemed to pulse once, softly, with a light that was not of this world.
It was a response.
She was not just in my dreams. She was in the words. She was in the silence. She was in the coldness of my hand and the impossible leaf on my table.
And for the first time, I understood the true nature of this haunting. It wasn't a curse. It was a conversation. And I was only just beginning to learn how to listen.