Heavy Georgia clouds sag over the highway, sullen and bruised, the kind that sit low enough to feel personal. Then—like someone flipping a switch inside the sky—the horizon goes black.
Not nighttime black.
Something thicker. The kind of dark that presses in. The kind that makes my shoulders tighten even before I understand why.
The first drop hits my windshield hard enough to sound like a stone.
The air hums with electricity.
The sound isn't thunder yet.
It's something lower. A pressure. Like the air itself is holding its breath.
The steering wheel vibrates faintly under my palms. Not enough to be mechanical. Enough to feel…alive. My ears pop, the way they do when an elevator rises too fast, and a sharp, instinctive awareness prickles across my scalp.
I roll my shoulders, trying to shake it off.
Georgia storms do this sometimes. They crawl under your skin, make your nerves buzz like bad wiring. I've lived here long enough to know the difference between drama and danger.
Except my body doesn't.
My pulse ticks up for no reason, tapping against my throat like a warning I can't translate. I swallow and force myself to breathe evenly, counting the exhales the way Mom taught me when I was little and scared of the dark.
In for four.
Out for six.
The hum doesn't fade.
It deepens.
For a fleeting second—so fast I almost miss it—I have the strangest sensation that I've done this before. Not driven this road. Not answered this call.
But felt this exact moment.
The pressure.
The waiting.
The certainty that something irreversible has already been set in motion.
My phone rings through the car speakers.
I flinch before I can stop myself.
I jab the answer button on the steering wheel. "Helloooo, Mom," I sing, stretching the word until it turns brittle. Fake. Too bright. The sound tastes like sugar the second it leaves my mouth, and I immediately regret it.
"Where are you?" she snaps.
Not annoyed. Not distracted. Not checking in.
Terrified.
The last time I heard her sound like this was when I was seven and dropped my music box down the stairs. She'd knelt beside me, shaking, hands fluttering uselessly over my scraped knees like she didn't know where I ended and the world began.
A pulse of cold slides down my spine—sharp, instinctive.
Remembered.
"I'm heading to Shel's," I say, forcing a laugh that scrapes on the way out. "Relax. It's just rain."
The sky answers like it's offended.
Rain thickens from drizzle to sheet to waterfall in the span of a breath. The windshield shudders with each impact. The wipers thrash at full speed and still lose. Brake lights smear red against the gray until everything outside looks like a watercolor bleeding itself to death.
"Angela." Mom whispers my name like it's already past tense. "Sweetheart. Please. Turn around. Come home. Right now."
My grip tightens around the wheel.
I shouldn't be shaking. I've driven through a thousand Georgia storms. Weather here loves drama. This is nothing.
But my body disagrees.
Something coils tight under my ribs—urgent, panicked—as if it recognizes the shape of this fear. As if it has lived it before.
Thunder cracks overhead. Too close. It vibrates through my chest like distant artillery.
Familiar.
"It's not that bad," I lie. "I'm going slow. I'll text you when I get there."
"Don't go to Shelby's." Her breath catches—a sharp, breaking sound that punches through my chest. "There's something I have to tell you, and we are out of—"
The light ahead flips from yellow to red.
I brake. Tires hiss on flooded pavement. The car stops, humming beneath me like it's holding its breath. The wipers beat time with my pulse.
Lightning rips open the clouds to my right.
For a heartbeat, the road looks different.
The sensation doesn't vanish when I blink.
The cracks in the asphalt seem too deliberate, branching in patterns that tug at something behind my eyes. For a moment, the white lane lines look thinner — stretched — like threads pulled too tight.
My stomach clenches.
I glance down at my speedometer, then back up, grounding myself in numbers and familiar shapes. The road snaps back into place, ordinary and slick with rain, but the unease lingers.
My hands ache.
Not sore—strained. Like they've been gripping something heavier than a steering wheel for far too long. I flex my fingers against the leather, a jolt of discomfort sparking up my arms before fading.
"What is wrong with me?" I mutter.
Mom is still talking, her words blurring together as my focus fractures. I hear fear in her voice, real and sharp, but it's layered with something else—urgency that feels older than this conversation.
Older than this storm.
The light overhead buzzes faintly.
I don't remember it ever making sound before.
When lightning splits the sky again, it's close enough that my vision whites out for a split second. In that flash, I swear I see something standing just beyond the intersection — not a person, not a shadow, but a shape where the rain bends wrong around empty space.
Then it's gone.
My breath stutters.
I tighten my grip on the wheel until my knuckles ache, anchoring myself in pain because pain is real, and real things don't disappear when you blink.
Mom is still talking, her voice climbing. "—should have told you years ago, but your birthday—"
"Mom." My throat tightens; the word has to be forced out. "You're freaking me out. I'm okay. It's just a storm. I'm ten minutes away."
The light turns green.
Left—blurred cars slowing in the downpour.
Right—darkness too empty to be safe.
I ease onto the gas.
"Mom, I'm fine. It's not even raining that—"
The truck comes out of nowhere.
A black shape explodes from the right-hand lane—too fast, too close—headlights like twin suns swallowing the world. There's no time to scream.
My hands wrench the wheel. My foot slams the brake.
And then—
Impact.
There is a moment—suspended, weightless—where sound drops out completely.
Not silence.
Absence.
My ears ring like a struck bell as the world spins, rain and glass and metal blurring into a single violent color. My stomach floats somewhere near my throat. Gravity forgets which way it's supposed to go.
Then pain slams in.
White-hot, all at once, radiating through my chest and shoulders as the seatbelt locks hard against my collarbone. Something inside me gives—not a bone, not exactly—but a sensation like fabric tearing under strain.
The car lurches, flips, skids.
I taste copper.
My vision fractures into overlapping frames: the dash lights flashing red, the sky spinning, my own hands flailing uselessly in front of me.
And under it all—beneath the chaos, beneath the pain—there is a pull.
Not forward.
Not backward.
Downward.
Like something deep inside my chest has been hooked and yanked, hard enough to make my breath seize. The panic spikes, sharp and animal, and I claw at the wheel instinctively, desperate for something solid.
Then the world drops out from under me.
No more pain.
No more motion.
Just a sudden, terrible stillness that feels wrong in a way my mind can't articulate.
As if the accident didn't end something.
As if it opened it.
Somewhere between heartbeat and breath, I feel it again.
The pull.
A whisper of cold brushes the back of my neck—not wind. Not imagination.
A name rises unbidden in my mind.
A name that is not Angela.
Then—
Nothing.
Silence.
I am standing in the road.
The storm still rages, but the rain passes through me like smoke. My feet leave no ripples in the puddles. The air hums faintly, vibrating around my skin as if something inside me is trying—failing—to remember how to be solid.
My car lies crumpled in the ditch, nose buried in mud. The black truck sits crooked across the intersection, steam hissing from its ruined front end. A streetlight hangs bent overhead, flickering like it can't decide whether to stay.
And in the ditch—
is me.
My body. Wrong. Broken. Arms twisted where they shouldn't bend. Head tilted back. Eyes open and staring at nothing. Hair plastered dark with rain and blood, fanned around my skull like a ruined halo.
I stare.
Disbelief and recognition collide until I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
"No," I whisper.
I try to run—but my feet make no sound. My hands slice through rain. My voice doesn't touch the air.
People spill out of cars, doorways, shadows. They run toward the truck. Toward the driver slumped over his wheel.
Toward everything except me.
"Hey!" I shout, waving. "I'm over here! I'm—"
Nothing.
I am not invisible.
I am absent.
Cold blooms in my chest. I turn back toward the ditch.
Someone is already there.
A figure crouches beside my body. Hooded. Cloaked in something too dark to be fabric. Rain avoids him, bending around his shape like the storm knows better than to touch him.
He doesn't check a pulse.
Doesn't perform CPR.
He looks up at me like he wasn't expecting me to be awake.
"Help her—me—call someone!" I choke, stumbling toward him.
A shard of asphalt skitters across the road at my feet.
It makes sound.
He moves.
His head snaps up. His eyes meet mine.
And the world stops.
Rain freezes midair. Thunder dies. Bystanders vanish. Every sound cuts out except my heartbeat—too fast, too loud, trapped in my skull like a warning siren.
His eyes are wrong.
Too pale. Too bright. Too deep.
Not monster. Not human.
Something older than both.
He rises without using his hands, motion smooth and impossible. Rain passes through him like smoke.
"You can see me," I breathe.
He tilts his head. Not surprised.
Something flickers across his gaze—calculation, recognition, something dangerously close to relief.
He steps closer. Lifts a hand. His palm hovers inches from my chest.
I don't feel skin.
I feel a pull.
Like a thread snapping loose inside my ribs, vibrating with an ache that feels ancient.
"Aetheria," he murmurs.
The name detonates in my veins.
"That is not my name," I whisper.
"It is."
Something groans behind us.
A door stands in the center of the intersection.
It wasn't there a moment ago.
Black wood, cracked and scorched, carved with symbols that crawl if I look too long—eyes, wings, teeth, threads knotted into impossible patterns. The darkness beyond it has weight. It pulses, slow and deliberate, like a heartbeat from somewhere that is not a place.
"You are not alive," the hooded man says. "Not anymore."
My vision flickers—hands on my chest, voices shouting numbers, the copper taste of blood—
—and then I'm here again.
"You've been here before," he says.
"No." Panic tears up my throat. "I would remember this."
"You don't remember," he replies. "That is the curse."
Cold fingers walk my spine.
"Curse?"
"The false name you were given. The life forced upon you."
"I didn't steal anything—"
"You did not choose it." His voice never rises. "But it was stolen."
A second figure materializes beside the door—tall, veiled, eyes glowing faint and inhuman.
"You should not exist," he says. "The Fates did not weave you. You were slipped between threads."
"My mother—"
"Your mother hid you," the hooded one cuts in. "She shattered the laws of life and death to keep you off the Ledger."
My knees buckle.
"I'm real," I gasp. "I scraped my knees. I had birthdays. I had—"
"Love does not make you real," he says.
The door hums.
Carvings ignite red-gold. Whispers coil through the air—threads tightening, pages turning, names spoken in languages that make my teeth ache.
Aetheria.
Aetheria.
Ash falls from nowhere—not snow, not soot. It lands on my skin and sinks in like ink.
"You are a fracture," he says. "A tear in the cloth of the worlds."
"I'm a person," I rasp.
"A person who ends gods."
The second figure speaks again. "If she walks through, the Ledger rewrites. If she does not, the Ledger burns."
I don't want the door.
I don't want any of this.
But my body rises anyway—jerky, unwilling—like a memory moving my limbs.
"What happens if I go through?" I whisper.
They don't answer.
The hooded man reaches up and pulls back his cowl.
Black hair spills free. A face too precise to be mortal. A mouth that once knew how to laugh and forgot.
And eyes—
Storm-blue. Ice and memory.
I know him.
Not as a stranger.
As history.
As blood.
I have kissed him. I have bled for him. I have died for him.
The certainty guts me.
"You," I whisper.
Something fractures across his face—grief, fury, restraint cracking at the seams.
"You were never meant to belong among them," he says. "Not this time."
The door opens.
Darkness spills out, curling around my ankles, my wrists.
Somewhere else, sirens wail. Someone sobs. My mother screams my name into a phone that doesn't exist here.
But here there is only this:
A door.
Two beings older than gods.
And me—the fracture.
And I know—
If I step through,
I will not come back.
And whatever survives me
will not survive unchanged.