SubChapter 25
Life tried to return to normal.
I went back to school, though everyone stared and whispered. The administration let me finish the semester remotely "for my wellbeing." Really, they just didn't want the disruption.
Mira wouldn't speak to me. Most people wouldn't.
The news covered the deaths of the detective and DA obsessively. The FBI investigation found nothing. No suspects. No evidence. No explanation for how three people died in three different locations in three impossible ways at the exact same time.
Some outlets called it "The Midnight Murders." Others suggested terrorism, though no group claimed responsibility. A few fringe websites whispered about "supernatural events," but they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
I tried to move on. Tried to pretend that my prayer and their deaths were unrelated. Coincidence. Tragic timing.
But I knew better.
Late at night, when I couldn't sleep, I researched. Ancient religions. Old gods. Spirits and demons and things that existed in the margins of human understanding. Looking for any explanation that made sense.
I found nothing. Or everything. Depending on how you looked at it.
There were stories, scattered across cultures, across centuries. Stories of people who prayed desperately enough, who wanted something badly enough, who opened themselves to forces they didn't understand.
And those forces answered.
But they always wanted something in return.
SubChapter 26
She appeared on a Saturday morning in late January.
I was in the kitchen, making coffee, when I felt someone watching me. I turned to find a woman sitting at our dining table, as if she'd always been there.
She was ageless, could have been thirty or fifty or somewhere in between. Dark hair, darker eyes, wearing a suit that seemed too formal for a Saturday morning. She radiated calm, but underneath it, I sensed something vast and old and utterly foreign.
"Ileh Park," she said. Her voice was pleasant, musical almost. "I've been looking for you."
My mother was upstairs. The house was quiet. I should have been terrified.
Instead, I felt a strange sense of inevitability.
"Who are you?"
"My name is Kai Mara. I'm a representative of the Isles of Dreams." She gestured to the chair across from her. "Please. Sit. We have much to discuss."
I sat, my legs moving on autopilot.
"The Isles of Dreams," I repeated. "I've never heard of them."
"Most people haven't. They exist... between places. In the spaces most people don't look. But you've seen them now, haven't you? The spaces between."
My hands trembled. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes, you do." Her smile was kind but firm. "You called out, and something answered. Three men died in ways that shouldn't be possible. And now you're wondering what you've done. What you've become. Whether you're going mad."
"Am I?"
"No. You're waking up." She leaned forward. "Magic is real, Ileh. Not the kind from storybooks. Not wands and spells and neat categories. Real magic. Raw magic. The kind that existed before humans gave it names and rules. The kind that answers desperate prayers and makes the impossible possible."
"That's not real. That can't be real."
"And yet three people died the exact way you wished them to die, in the exact moment you needed them to die. Coincidence?" She tilted her head. "Or something listening in the dark?"
I couldn't speak. Couldn't deny it. Because she was right.
"What you felt that night," Kai continued, "was the raw force of magic responding to genuine, desperate need. You touched something old. Something that exists outside the normal rules of reality. And it touched you back."
"Why? Why me?"
"Because you were desperate enough. Open enough. Because in that moment, you meant what you said, you would give anything, become anything. And that kind of truth, that kind of absolute surrender to need... magic recognizes it. Responds to it."
She pulled out a card, elegant, black, with silver writing that seemed to shift in the light.
"The Isles of Dreams is a place for people like you. People who've touched magic. People who exist now in that space between the world everyone else sees and the world that really is."
"What have I become?"
"Someone with potential. Someone who called out into the dark and found something calling back. What you do with that... that's up to you."
She stood, placing the card on the table.
"Think about it. The address on that card will take you to one of our recruiting offices. They're scattered around the world, hidden in plain sight. When you're ready, if you're ready, come find us."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you'll live the rest of your life knowing magic is real, knowing you touched something impossible, and having no way to understand or control it. You'll feel it constantly, that sense that reality isn't quite what it seems. That sense that you're standing on the edge of something vast and unknowable. It will drive you slowly mad. Or..." She paused at the kitchen door, "you can learn what you are. What you did. And maybe, eventually, find some measure of peace."
"I killed three people."
"Yes. You did." No judgment in her voice. Just fact. "And now you have to decide what kind of person you want to be in the aftermath. Someone who runs from what they've done? Or someone who tries to understand it, control it, maybe even make meaning from it?"
She was gone before I could respond. Simply not there anymore. Like she'd never existed.
The card remained on the table.
I picked it up with shaking hands.
The Isles of Dreams
Where Impossible Things Learn Their Names
And beneath it, an address in a city I'd never heard of.