---
The forest was never fully lit.
Not dark — but the light that existed came from nowhere I could point to. It simply was, spread evenly like light that knew no source, no direction, no time. The trees around me stood tall in the way trees stand when no human hand has ever touched them — their trunks wider than I could wrap my arms around, their roots rising from the ground like the bones of something enormous and very old buried beneath.
I had been here a long time. I didn't know how long.
Left. Right. Straight ahead. Everything looked the same. Everything felt the same — as though this forest had no interest in taking me anywhere, only in keeping me within it.
I stopped.
Follow the path that exists. I told myself. Every forest has an edge.
But the deeper part of me — the part that doesn't speak in sentences but in feeling — already knew.
This forest had no edge. Or if it did, it wasn't meant for me.
I lifted my head.
And it was there.
Between two large trees, at a distance not quite far but far enough that I couldn't make out its details — something stood. Upright. Two legs. Dark fur from head to base, moving slowly despite the absence of wind. Its height reached my shoulder, perhaps slightly lower — small in a way that made my mind refuse to classify it as anything. Not an animal I recognised. Not human. Something in between, something the mind resists naming because to name it is to acknowledge it exists.
Then I saw its feet.
It stood — but the soles of its feet did not fully touch the ground. It hovered, thin as paper above the earth's surface, as though the ground was unworthy of being walked upon or as though it had never learned how heavy things are supposed to land. Not flying. Not floating. Simply not touching — in a way that made something inside my chest shift to the wrong place.
It looked up.
And I saw its eyes.
Not their colour. Not their size. But the way those eyes looked at me across the distance between us — complete, patient, with something that had no good word for it in any language I knew. Eyes that were aware. Eyes that knew. Eyes that looked at me not like they had found something interesting, but like they had been waiting a long time for something that had finally arrived.
It knew me.
I did not know it.
And in that imbalance — in the feeling of being known by something you yourself do not know — there was a fear unlike any I had ever felt. Not fear of being attacked. Not fear of pain.
Fear that something knows more about you than you know about yourself.
It stepped forward.
One step. Slow. Calm. Its feet still not touching the ground — it moved like something that didn't need the earth to move, like physics was a choice and it had long chosen not to follow.
I wanted to run.
My legs didn't move.
It stepped again —
I woke up.
---
The ceiling of my room greeted my eyes.
The fan turned. The grey pre-dawn light crept in through the gaps in the curtains, carrying with it the sound of early morning birds and the neighbour's car engine starting outside — the same sound every morning, the sound that said the world was still running on its own schedule regardless of what happened in anyone's dreams.
I took a moment.
Breathe first. Then remember where I am. Then move.
A routine that had formed on its own over the past few nights — since the forest dream began returning, began arriving with more clarity each time, with trees that grew taller and stranger light and the creature that each time appeared in a different place but was always there.
Always watching.
My hand moved to my right wrist before I realised I was doing it.
The small wooden beads were beneath my fingers. Ordinary. Normal. Cool in the way objects are when they have long been kept close to someone's skin.
I had worn this bracelet for years. For years it had become like a watch — something my hand would feel wrong without but never thought about why it was there. After *Tok*'s house, after those first months of checking every corner of my room before sleeping, after that feeling slowly faded into a memory I could choose not to think about — the bracelet became ordinary.
Became background.
Became something that was there but that you didn't notice was there.
Until last night.
Last night — for the first time in years — the bracelet had gone cold in a different way. A cold that had depth to it, that came from within the beads themselves, from a place that had no anatomical name.
I recognised that cold.
I had spent years trying to forget what that cold felt like.
And it had come back on the exact same night the forest dream first arrived.
Coincidence, I told myself. Must be coincidence.
But I didn't let go of the bracelet. My fingers remained there, on the wooden beads that were warm again now, ordinary again now — and I lay in the brightening pre-dawn light and waited to feel truly awake before daring to get out of bed.
Outside the room, the smell of fried rice began pulling me back to a world where everything had a name.
---
Four years after we came back from *Tok*'s house, life had become ordinary again.
Not immediately. There was no day I could point to and say: this was the day I stopped being afraid. It happened the way old wounds lose their feeling — not healed, but the body learns to live with the scar until one day you realise you haven't thought about it in a long time.
We learned to live with the scar.
*Along* was working now — the first company didn't work out for reasons she never fully explained, and I never fully asked. Now she was weighing a new offer, a bigger company, one she had long researched and that seemed right. *Angah* had continued studying, a bit further away, came home on weekends if there was good enough reason. My younger sister was still at home, still *Mak*'s constant companion.
And I —
I was still at home. Just finished university. Sending resumes here and there. Waiting for calls that sometimes came and more often didn't. Days whose structure I built myself because if I didn't, those days would become something I didn't want to name.
Our dining table was never quiet when everyone was there.
*Angah* had come home this weekend — because *Along* wanted to share news, she'd said. News that required everyone at the same table was usually not small news. My younger sister was the first to the table, as always. *Ayah* with his newspaper. *Mak* who knew everything about everyone but chose her moment to show it.
"*Along*," said *Mak* without looking up from her plate, "is it still happening tomorrow?"
*Along* smiled — the smile of someone holding onto something good, whose time was nearly here. "It's happening."
"That face of yours." *Angah* pointed with her spoon. "Haven't seen that face in a while."
"What face?"
"The not-a-mess face."
Laughter broke at the table. Small, brief, genuine — the kind that required no effort.
*Along* set down her spoon. "*Along* got a new job offer. The one I mentioned — big company, the work scope fits my degree, the pay makes sense." She paused for a moment. "But the office is a bit far. I'd need to stay in that area for now."
"How far?" asked *Ayah*.
"About an hour or so."
*Mak* nodded slowly. Her eyes lit with something deeper than simple happiness — something that only exists in a person who has long been waiting for their eldest child to receive something they truly deserve.
I laughed along with them — and this time it wasn't forced. There was something in this moment that felt like the first breath after holding it in too long. Normal. We were truly normal right now, and I wanted to sit in this moment for as long as I could before something disturbed it.
*Mak* saw me laugh for real. I saw her see it.
*Ayah* saw it too — he didn't say anything, only folded his newspaper and set it aside, but his eyes held something I couldn't fully read before he looked away. Not worry. Not relief.
Something in between. Something *Ayah* kept in a way that was different from how others kept things — not because he didn't want to share, but because he was waiting for the right moment.
The right moment for *Ayah* always came in its own way.
---
That night, after *Isyak*, *Mak* knocked on my bedroom door.
"Come to *Mak*'s room for a bit."
I followed her into the room that smelled of her — the particular scent of someone who had inhabited the same space for decades, layered into the walls and the curtains and the air itself. She sat on the edge of the bed. I sat beside her.
On the floor, two boxes.
One I recognised — the old wooden box that had always been in the corner of her wardrobe, that I had been curious about since I was small but had never been brave enough to ask about. The other was newer. Cardboard. Closed.
*Mak* opened the wooden box.
Inside — fabric. Old batik, folded carefully. And beneath it, things that had weight without being heavy: a small journal, its cover worn. A photograph, edges yellowed. A ring, silver, simple.
*Tok Wan*'s things.
*Mak* began to speak.
She talked about *Tok Wan* — about who he was before illness, about what he left behind, about the ring that had been his and that had come to us in a way she didn't fully explain that evening. She spoke slowly, choosing her words the way a person chooses which door to open and which to leave closed.
But there was something *Mak* wasn't saying.
I could see it — in the small pauses between sentences, in the way her eyes occasionally dropped to the second box before she looked back at me, in the way her lips moved for a moment before she chose a different word from the one that first came.
There was something she told just enough of. Something she kept for a time she herself would determine.
"But *Aina*." *Mak* held my hand at the end of her telling, her fingers pressing gently over the bracelet — as though she wanted to confirm it was still there, still intact. "Don't ever trust this thing more than you trust Allah. The bracelet is only a means. The one who truly protects us — only Him."
I nodded.
*Mak* nodded back.
And in that exchange I saw something released — a little, but not all. Like someone opening the window of a long-closed room, not fully, just enough for a little air to enter. Not because she didn't want to. But because there were things that needed to come in slowly so they wouldn't shatter what was already inside.
Her eyes fell once more to the second box.
Then she looked up. "Getting sleepy. Go to bed."
The second box was not opened.
But the way *Mak* looked at it before turning away — one moment, no more — as though there was something inside that she herself wasn't ready to bring out. Or perhaps wasn't ready for me to receive.
I didn't know which was heavier to carry back to my room.
---
I slept late that night.
And the dream came again — the same as the nights before, but deeper, more real, with details that grew sharper each time as though something was learning how to reach me more precisely.
The same forest. Light without a source. Trees too old to care about a human presence.
This time the creature was closer.
It stood behind a tree trunk — half hidden, half not — the soles of its feet still not touching the ground, still hovering thin as paper above the earth's surface in a way my mind couldn't get used to no matter how many times I saw it. Its eyes looked at me from within the dark in the same way. Patient. Complete.
Waiting.
I didn't run this time.
For some reason that night I didn't run — whether because I was tired, or because the deeper part of me already knew that running changed nothing in a forest with no edge.
We only looked at each other in the sourceless light, in the forest with no way out, in a dream that felt more real than it should.
Then the bracelet at my wrist —
went cold.
A cold with depth. The cold of an old well that has stored the dark chill of years within it.
And I woke for the second time that night with breath suspended in my chest and a hand already reaching for the bracelet before my eyes could focus on the ceiling.
This time the cold didn't disappear immediately.
It remained — slow, deep, like something that had just woken after a long sleep, after a long wait for reason enough to wake.
I sat in the dark of my room and waited for it to feel ordinary again.
It took longer than the night before.
---
The next morning, the house was full of familiar sounds.
*Along* packed her bag with the systematic efficiency of someone who had been thinking about this for a long time. *Angah* searched for a charger that had been missing for two days. My younger sister sat on the stairs watching everyone with the face of someone who had nowhere to be and was happy about it.
"*Aina*! Open the door!" *Ayah* from the kitchen. "The bell rang just now!"
I came down the stairs, past my younger sister who asked who was there, and walked to the front door without thinking much about it.
The door opened.
Morning light rushed in, full, without warning.
And beyond that light —
a man stood at the door of my house.
Tall. His shoulders set in a way that required no effort. His complexion clear in a way that made the morning light fall on him differently from ordinary people — as though the light knew where to go, as though it had memorised this face. His face had something in the arrangement of its features that made my eyes not know where to stop, that made my mind lose its usual rhythm for a moment.
He smiled.
Calm. Controlled. The smile of someone who was not surprised to see who opened the door — as though he already knew. As though this was something he had imagined and reality was only now catching up.
"*Assalamualaikum*." His voice was low, with a depth that didn't impose but was there. "Sorry to disturb so early in the morning. We just moved in next door."
Behind him, a small lorry was being unloaded. In the yard of the neighbouring house — the house that had been empty for almost a year, that I had grown used to seeing dark every night — a middle-aged woman stood looking in the direction of our house.
Her eyes met mine.
Her expression — I didn't get to read it fully before she looked away. But there was something in the way she looked, in the small pause before she chose not to continue that gaze, that made the back of my neck feel as though there was a wind that wasn't there.
I opened my mouth to return the greeting.
But the man — his eyes moved. Briefly. Barely noticeable unless you were already watching.
From my face to the house behind me.
Not like someone looking at a new neighbour's house for the first time. Not the look of someone who was curious. The look of someone taking stock — confirming something he already knew, marking something in his mind that had nothing to do with a new neighbour's introduction.
A look that passed in less than a second.
A look I wasn't sure I truly saw or had simply imagined, too tired from last night's dream to think straight.
Just a feeling, probably.
Then his eyes returned to mine and his smile didn't change — still calm, still controlled, still like someone who knew more than he was showing.
The bracelet at my wrist went cold.
Not the usual cold.
A cold with depth — the same cold as in the dream just now, the same cold as last night, the same cold I had tried to forget for four years and had almost managed to.
Why now.
Why him.
"*Waalaikumussalam*." My voice came out — I hoped it sounded ordinary. "New neighbour—"
"Zayriel." He extended his hand. His smile didn't change. "Zayriel Meerqeen."
In a name I was hearing for the first time but that felt like something I had heard somewhere I couldn't remember, at a time I couldn't point to —
I thought of the dream.
The forest with no edge.
The small dark-furred creature — feet that didn't touch the ground, eyes that watched with the patience of something that knew it didn't need to rush.
And the cold that came when it was too close.
The exact same cold that was at my wrist now.
Exactly.
I took his hand.
I smiled.
And the deepest part of me — the part that doesn't speak in sentences but in feeling, that had known since just now but couldn't prove anything — had already begun to count.
One.
The first step.
Just like in the dream.
— END OF CHAPTER 1 —