God's Blessing is a Curse Chapter 39: What Was Left Behind, V

It started with a shadow.

I saw him for the first ti near the river—just beyond the trees that lined the walking path. A man in a dark coat, shoulders squared, watching the water. He stood so still, it was as if the landscape had shaped itself around him. I slowed my pace, drawn by the presence before I even understood what I was seeing.

When I looked back, he was gone.

No sound. No Motion. Just absence, sudden and complete.

I dismissed it as nothing. A passerby. A trick of light. My own thoughts making patterns where there were none. But the stillness stayed with , like sothing left behind in the shape of that pace.

The next day, I saw him again. Near the university gates. Leaning slightly against the iron railing, his face obscured by the low tilt of his coat collar. The crowd passed without noticing him.

This ti, he wasn't looking at the river.

He was looking at .

***

I didn't say anything to Eberhardt. I didn't write it in my journal. I wasn't sure what it was yet.

Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe I was beginning to see what I wasn't supposed to. My thoughts had grown less linear since I returned. The dreams shaper. The hours between sunrise and sunset heavier. Even my handwriting had begun to change—more rigid, more deliberate, as if soone else were finishing my sentence when I wasn't looking.

He never approached . Never followed close. But I always knew when he was near. My skin would tighten. My vision would narrow. Conversations around would slip into the background haze.

He stayed at the edges. Just far enough to notice—but never far enough to forget.

Once, I tried to walk toward him. Through the crowd, across the square. My legs moved without full command, drawn by sothing beneath language. But by the ti I reached the place he had been, the air was empty.

I stood there, breath caught in my throat, scanning windows, alleyways, doors.

Nothing.

And yet I knew—he had seen .

***

I began watching for him without aning to. Every street corner, every reflection. In storefront windows, in the polished backs of tram seats, in the blurred edge of a passing crowd. Not out of fear. Sothing else.

Sothing like recognition.

He wasn't threatening. But he wasn't natural either. There was weight in the way he stood—like he had decided sothing I hadn't. Like he knew , and was waiting for to rember why.

And then things began to shift again.

It started with small anomalies—too small to ntion aloud, but too precise to ignore. A folded page on my pillow I hadn't placed there—an old note from my journal I had thought lost, now marked with a crease I never made.

A warning scribbled in the corner of my lecture notes:

Don't go back.

I hadn't written it. But the handwriting was mine. Not just the style—the tilt of the 't's, the spacing between the 'a' and 'c', the tight curve of the 'g'. It was unmistakably mine.

Books I hadn't borrowed appeared stacked on my desk. All on subjects I'd recently thought about but never spoken aloud. mory theory. Temporal awareness. Dissociation through repetitive cycles.

My door, which I always locked twice, clicked once in the middle of the night. Not with force. With intent.

I didn't sleep after that.

***

On the fifth day, I followed him.

I saw him standing at the far end of a tram platform, half-turned. Coat collar pulled high, head low. He boarded without urgency. I stepped into the next car.

I didn't know where he was going.

We passed the market. The rail yard. A stretch of crumbling industry that had not recovered since the last panic. He disembarked just before the final stop.

I followed.

Snow had started to fall—slow, thin flakes drifting down with little weight. The man walked ahead of , never looking back,yet never pulling far enough ahead to lose.

We ca to the edge of the city. Then past it.

By the ti I realized where we were, the tram was long gone.

He stepped into the ruins of what had once been a chapel—its roof half-collapsed, its stone walls crooked with frost. I crossed the threshold a minute later.

But the chapel was empty.

Just stone. Silence. And the sound of distant bells that didn't belong to any clock nearby.

I turned to leave.

There was a note folded beneath my boot.

"You're not supposed to be here yet."