Clara was gone.
The mont she passed through the threshold, the house had swallowed her.
The air still shivered from the rupture. A low hum lingered in the snow around us, like the mont hadn't fully settled. My legs were already moving.
Konrad tried to follow, but the doorway rippled and snapped shut like a breath caught mid-sentence. His hand hit the fra and recoiled—burned.
"She's inside," I said. I could feel it—through the thread. Weak, but pulsing. Twisted. Like it was trying to reach out through water.
"We'll find another way," Konrad said, already scanning the periter.
But I didn't wait.
I stepped forward, pressed my palm against the wood.
It bent inward—like breath against glass—and let through.
***
The world twisted the second I passed through.
It wasn't a house anymore. It wasn't anything real. Ti felt folded, like it had been drawn through itself. My boots touched solid floor, but my steps echoed too far, too slow.
The walls breathed. Doors blinked open, then closed again without hinges. Shadows shifted like they were watching. The ceiling pulsed with threads of light—tangled and frayed, as if soone had tried to stitch together broken seconds and failed.
Sothing whispered along the edge of my hearing. Not swords. Not breath. Just pressure shaped like guilt. The sa kind I felt when I looked at Clara and didn't know how to help her.
I moved forward.
The hallway bent as I walked. Turned back on itself. The windows on either side flickered between seasons—winter, spring, winter again. In one, I saw a reflection that wasn't mine. It's eyes were wrong. Hollow and rembering.
Then I felt it.
Clara's thread.
Faint. Shaking. But still tethered.
It pulled left, through a wall that wasn't there a second ago. I passed into another corridor—this one longer, darker. Paper lanterns flickered overhead, swaying in a wind I couldn't feel. Symbols I couldn't read shimred on the walls, written in ink that bled slowly down like tears.
A child's laughter rang out ahead.
Mockery.
I pressed forward.
The laughter split, echoed, broke apart. Beca sobs. Beca silence. My pulse slowed with every step, but my feet moved anyway. The corridor breathed beneath .
Then a door appeared. Wooden. Heavy. With a handle shaped like a broken thread spool.
I reached for it.
The door dissolved.
And behind it—
A field of stars.
Just for a second. Then nothing. The image gone.
I stumbled through.
The space inside was shifting between rooms. A dormitory. A garden. A hallway of paper walls. Each blink showed sothing different. None of it real. Or maybe all of it was. Just not now.
Clara stood in the center of a room that wasn't. It pulsed with light—walls reshaping every second. The floor was a ripple, like stone trying to beco water. Her eyes were wide, fixed on sothing I couldn't yet see. Her hands trembled at her sides. Her thread pulsed—but it was warped, frayed by grief.
"Clara!" I called.
She didn't move.
Then she whispered sothing.
I barely caught it.
"I know her."
A figure stood across from her.
Small.
Draped in too much coat. Buttons mismatched. Collar too high.
Face hidden behind strands of hair and a shadow that shouldn't have been there.
It didn't move at first. Just watched her.
Then it turned.
Toward .
"It's all your fault." it said.
Its voice didn't echo. It unmade sound around it.
Then the world broke again.
The ceiling tore upward like paper. The walls twisted. The ground beneath my boots dissolved and reford. I stepped back instinctively.
Clara gasped—like she had been holding her breath for minutes.
The girl raised a hand.
Clara flinched.
A pulse of threadlight erupted between them, and for a second I saw both of them illuminated—Clara caught in anguish, the girl frozen in the posture of soone abandoned.
Not fighting.
Just rembering.
Everything felt like it was about to collapse again.
I reached for Clara.
My hand passed through air that resisted. Like trying to push through mory that didn't belong to .
"Clara!" I shouted.
She turned.
Her eyes found mine.
Then—
The girl stepped forward.
And ti bled sideways.
The ground tilted. The corridor blinked into a stone path through falling leaves. Then firelight. Then snowfall again. Clara's expression flickered between recognition and confusion. She tried to speak but her voice caught.
"She can't speak," the girl said. "If she speaks, you'll rember too much."
"Rember what?" I asked.
But the mont fractured.
I was standing in the ruins of a temple, and then in a street of fog, and then in the hallway again. I stumbled, braced against a wall that wasn't stable.
Clara began to tremble.
The girl stepped closer to her now.
"You abandoned ," she whispered. "All of you... but you... yours hurt most."
Clara collapsed to her knees.
Tears stread down her face. She wasn't crying. She just couldn't hold the weight anymore.
The girl lifted her hand again.
This ti, the pulse between them cracked the space around.
Then I saw the thread connecting them—
A tether that was never supposed to be broken.
A bond stretched across lifetis—thin, fragile, fractured, still reaching. A thread that was never ant to be cut. Rembered only by grief.
Then the house scread.
And everything went white.
The sound tore through like a blade through water—no blood, only distortion. The room bent outward, collapsed inward, and reassembled in wrong order.
I lost sight of Clara.
For one terrifying breath, I thought she was gone.
Then—
A flicker of threadlight sparked in the distance.
And the girl said—softly, "She still loves . Why can't she rember?"
I moved toward them, the weight of mory pressing against my ribs.
But ti cracked again.
And this ti, I saw it from outside.
The thread between them flared.
The girl smiled.
And the world began to burn.
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