Clara was gone.
The moment 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 moment 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 frame 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 perimeter.
But I didn't wait.
I stepped forward, pressed my palm against the wood.
It bent inward—like breath against glass—and let me through.
***
The world twisted the second I passed through.
It wasn't a house anymore. It wasn't anything real. Time 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 someone had tried to stitch together broken seconds and failed.
Something whispered along the edge of my hearing. Not swords. Not breath. Just pressure shaped like guilt. The same 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 remembering.
Then I felt it.
Clara's thread.
Faint. Shaking. But still tethered.
It pulled me 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 shimmered 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. Became sobs. Became silence. My pulse slowed with every step, but my feet moved anyway. The corridor breathed beneath me.
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 something 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 become water. Her eyes were wide, fixed on something 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 something.
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 me.
"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 reformed. 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 someone abandoned.
Not fighting.
Just remembering.
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 memory that didn't belong to me.
"Clara!" I shouted.
She turned.
Her eyes found mine.
Then—
The girl stepped forward.
And time 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 remember too much."
"Remember what?" I asked.
But the moment 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 me," she whispered. "All of you… but you… yours hurt most."
Clara collapsed to her knees.
Tears streamed down her face. She wasn't crying. She just couldn't hold the weight anymore.
The girl lifted her hand again.
This time, 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 lifetimes—thin, fragile, fractured, still reaching. A thread that was never meant to be cut. Remembered only by grief.
Then the house screamed.
And everything went white.
The sound tore through me 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 me. Why can't she remember?"
I moved toward them, the weight of memory pressing against my ribs.
But time cracked again.
And this time, I saw it from outside.
The thread between them flared.
The girl smiled.
And the world began to burn.