It was wrong.
The moment I regained consciousness.
Everything was wrong.
I couldn't feel the ground. Couldn't feel my body. Just cold—soaked deep into me, like it had always been there and I'd only now noticed. The silence wasn't silence. It was pressure. Crushing and steady, like water against glass.
I tried to breathe.
Nothing.
Not air. Not sound. Just… stillness.
I opened my mouth. "Hello—"
No voice came out. My lips moved. My throat worked. But the sound didn't exist. I wasn't sure I existed.
Shapes swam in the dark around me. Colors without names. Hints of things I couldn't quite see: a doorknob. A cracked tile. The hallway from when I was eight. My father's shadow stretched across the floor.
"No."
I didn't want to be here. Wherever here was.
I jerked forward—tried to move, run, scream. Something. But my limbs responded like they belonged to someone else. The space moved instead. Tilted. Flexed around me like muscle.
The hallway appeared again.
Long. Endless. The carpet stained the exact way I remembered it. My breath caught before I could stop it.
I'd walked this hallway every night. Quiet. Careful. Praying the floor wouldn't creak. Praying I wouldn't hear his door open behind me.
I heard it now.
Click.
My entire being gasped.
The hallway stretched further. Shadows ran up the walls. There was light spilling out from the door at the end—but it flickered violently. The sound of static built up behind my ears, like someone had jammed metal against a wire.
Then I saw him.
Not fully. Just the outline. But I knew.
He stepped into the hallway without a face—just that belt in one hand and the sound of breathing too loud to be human.
"No—no, no, no—" I backed away. I couldn't stop saying it. "This isn't real.
This isn't—"
Something cold gripped my ankle.
I looked down. A hand. Pale. Clawlike. Fingers curled up through the floor.
Another one dragged across my ribs.
I screamed.
But again—no sound came. My throat burned. My chest seized.
Behind me, a voice.
"Still trying to escape?"
Hers. But twisted now. Split with something lower. Hungrier.
"You remember what it felt like, don't you? You never really left."
Pain spiked through my chest again—sharp and sudden like the stab all over again—but deeper now. Spreading up my spine like wire being threaded through bone.
The hallway folded inward.
The world snapped—
(Silence. Then breath. Then noise.)
I was still screaming when I woke—
the sound finally real, tearing from my throat and vanishing into the air like it didn't belong.
My hands clawed at a floor I didn't recognize—rough, uneven. Cold.
My heartbeat thundered in my ears. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see.
Everything was dim, lit by something pale and flickering above me. Not
fluorescent.
Not the store.
I wasn't there anymore.
I curled forward on instinct, gasping, choking on air like it had weight. My
chest felt bruised, my ribs screaming.
I stayed there, hunched and shaking, until I remembered how to move.
Then I looked up.
And realized…
I had no fucking idea where I was.
The ground beneath me felt like dry soil—solid but brittle, as if it would
flake apart if I pressed too hard. Cold clung to my skin, even though no wind moved.
I forced myself upright, gasping, and finally looked around.
I was standing on a flat stretch of land—bare, colorless earth broken by old roots and scattered stones. It was the size of a village. Big enough to walk across in an hour. Small enough that I could see every rise, every dead tree, every jagged curve along the edge.
It wasn't infinite.
I could see where the ground stopped—where it dropped off clean into the void. A sharp, perfect edge wrapped the land like the rim of a plate. Beyond it: stars. Cold, unmoving, scattered across an impossible sky.
No buildings.
No paths.
Just silence.
I stood there, breathing in the stillness. My chest still ached where she'd stabbed me. No blood. No mark. But the pain was there. Not physical now—just deep. Remembered.
I turned in a slow circle.
There was no horizon. No sun. No movement in the sky. Only that darkness, full of stars. And it felt like they were watching.
"Where the hell am I…" I said aloud.
My voice didn't echo.
It just fell.
I took a step forward. Then another. The ground held. Dust rose in little
clouds with each movement, then settled again.
I started walking, aimless but slow.
And in the silence, I realized something worse than being alone.
There were no birds.
No wind. No time.
Nothing alive.
Just me.
And the stars.
I kept walking.
Each step felt like it led nowhere. Just dry, brittle ground and a sky that
wouldn't shift. I wasn't tired, but I felt worn—like I'd been walking for hours
or years, and the weight hadn't settled in yet.
Then I saw it.
Centered in the distance.
A stone pillar. Low, waist-high. Smooth. Deliberate.
I stopped.
"That wasn't there before," I said under my breath. "I would've seen it."
But now it was here. Waiting. Like it had always been.
I stepped toward it slowly, eyes narrowing. The ground felt too even around it. Too level. Like the space had been shaped around this thing instead of the other way around.
At the top of the pillar sat a stone tablet, coated in a layer of dust.
I wiped it away.
Two words were carved into the surface—sharp, uneven, deliberate.
'Aurora's Parabola.'
I stared. My chest went tight.
"Aurora…" I repeated. The name felt heavy. Familiar in the wrong way.
I looked at the second word.
'Parabola.'
"Not a curve," I muttered. "Not here."
The meaning came slow. Buried under schoolroom definitions and half-remembered roots. Latin.
Fable.
A story. A construct. Something told to make sense of the senseless.
"Aurora's fable," I said. "A story with teeth."
I looked down.
Beneath the words, perfectly centered in the stone, was a handprint. Pressed deep. Clean. Waiting.
It matched mine exactly.
'Of course it did.'
I swallowed, my breath uneven now. My fingers twitched, like they wanted to move on their own. I clenched them into fists.
"What happens if I touch it?" I said. "Do I wake up? Or get written in?"
I stood there.
Staring.
Thinking.
The silence felt sharper now. Less like absence. More like… expectation.
I looked at my hand. Then back at the print.
"I don't want to do this."
But I already knew I would.
I raised my hand and placed it against the stone.
The fit was exact. Not almost. Exact.
Every line. Every ridge. Like the print had been made from me—before I ever got
here.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the stone warmed under my palm. Not heat—just a pulse. A slow, steady thrum, like something had been waiting for contact and was now… awake.
A sound followed.
Low. Subtle. Like wind moving through distant branches, even though there were no trees.
And then—
Light.
It started at the pillar's base and spread out like a ripple through the earth. The dust lifted. The color deepened. The cracks began to knit themselves together.
I stepped back, watching in stunned silence as the ground moved beneath my feet.
The dry creekbed that had twisted through the land filled with rushing
water—clear, real. It cut through the village-sized plain like a vein,
glittering under a sky that hadn't changed.
Structures rose slowly from the dirt—stone walls, wooden beams, thatched roofs. Homes. Stables. An old, moss-covered well. The bones of a medieval village building themselves like they'd just been remembered.
I turned in place.
Smoke began curling from chimneys.
Windows flickered with soft orange light.
There were no people.
But the world looked… lived in.
The silence remained, but it had changed. No longer vacant—now expectant. Like something just beneath the surface was waiting to see what I'd do next.
I stared at the village forming around me, the cool water running beside my feet, the stone under my hand still faintly humming.
"Aurora's fable," I whispered. "And I just turned the page."