The handle didn't turn.
Of course it didn't.
He stood there for several seconds, staring at it, almost as if willing the metal to soften under his grip. But the door didn't move. It pulsed with significance—like the space beyond it mattered—but the key was missing.
His heart was still. His breath measured.
But something beneath the surface began to shake.
There was a silence inside him that no longer wanted to stay silent.
He stepped back, hand falling to his side.
And the memory came like a wave breaking open behind his eyes.
Not of childhood.
Not of family.
But of this.
This corridor. This room. That tree.
That girl.
The letters.
The envelope with trembling ink.The mirror, first covered, then not.The pain in his skull.The question he kept asking: "Where am I?"
He remembered the time he wandered aimlessly through liminal spaces, rooms bleeding into each other, forgetting with every step.He remembered the chapter that repeated but with different details.He remembered sitting at the swing with her—laughing, before the dread came.
He remembered falling through the ground like it was gravity's will.He remembered the Archivist and his tired eyes."You're not the author," the Archivist had said."But you're changing the story."
He remembered the letter that warned him: "Don't trust the swing."
He remembered waking up without knowing his own name.He remembered writing the letter in the first chapter.He remembered watching himself forget that he wrote it.
His knees buckled.
He sank to the floor, palms on the cold stone, the room spinning even though nothing moved.
All of them—every version of him—rushed in at once.
The calm, the confused, the broken, the hopeful.
Every emotion layered on top of itself like smeared ink on a page reread too many times.
One thought rose through the noise:
The tree.
Yes.
There had been a tree. A tall, gnarled thing. Its roots stretched deep into the soil of some forgotten courtyard. He had been there. He'd reached under it. His hands had come back with dirt under his nails.
There had been something underneath.
Something small.
Hard.
Shaped like—
He stood.
No hesitation.
He knew where to go.
Not because he had been told. But because he had lived it, again and again, just never in the right order.
But now, finally, something in him was starting to thread itself together.
The key wasn't just real.
It was waiting for him.