He inhaled like he hadn't done it in hours.
A long, shuddering breath that seemed to scrape against the back of his throat. The air was stale, or cold, or metallic—he couldn't tell. He didn't know how long he'd been holding it. Only that something in his chest unclenched when he did.
He stood in a hallway. Or was it a stairwell? No, the floor wasn't slanted, but it pulsed faintly beneath his feet, like it wanted to slope. The light was dim, but not in the way light dims with darkness—more like it had been deliberately faded, as if someone had tried to erase it but hadn't quite finished.
There were no windows. No clocks. No sense of when.
He exhaled, slower this time.
And kept walking.
The space was silent except for his footsteps, which didn't echo properly. They landed flat, wrong, like they weren't being acknowledged by the walls.
He didn't remember how he got here.
But he knew what he was doing.
He was looking for a key.
Not because he had a memory.
Because he had a pattern.
He'd followed it before.
The archivist.The swing.The girl.The mirror.The tree.The buried room.
All of them circled the same gravity.
And somewhere in the center—the key.
He didn't know what it opened.
Only that it was never where it was supposed to be.
He passed a door. Stopped.
It didn't look familiar, but familiarity was a lie in this place.
He reached for the knob, hesitated, then pulled his hand back.
Wrong door.
He wasn't sure how he knew. But he did.
The next corridor was narrower, slanting now.
His breath fogged in front of him.
How long had it been since he felt cold?
He pressed forward, knees aching from nothing he could name.
The space ahead seemed to bend before he reached it.
But he didn't stop.
Because somewhere out there, past the frayed corners of what this story used to be—
The key was still waiting.