Lio awoke with a violent, shuddering gasp, his heart hammering against his ribs as if trying to escape his chest. He was tangled in his bedsheets, which were dry and warm, not the perpetually damp, cold blankets of his journey. The air in his lungs was clean, carrying the scent of cut grass from outside, not the cloying smell of salt and decay. He sat bolt upright, his eyes wide, frantically scanning the room.
It was his room. His real room. The walls were solid, adorned with posters of constellations and old world explorers. Sunlight, real, warm, yellow sunlight, streamed through a clean window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. Outside, a bird was singing.
It was a dream. The whole, epic, life long nightmare—the sinking house, the living maps, the Hollows, the Garden of Repeats, the fall of the sky, the sacrifice of his mother, the memory of his sister who never was—all of it had been a dream. A wave of relief so profound it felt like a physical blow washed over him, and he collapsed back onto his pillow, his body trembling with the aftermath of terrors that had only existed in his mind.
He lay there for a long time, letting the sounds of a normal world stitch his sanity back together. He could hear the distant, familiar hum of morning traffic. He could hear his mother humming a cheerful, off key tune in the kitchen downstairs.
The sound of his mother's humming spurred him into action. He threw off the covers and ran from his room, his bare feet thudding on solid, dry floorboards. He took the stairs two at a time, bursting into the sunlit living room.
And there they were. His family. Whole.
His father, Ira, sat at the dining table, not a broken man cradling a bleeding map, but a confident, energetic scholar.
He was surrounded by beautiful, pristine charts, a magnifying glass in one hand, making notes with a fountain pen. He looked up as Lio entered, a smile on his face. "There's my sleepy boy! You'll never guess what the latest deep earth scans are showing."
His mother, Sera, came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron. She was vibrant and smiling, her eyes held no ancient sorrow, only a gentle concern for her son. "Lio, you look like you've seen a ghost. Are you alright, sweetheart?"
And then he saw her. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by colorful building blocks, was Mina. She was nine years old, her hair in pigtails, her face bright and alive. She was real. She looked up at him and gave him a gap toothed grin.
"Lio!" she said cheerfully. "Look what I built!"
He rushed to her, falling to his knees and pulling her into a fierce hug. She was solid and warm in his arms. He could feel the living, breathing beat of her heart against his chest. He started to cry, deep, ragged sobs of a man who had mourned her loss a thousand times in a hundred different ways.
"Whoa, easy there," his father laughed. "It's just a bad dream, son."
Later, after he had calmed down, after his mother had plied him with orange juice and toast, he tried to explain the dream. He spoke of a sinking world and a man in the water, of a shining plateau and a house that was a tomb. The words sounded like madness in the bright, cheerful kitchen. His parents exchanged worried glances, ultimately dismissing it as a feverish nightmare brought on by too many late nights reading his father's old, fantastical exploration journals.
Lio wanted to believe them. He desperately wanted to let it go, to file it away as the worst dream a boy had ever had. He was sitting at the table, watching Mina play, when he saw the news report on the small kitchen television.
The headline read: Unprecedented Global Tremors Baffle Scientists; Some Dub Phenomenon 'The Earth's Pulse'.
A cold dread, familiar and absolute, began to seep into Lio's bones. He looked over at his father's desk. Ira was looking at a complex geological scan on his computer screen. It showed a massive, branching fissure deep within the planet's core. Scrawled on a notepad next to the monitor was a name Ira had jotted down for this new formation.
The Vein.
Lio felt the world tilt under him once more. He looked at Mina. She was humming to herself as she played. On her left hand, forgotten and innocuous, was a single, red woolen mitten. She'd refused to take it off all week, even though it was summer, claiming her hand felt cold without it.
It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a memory of a past life. It was a warning. A detailed, perfect, and horrific prophecy of the world that was coming for them. The entire journey, every death, every choice, was a vision of the future that awaited them if he did nothing.
He was no longer just Lio, a fifteen year old boy. He was a survivor of a war that hadn't happened yet. He looked at his happy, unsuspecting family, and his heart filled with a fierce, terrifying resolve. The dream had shown him the loop. It had shown him the rules of the prison. His task was not to break a cycle that already existed, but to stop it from ever beginning. The journey was not over. It had just been given a new, desperate starting point. And he, a boy with the ancient eyes of a man who had already seen the end of the world, was the only one who knew it.
Season 1 end