The morning doesn't come -it just drags itself across the horizonlike a tired ghost trying not to wake.
I step into the hallway,and the floorboards groan like they rememberevery time I've ever run from myself.
Flame isn't here.Her absence is loud.It's the kind of quiet that twists your stomachand makes your chest ache,like something's waiting just out of sight.
I remember her words from yesterday:"Even the dark has a heartbeat."But the heartbeat I hear nowisn't hers.
It's mine.Fast. Uneven. Erratic.A drum of panic that pounds through my veins.
The walls are whispering again.Not in words, not yet,but in a feeling I can't name:a presence curling around my ankles,pressing cold into my spine.
I try to tell myself it's nothing -just shadows,just the remnants of last night's storm.
But storms don't leave this kind of quiet behind.
The mirror at the end of the hall catches my reflection,and for a second, I don't recognize the person staring back.The eyes are mine - wide, anxious, alive -but the shape of my fearsits in my jaw, in the way my hands shake.
I take a breath.I tell myself I can walk past it.I tell myself I'm not a coward.
The air shivers.A draft brushes my ear like fingertipsthat weren't there a second ago.
I freeze.I hear it -not the whispers, not the walls,but a voice beneath them,soft, low, coaxing,like it's been waiting for me to notice.
"You can't run," it says.
I swallow.The voice doesn't belong to me.It doesn't belong to Flame.It doesn't belong to anyone I know.
It belongs to the storm.
And I realize:I've been waiting for the storm to speak.But now it's awake.
I step forward anyway.My shoes scrape the floor, a timid drumbeatagainst the rhythm of the dark.Every step echoes too loudly,yet I can't stop.
There's a door at the end of the hall.It wasn't there yesterday.I'm sure of it.
And now it is.
The keyhole glares at me like an eye,watching, judging, daring me to enter.
I reach for the knob.The metal is ice-cold against my palm.
The voice hums again,closer this time,inside my head,inside my chest:
"You are the silence before the hailestorm..."
And just like that,I know:nothing will be the same after this door.
I open it.