There was no name exchanged.
No formal greeting.
Just silence—and the strange kind of understanding that doesn't need words.
Kael stood across from the girl on the rooftop. The city stretched beneath them, humming with digital life, but up here… it felt distant. Like the world belonged to someone else.
"You're late," she said casually, not looking at him.
Kael raised a brow. "I wasn't coming."
"Exactly." She smiled faintly. "But here you are."
She called herself Sera.
No last name. No explanation.
She didn't explain why she was waiting.
Or how she knew he'd show up.
Kael didn't ask.
Something in her presence made it clear that asking would be pointless.
She'd only tell him what he was meant to hear.
They spoke for hours.
But very little was said.
Sera wasn't interested in his dreams, his doubt, or even the parchment he still kept locked in a drawer.
She asked him one thing:
"Do you still feel the crack?"
Kael paused.
She wasn't talking about glass.
Not really.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "When things go quiet."
"Good." She nodded. "Then you haven't dulled completely."
Kael frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means," she said, standing, "you're still capable of remembering. Even if you've already chosen to forget."
Kael didn't sleep again that night.
But this time, there were no dreams.
Only… noise.
A low hum beneath his thoughts.
Like something stirring just beyond reach.
In the days that followed, Kael saw her again.
Not often. Not predictably.
Sometimes in places that shouldn't have allowed her presence.
A rooftop. A metro tunnel. A locked building he never remembered entering.
She didn't always speak.
But each time, she left him with fragments—half-truths, cryptic phrases, memories that weren't his.
Then came the others.
Not like Sera.
Different.
One was a man who never blinked.
Another, a girl who spoke in proverbs but reacted like a soldier.
They never met together.
Only in fragments.
Like a shattered mirror slowly being reassembled.
Kael began to piece it together—not a truth, but a pattern.
He wasn't the only one who had felt the silence.
He wasn't the only one who had dreamed of things that didn't belong in this world.
But none of them had answers.
Not yet.
Only scars.
Echoes.
And that phrase…
"Question everything."
The words returned again and again, whispered through broken moments.
Once in a graffiti tag that vanished the next day.
Once from a child's voice in a crowd, lips unmoving.
Once in his own handwriting… in a notebook he never owned.
Kael began keeping track.
Symbols.
Voices.
Dreams.
But no matter how far he reached—the trail always ended in nothing.
Like someone was always one step ahead.
Covering tracks.
Severing links.
Pulling strings Kael couldn't even see.
That was when he realized something horrifying.
He was being watched again.
But this time…
whoever it was knew how to hide better than before.
Sera noticed the shift too.
"They know now," she said, eyes cold. "You've crossed a line."
Kael clenched his fists. "Then let them come."
"No." She stepped closer. "They don't come. That's not how this works."
"Then what?"
She whispered two words:
"They wait."
The world didn't change overnight.
But Kael did.
The crack wasn't just a fracture in perception anymore.
It was becoming a doorway.
And something on the other side had begun to stir.
End of Chapter 3