Lio fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep huddled against the cold earth, the words of the woman with two shadows chasing him into the dark. Walking in a circle. Different faces. Always the same girl. He woke with a gut wrenching lurch, the kind that happens when you dream you are falling. But it wasn't the impact that shocked him; it was the softness of his own bed.
He lay perfectly still, his eyes wide in the dim light of his room. He knew the cracks in his ceiling, the exact way the damp had stained the wallpaper into the shape of a drowning man. He knew the salty, rotten wood smell of his own home. And he knew, with a dread that was colder and sharper than any fog, the sound that was echoing from downstairs. It was the slow, rhythmic drip… drip… drip… of water striking the linoleum in the kitchen. The house's failing heartbeat.
"No," he breathed, the word a small puff of steam in the cold air. It was a dream. It had to be. The journey, the compass, the living map, the plate in the garden, the Hollow's empty eyes, the woman by the fire… it was all an elaborate, week long nightmare. The relief that thought should have brought was thin and unconvincing. He could still feel the phantom ache in his mind where the Hollow had feasted, the memory of his mother speaking a word of power, the weight of the woman's prophecy.
He swung his legs out of bed. His bare feet met not a solid, dry floor, but a damp, creaking floorboard that gave slightly under his weight. He walked out of his room, his movements stiff and robotic. He passed the faded photograph of his grandparents on the wall, the same one he'd mourned leaving behind. He reached the top of the stairs and looked down.
The scene below stole the air from his lungs. It was a perfect recreation. The ground floor was filmed with a shallow, shimmering layer of seawater. And in the middle of it, at the kitchen table, sat his father. Ira was hunched over his collection of antique maps, his shoulders tight with the same frantic energy.
Lio descended the stairs, each step a descent into a fresh layer of hell.
"It's no good," Ira muttered, his voice a low, familiar growl of frustration. He jabbed at a map with his charcoal stick. "This inlet wasn't here at sunrise. It's moving faster."
From the corner of the room, Mina looked up from a spiral of shells she was arranging. Her gaze was fixed on a point just to Lio's left. "He says the floor is thirsty," she whispered.
And there, by the stove, stood his mother, her back to the room, her hands plunged into a bucket of murky water, methodically scrubbing a single, grime caked pan.
It was all the same. Every single, horrifying detail. The world hadn't just reset; it had rewound.
"We've done this already," Lio said, his voice cracking.
Three heads turned to look at him. They didn't see a fellow prisoner of a nightmare; they saw a boy who looked pale and wild eyed.
"Done what, son?" Ira asked, his frustration softening into paternal concern. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"We left," Lio insisted, stepping into the cold water on the floor, the shock of it doing nothing to wake him from this reality. "Yesterday. We left. We walked for days. We found my compass under a root. Your maps—they came alive. We met a woman with two shadows. A Hollow attacked us!"
He was shouting by the end, his words frantic and nonsensical. His father's face clouded with worry. "Lio, you've had a bad dream. The dampness… it's giving you a fever."
"No!" Lio turned to his mother, desperate. "You know! You used the map, you spoke to it—"
Sera turned from the sink, her hands dripping. Her face held a deep, bottomless sadness, but no recognition. It was the same haunted, distant look from before. The look of a woman who knew too much to be surprised, but not enough—or perhaps too much—to intervene. She looked at him with pity, as if he were the one who was truly lost.
The final, crushing weight of his isolation settled on him. They didn't remember. He was alone in the loop.
Then, the final, cruellest turn of the screw. He remembered the catalyst, the event that had spurred their first departure. As if reading from a script he'd just been handed, Lio blurted out, "I had a dream."
His own words sounded alien to him now, a memory of a memory. But they had the same effect. His father's attention sharpened.
"I dreamed our house was already gone," Lio recited, the words tasting like ash. "I was swimming where we're standing now… your maps were like pale fish, drifting in the dark."
A grim relief washed over Ira's face, exactly as it had before. He stood up, splashing water. "That's it," he declared, his voice a low promise. "We have to leave. Today."
Lio watched, helpless, as the scene played out, a spectator at his own life. Sera turned, her expression unchanged, her role immutable.
"The Rising Lands, then," she said.
His family began the process of leaving all over again. For them, it was a moment of decision, of fear and desperate hope. For Lio, it was the slamming of a prison door. He was trapped not by sinking land or rising water, but by time itself. He looked at the faces of his family—people who were no longer just his family, but his unknowing co stars in a tragedy they were doomed to repeat. And as he picked up his satchel to depart, he understood. This wasn't a departure. It was just the beginning. Again.