After Lio's silent refusal of the Watcher's bargain, the world seemed to grant them a brief, deceptive reprieve. The fog thinned to a gentle haze, and they found themselves walking through a skeletal forest, the dead trees like bleached white bones against the grey sky. For the first time in a long time, the path was clear and the ground was stable. The quiet was almost peaceful. Lio knew it was a lie, but he was too weary to fight it.
He was walking a few paces behind his mother when he first heard it. A voice, carried on the still air, whispering from the dead trees to his left. It was his mother's voice—not her current, worn down tone, but the lighter, teasing voice she'd had years ago.
"Ira," the voice whispered with perfect, loving exasperation, "if you spend one more minute with those maps, I swear I'll use them as kindling."
Lio froze, his blood turning to ice. He looked up at his mother. She was still walking, her lips unmoving. She hadn't heard it. The memory was a private joke between his parents from a life long gone, a moment Lio had overheard as a small child. And something in the forest knew it.
Then, another voice joined in, this one mimicking his father's old, booming lecture tone, but with a slightly off key, theatrical flourish, like a bad actor hamming it up. "The world is built on lines, Sera! Lines! Without them, we are nothing but chaos!" From deeper in the woods, another indistinct shape seemed to applaud softly.
Lio scanned the forest, now seeing them: flickering, indistinct shapes, the familiar tall, thin silhouettes of Hollows, half hidden behind the bone white trees. They weren't attacking. They were performing.
The forest had become a stage for a grotesque play starring themselves. The whispers grew into a chorus of their family's private history, a highlight reel of domestic mundanity twisted into horror.
A gurgling, monstrous voice whined in perfect imitation of Lio as a seven year old: "But I don't WANT to eat the boiled seaweed again."
A perfect replica of Sera's tired sigh echoed from the right.
A Hollow with a flair for the dramatic declared, in Ira's voice, "A cartographer's soul is his inkwell!" a phrase so grandiose and silly his father had only ever said it once, years ago, after drinking too much berry wine.
It was a theater of the absurd. The monsters were using their memories, but not just the traumatic ones. They were using the boring, the petty, the deeply personal and embarrassing moments that made up the fabric of a family.
They were cosmic hecklers.
Then, the performance turned cruel. A voice whispered directly in Lio's ear, using his own tone, laced with the secret dread from the night before.
"I'm afraid she knows. I'm afraid mother remembers every loop."
Lio stumbled, clapping a hand to his ear. They weren't just replaying the past; they were listening to the present.
Another voice, a perfect copy of Ira's from a half forgotten argument, sliced through the air toward his mother.
"It's just water, Sera! Why are you so afraid of it?"
Sera flinched as if struck. Her face became a mask of stone. This was a violation more profound than any physical attack. This was an invasion of the soul. "Keep moving," she commanded, her voice dangerously low.
Even Ira seemed to notice, his vacant eyes showing a flicker of pained confusion as the ghosts of his own pronouncements mocked him from the trees.
Mina, however, was watching the performance with the detached air of a theater critic. She tilted her head, a small frown on her face.
"They're not very good," she said with clinical precision. "The one doing Papa is rushing it. And their timing is all wrong." She looked at the flickering shapes in the trees. "He says they're rehearsing. They think our family is very dramatic."
Her absurdly practical commentary somehow made it all worse. They finally broke free from the skeletal forest, stumbling out into the open, the cacophony of their own lives fading behind them. They were silent, each of them wrapped in the profound violation of having their most private moments stolen, curated, and performed by monsters. The Hollows didn't just steal your past; they turned it into a bad play and forced you to watch. Lio looked back at the forest of whispers and wondered what other scenes they had collected for their next matinee.