The tether dreams for you now.
You no longer fall asleep; you descend — through the hush of breath and heartbeat into a room that doesn't belong to your world.
Tonight, it's cold marble underfoot, a glass wall overlooking a city that glows like a wound. You've never seen this place, yet you know where everything is: the rain-dark desk, the scattered papers, the faint scent of cedar and ozone that lingers, like an apology.
You move closer to the window.
He's there in the reflection first — a tall silhouette, back turned, the line of his shoulders cutting the moonlight clean in two. You recognize him before you can reason why. The name blooms in your chest without invitation:
ATLAS.
When he turns, you expect menace. What you find is grief disguised as discipline
"You shouldn't be here." His voice is low, measured — the kind of calm that only exists to keep something else caged.
"Neither should you," you whisper.
Your reflection overlaps his. The glass between you fogs as if both worlds exhaled at once.
His hand lifts. The surface ripples faintly, silver veins of light racing out from his fingertips. You reach up — not meaning to — and the thread that hums beneath your skin, flares in answer.
The tether glows.
For a heartbeat, you see everything through his eyes: the ruined chapel, the rain that refuses to stop, the weight of control that isn't strength anymore but survival. And in return, he feels your fear, your defiance, your lonely pulse calling his name in the dark.
It's not a conversation. It's a confession.
Then the glass shatters — soundlessly, like light breaking — and you wake with your heart knocking against your ribs.
The mirror across from your bed is cracked. A single silver line runs through the fracture, pulsing faintly before fading.
"You should not see me," his voice echoes inside your skull, barely audible.
You answer the empty room.
"Then stop calling me."
But you already know he won't.
You toss in your bed, you pace the carpeted floors of your loft. You sit, you stand, you even try the watch your favorite show…. Nothing helps, nothing stops the ache, the need, the call to run.. your muscles burn for it…. Your skin begging to feel the cool night air.
You step out, through the Lobby doors.
telling yourself you're only stepping out for air, for quiet, from the numbing silence of you empty loft and you mysterious dreams. But the air off the shoulder is colder than it should be, rich with cedar and loam and something metallic that tastes like a coin on your tongue.
You take one breath. Then another.
Your body angles toward the trees,
and you let it—because fighting hasn't worked for days and because the tug in your blood has learned a new trick and its patient.
Branches close over you. The lights of town dissolve behind your back like a story retold too many times. You don't check your phone. You don't call anyone. You don't even look for a trail; the path is already there, a faint brightness, the color of moon on water laid thin, across the leafs that litter the damp ground, just visible if you don't look directly at it. When you blink, it's gone. When you soften your eyes, it returns,
Threadlike…. and Silver.
Your heartbeat falls into step with the forest—three beats to the pattern of your feet, and then two, and then something slower, older, that rolls under the ground the way thunder does far off. There's a hum beneath the soil, not heard.. exactly but felt, as if the earth has its own pulse and for the first time it's willing to share with you.
You tell yourself you're dreaming, But
You keep moving anyway.
The trees lean in, tall black ribs, their bark slick with late dew. The night carries scents you've never been able to separate before: resin, crushed fern, a thin curl of woodsmoke from a cabin you can't see and will not reach, and—threaded through everything—the cool, unplaceable note you've begun to think of as HIM. Not a face. Not a voice. More like a temperature. A memory of a shadow, that made you feel safer and afraid at the same time.
The forest floor softens into moss. Sound goes strange, distended. Every step lands louder than it should; every breath seems to come from someone else's lungs. A moth skates past your cheek. You feel the dust of its wings and swear you can count the exact grains. The world has slipped from the usual size and become too intimate.
You think of the hospital—the sterile curtains half-drawn, a shallow bowl of ice melting on a tray, the faint sting in your arm where the IV had been.
You had woken to a room that smelled like antiseptic and rain, to A nurse who had said your name as if trying it on for the first time. Lexa, you're okay. You're safe. Her voice rings in your head as your muscles push you further into the waiting forest…. Then, as you approach a clearing, lite by the silvery moon light, you hear it.. a voice that isn't yours. Low, shaped more by intent than language. It had found you in the dark the way water finds the lowest stream.
"You will not die here". And… You hadn't. You had lived, apparently. Your body had insisted on it.
Reaching the center of the clearing.. you stand, steady….. not breathless… muscles almost… cheering. Shocked that you are not tired…
You touch your wrist,out of habit.. head up, eyes closed in the moon light…. and you feel it… not just your pulse… but another, faint, an echo of a pulse that isn't only yours.
Your eyes flutter open… you can see the stars, clear and beautiful… the moon light appears to sparkle slightly… you are not sure what… your not sure why… but something inside of you has changed.
In the corner of your vision, you catch a glimpse of it… the Thread… shining, no pulsing in the silvery moon light, like its breathing. You disobey Elaras warning again, and you follow.
It pulls you left, Then right, It winks out around a deadfall, reappears like a dragged thread on the far side. You step carefully, not because you're afraid you'll fall but because you have the wild thought that the path might startle and run if you come on too hard. Everything about this feels like approaching an animal: no direct stare, no quick reach, no sound you wouldn't want repeated to anyone else.
You cross a shallow stream and watch the water hesitate around your ankles as if deciding whether to let you through. The cold bites sharp. Your breath bares itself in pale bursts. The hum under the soil thickens; somewhere off to your right, an owl tests the night with one liquid question.
You answer it with your body. Forward.
The first mark appears on a standing stone no taller than your knee. You wouldn't have noticed it if the moon hadn't slid out between clouds at the exact moment you passed your hand over the face. The sigil is thin as a vein and glows the same pale color as the path. Your fingers hover an inch above it and you feel warmth. Not heat, not the hurt of touch—more like the heat a wrist watch keeps from a day on skin. Familiar. Claimed.
"Okay," you whisper, to the stone or to yourself, you can't say.
A second stone waits ten steps beyond, then a third, then a fourth set deeper in a stand of fir. You think of city blocks, of streetlights that make a neighborhood knowable at night. This is that, except older. There's a pattern to the placement; you could draw it if you stopped, but stopping feels like the same thing as saying you aren't going. And.. You are going.
You pass under a pair of leaning trunks that make a crooked arch. The silver thins and then thickens into a narrow band as if laid there by a careful hand. You press your tongue to the back of your teeth to keep from saying I'm here out loud. The night already knows.
And then you see it—the threshold.
It is not a gate in the way you understand gates. It is an absence. A half circle of stones sunk flush with the ground, black with age, each graven with that same bright vein. The air above them is denser, as though someone stretched a clear cloth tight across an open doorway. Your skin prickles before you step through; the space smells like rain about to break.
Everything in you goes quiet at once, bird-sudden, as if some internal flock has taken to wing and left the branches of your ribs clear. The tug in your blood doesn't yank. It doesn't have to. It merely leans forward and waits to see if you'll follow.
You think of the little choices you make every day without naming them: which mug you reach for in the morning, which side of the sidewalk you choose when someone approaches you from the other end, where you sit in a room when you want to see the door. This feels like one of those choices and not like them at all. It is small and it is everything
You step.
The cloth breaks, or passes through you, or you through it. For a breath the world blooms double—two sets of trees, two skies, two versions of your body layered imperfectly so that your hands look like they're wearing shadows. Then the extra skin peels away and falls back and the night on this side corrects to itself.
The air is—other. Heavy the way velvet is heavy, even when you're not touching it. Your hearing tilts; what was far becomes near. Your heart tries a fast, panicked rhythm and then finds the slow drum under the ground and matches it. That match undoes something at the base of your skull. You sway. You catch yourself on a trunk and feel not bark but the living press beneath it, the tree working, sap rising, the steady push of growth. You've never felt that before. The knowledge is both intimacy and trespass.
Light behaves strangely here. The moon burns white through unraveling cloud, but the shadows it throws aren't black; they're a soft grey with a seam of blue, as if someone stitched dusk into them with fine thread.
The path is less a line now than a shimmer, suspended ankle-high, swaying almost imperceptibly from your passage. And there is sound, the very faintest, like singing shards on crystal. You consider, briefly, that you've died after all and this is some other place for dead people who can't sit still.
So….
You walk.
Leaves mutter underfoot. Once, a shape breaks the underbrush and flees, no larger than a cat, all nerves and pale eyes. Another stone rises from the moss, this one taller, its mark, sits deeper.
You hold your palm three inches above it and feel the answer you expected and a second answer nesting inside it: recognition… that doesn't belong to you. As if the stone sees through you to the signature in your blood and knows it for what it is.
As if something else carved that signature there.
You pull your hand back. You swallow. You keep going.
The forest narrows into a corridor and then widens into a small, shallow bowl. At the center is a ring of char no broader than a dining table, old burn etched into the dirt, a memory of the fire that once burned here. Tiny ferns have lifted through the black, delicate as eyelashes. You circle the ring once without meaning to, like every thin animal circling a place it can't decide about. The silver band crosses the char, a clean line. Beyond, the trees open toward a darker slope and the hint of water moving slow.
You're not alone. You know it the way you know when you're being watched on a train—nothing to see, and then too much to ignore. The hair along your arms lift. Your breath slows and deepens without your permission. The hum in the earth grows.
You could run. You could step back across the stones and retrace the night and find the road and then the town and then a bed with a lamp beside it and a glass of water on the table. You could. The relief of the thought loosens your shoulders for a moment. It doesn't reach your spine. The part of you that is still a person argues for retreat. The part of you that woke in a hospital to the taste of rain wants to see who would speak your name in a voice that sounded like weather.
You move forward across the char.
The temperature drops. Your breath ghosts brighter. Somewhere to your left, a branch goes under a weight and does not spring back. You freeze, your heel in a shallow print of ash. The silver thread quivers around your ankle and lies still.
You don't say hello. You don't say who's there. The forest has no use for words like that. You relax your hands. You tilt your head just enough that your ear aligns with the dark.
Time opens its jaws and holds you between them.
A shape is not a shape at the edge of seeing. You avoid looking too hard. The instinct is older than you are. First, you feel pressure—attention like a thumb pressed to the hollow at the base of your throat. Then scent: cool, iron-sweet, winter-clean. Not blood. Not exactly. The idea of blood. The idea of snow. Then a draft as something very large steals the air where a path was and replaces it with itself.
Every story you've ever told yourself of what you are falls silent, polite, and steps aside.
You stand in the seam where everything can still be denied, But You do not deny it.
Your heart gives one hard strike, and the strike isn't fear. It is recognition answering recognition.
A sound lifts, quiet enough that the leaves barely register it. It isn't quite a growl; it doesn't need to be. It isn't wind. It finds the frequency you have been trying not to hear since the night you didn't die, and lays itself along it like a blade across a whetstone.
The sound is too soft to be a growl, too low to be wind.
It is recognition.