The train station buzzed with quiet rhythm, a backdrop of city noise muffled by layers of glass and steel. Ayame had taken the earliest train she could, her thoughts still stuck on the mysterious spiral in her grandmother's journal. It had been a long night of restless dreams—Kael's face floating between stars, the whisper of pages turning without hands, and that same spiral glowing with impossible light.
She sat by the window now, the journal in her lap, flipping pages slowly. The ink of the new passage hadn't faded. It was still there—clear, deliberate, purposeful. "When the paths of memory are frayed, the stars remember."
There was no rational explanation. Not one that made sense in the world she knew. And yet, it tugged at her. Like a thread barely holding together something much larger than it seemed.
The train rocked gently. A boy across the aisle tapped away at a game on his phone. A woman behind him muttered into her headset. Ayame remained fixed on the journal. She didn't even notice when the overhead announcement called the next stop until a name caught her ear.
"...Kaezora Station."
Kaezora. Her heart lurched.
That name hadn't been spoken in her world in years—not since her grandmother's funeral. Kaezora was the place of legends, whispered in bedtime stories and half-remembered myths. Her grandmother had insisted it was real, a village hidden just beyond the folds of the ordinary world, where time ran sideways and the veil between realms thinned.
She stood up without thinking.
The train doors slid open. The platform was empty. Silent. As if waiting.
The moment her foot touched the concrete, something in the air changed. The colors felt... warmer, richer. The sunlight was too soft, as if filtered through some invisible haze. The journal in her hand pulsed faintly. She flipped to the back—where pages had once been blank, there was now a new map sketched in graphite. A path. A location. And at the very center: a symbol she knew all too well.
The spiral.
She followed the path. Past the edge of the station, through an overgrown archway tangled in ivy and memory. The wind shifted again. This time it smelled like home. Like lavender and burnt toast and something else... something ancient.
And then she heard it. A hum. Low and melodic. Drawing her toward a clearing where the trees bent in unnatural ways, bowing toward a small, cracked mirror standing upright on a stone pedestal.
She reached out.
Her fingers brushed the glass.
It rippled.
And then—
Everything fractured.
Not shattered. Fractured. Like a perfect illusion cracking under pressure.
The sky darkened.
The journal fell from her hand, pages fluttering like startled birds.
A voice echoed, not from behind her, but from within.
"You found the first gate, Ayame. Will you remember him when he forgets himself?"
She opened her mouth to speak, but the world blinked.
And she was gone.
---
But it wasn't just her. As Ayame vanished through the mirror, another force stirred far from Kaezora. A shadow fell over the horizon of a realm untouched by time. High above the swirling sky of Elaria, in a tower shaped like a needle of black crystal, a boy looked up from a window ledge.
Kael.
His eyes were hollow with confusion. He did not remember Ayame. He did not remember the world from which he came. Only flickers of emotion tied to a name he couldn't grasp. And yet, the sound of a journal's page fluttering through windless air tugged at something deep within him.
Elsewhere in Elaria, the stars above began to move—not randomly, but purposefully—as if responding to an ancient call. The Veil was weakening. The world was shifting. Forgotten gods whispered secrets in the language of dream.
Ayame stumbled onto moss-covered stone as she landed in the otherworld. A single raven circled overhead before darting through the forest ahead. She was breathless, disoriented, but alive.
And something within her knew: this was just the beginning.
She picked up her grandmother's journal from the moss. It glowed faintly again. This time the ink formed not words, but a series of glowing symbols she didn't recognize—except for one.
Kael.
The name shimmered, as if pleading to be remembered.
Ayame wiped a tear from her cheek.
Wherever he was, she would find him.
Even if it meant facing the legends her grandmother once warned her about—the ones that weren't just stories.
She turned toward the path ahead. The spiral etched itself into the sky, and with each step, the veil grew thinner.
And in the place where stars remember, the adventure had only just begun.