The House of Living Messages didn't look like a building, it looked like a sleeping creature. It was spiral-shaped, made of dark wood covered in glowing lichens, and its roof was formed from living branches that kept growing, intertwining as if they breathed. It had no doors, only a curved entrance like the inside of a seashell.
"People work here?" Elías asked in a whisper.
"Here, we listen," Ilyara replied.
Inside, the silence wasn't the absence of sound, but the presence of something deeper: the murmur of thousands of messages waiting to be read. The walls were covered with hanging leaves, suspended feathers, stones with living inscriptions, and small floating fragments turning slowly in the air like they drifted through a dream.
An elderly woman with golden eyes and hair like stardust awaited them beside a bowl filled with freshly cut green leaves.
"This is the boy?" she asked without looking at Elías.
"Yes," Ilyara answered. "The Feather Tree accepted him."
The woman nodded.
"Then let him choose a leaf. The one that chooses him… will speak."
Elías approached the bowl, feeling clumsy. The leaves moved slightly, as if they were breathing. One of them trembled as his hand neared, not the largest, nor the brightest, but a small one, with a broken tip.
He took it, the leaf grew warm in his fingers, its inner veins began to glow, and then it spoke, but not with voice, not with words. The story spilled into his chest like a memory that wasn't his.
A field bathed in blue nectar, a dark-haired woman, dressed as a traveler, fleeing through a clearing, hands clutching a book, a small girl, asleep in her arms, a door, the bookstore, a leap, a new world and the impossibility of returning.
Elías dropped to his knees.
"It's her!" he whispered. "My grandmother's mother! My great-grandmother!"
Ilyara knelt beside him.
"What did you see?"
"She… she was from here, from Lunareth, and she escaped, she crossed through the bookstore when my grandmother was just a child. They reached my world… but they could never return."
"Are you sure?"
"I felt it. It wasn't like someone else's memory. It was like… part of me had been there too."
The elder woman approached.
"The House only reveals what you are ready to remember. That story… was yours before you were even born."
Elías took a deep breath.
Everything made sense now: the leaflet, Amelia's familiarity, the symbol on the page.
They weren't strangers in Lunareth. They were part of it.
When they stepped out of the House, the sky was covered in silver clouds, as if the world itself were holding its breath.
Ilyara glanced at him.
"So… you didn't come here. You came back."
Elías didn't answer. He only pressed the leaf against his chest.
His old life, the city, the newspapers, the damp apartment, was no longer his whole story.
Lunareth had been waiting for him.
And he, without knowing it, had been waiting for Lunareth.