The path up the shining plateau was an ascent into a lie. With every step, the air grew warmer, the golden light more intense, and the feeling of hope more dangerously seductive. Sera walked with a relentless, focused energy, her eyes fixed on the summit, her grief for Mina momentarily transmuted into a desperate faith that this was the answer. Lio followed, the beauty of the place warring with the cold knot of suspicion in his gut. The world had never offered them kindness without a hidden price tag, and this felt like the most beautiful offering yet.
They reached the top, and the path opened onto a landscape that defied all logic. The summit was not a rocky, windswept peak but a vast expanse of rolling green hills, bathed in the soft, eternal gold of a perfect afternoon. The grass was lush and impossibly vibrant. It was a garden, a park, a paradise.
And in the distance, sitting on the crest of a gentle hill, was a house.
Lio's fragile hope dissolved instantly. It was their house.
He heard his mother draw a sharp, wounded breath beside him. Her quest for Mina had led them back to the one thing they had been fleeing. But the true horror was yet to reveal itself. As their eyes adjusted to the golden light, they saw that it wasn't just one house.
The rolling green hills were dotted with them. Dozens.
It was a garden of their own home, a landscape cultivated with their own repeating lives. Some of the houses were pristine and perfect, untouched by time or water, standing proudly like the Mirror House they had found in the mountains. Others were horrific ruins. One was a blackened, charred skeleton, smoke still faintly curling from its burnt out window frames as if the fire had been extinguished only moments ago. Another was half sunk into the impossibly green grass, its wood swollen and green with algae, as if the lawn itself were an ocean that had consumed it. One was covered in thick, thorny vines, its windows and doors choked by a dark, angry looking growth. Some were nothing more than foundations, the skeletal stone outlines of a home that never even managed to stand.
This was not a promised land. This was a graveyard. It was a museum of their failures, each house a monument to a different loop, a different doomed journey.
The sight broke Sera. The desperate energy that had propelled her up the mountain vanished, leaving her utterly bereft. She stared at the landscape of her repeating failures, her face ashen. This was not the place she would find Mina. This was the place she had lost her, over and over again, in a dozen different ways. She sank to her knees on the soft green grass, her shoulders slumping in final, absolute defeat. She opened her hand and stared at the small, red mitten, the last relic of a hope that was now officially dead.
Ira, who had been shambling with his usual vacant stare, stopped and looked out over the valley of houses. His brow furrowed. His gaze drifted from a pristine copy to a sunken ruin, and for the first time, a flicker of something beyond confusion crossed his face. It was a dawning, horrified recognition. He took a few stumbling steps toward the nearest ruin—the one that had been burned. He reached out a trembling hand and touched the blackened, charred wood of the doorframe. A soot stain came away on his fingers. He stared at it, then at his own hand, a faint, ghost memory of a burn tingling in his palm. The amnesia that had protected him was beginning to crack under the sheer, physical weight of the evidence.
Lio felt a dizzying vertigo, a sense of temporal sickness as he looked at the impossible panorama. It was all real. The woman with two shadows. The reflection in the water. His mother's story. This was the hub, the center of the labyrinth, the trophy room of the power that held them. They had finally reached the end of the maze, only to find it was a cage with a view of all their other cages.
Amidst the dozens of versions, one house stood apart from the rest. It sat on the highest hill, directly in the center of the valley. It wasn't pristine, nor was it a ruin. Its paint was slightly faded. A single shutter hung slightly askew. It was their house, exactly as they had left it at the beginning of this journey. Their specific house. This loop's house.
Lio knew, with a dreadful, final certainty, that this was their destination. The long, repeating journey was over. He looked from the house on the hill to his mother, kneeling in the grass, and his father, staring at his own blackened fingertips. He realized they had finally made it. They had finally come home.