Silence.
A thick, heavy silence that felt like a blanket smothering the memory of the heart monitor's scream. I don't remember what happened. I was fainted. It's morning already. The sun light is on my bed like it was that day. The same golden stripes painting the same rumpled sheets. The same smell of ghee and toast from downstairs. A perfect, terrible echo. The day when everything started. And after that my whole life changed.
My head was hurting. I don't remember what happened but suddenly remembered everything from last day. I see my hands and that was clean. I turned my hands over, examining them in the morning light. The skin was pale, unmarked.
My hand was clean. No blood. No burning letters. Just the phantom sensation of a cold, familiar grip. The word "LIAR" was gone, but its accusation was seared into my mind. The hollow ache beneath my ribs pulsed, a silent drum keeping time with my heart.
I lay down seeing my hand. Everything seems fainted. What is going on I don't understand. All is confusing but somehow comforting. Then suddenly my head hurt. Like a shock. Everything becomes dark and then sound
TAP. Tap.
I was shocked. I look at the window. I thought it was the hawk again. But it was just a small bird. A sparrow, bickering with another on the ledge. Ordinary. Meaningless. But i don't know what I was expecting the hawk again. My pulse, which had leapt into my throat, settled into a dull, disappointed throb.
I lay down. I feel hollow. I miss something. And I don't know what is it. It's hollow feeling is killing me. The void inside was a physical weight, a cavity where something essential had been carved out.
As I lay down. Suddenly the nurses come to my room. They seems mysterious too. But I don't feel any. Maybe I am Imagining it. They checked me and confirmed I am fine and ready to go home. Their smiles were too bright, their touches too clinical. They were just shapes going through motions, their words buzzing like distant flies.
-----
At that day I returned to home. My mother was there waiting for me. As I enter the house I saw my mother cooking. Her cooking is amazing. The smell so familiar. When she saw me entering her face lighten up.
"Look who's back!" she said, her voice warm. "I was starting to think you were avoiding your exams."
Her humor is unmatched. I can't deny how good she is as my mother. But something feels off about her. The warmth didn't reach her eyes. They were careful, guarded. She was performing.
Her hand mark. It's gone.
My eyes dropped to her wrist. The skin was smooth, unblemished. There was no trace of the twisted symbol, not even a faint scar or a shadow of ink. It had been erased as completely as the blood from my hands.
I forced a smile, the banter feeling like a script from a life I'd been evicted from. She was perfect. Kind, worried, humorous. The ideal mother. And that was the problem. The symbol on her wrist was gone. Not faded. Not covered. Gone, as if it had never been there at all. The evidence was vanishing, and with it, my grip on reality.
----
For three days, nothing happened.
I went to school. I sat through my exams, my pencil scratching out answers I didn't care about on papers that felt insubstantial. Nothing happened. No whispers, no shadows, no hawks. The world was stubbornly, maddeningly ordinary. The days bled into one another, a grey, flavorless blur. The hollowness inside me grew, a silent scream in a soundproof room. I was forgetting the taste of the terror, and that was the most terrifying thing of all. I was a ghost going through the motions, the hollow space inside me now a constant, echoing companion. The factory, the hawk, the blood scrawled message. it all felt like a fever dream, a story I'd read about someone else.
---
I fell asleep on the fourth night exhausted by the effort of pretending. Then, on that night, the full moon hanging like a pale, watchful eye outside my window.
Then, the music began.
It wasn't a sound that entered my ears. It unfolded inside my mind, a slow, wordless melody that felt like a memory I'd never had. It was a woman's voice, pure and resonant, singing a tune that was both profoundly sad and deeply comforting. It was the sound of coming home to a place you'd never been.
One moment I was asleep, the next, I was floating. There was no ground, no sky, only a soft, golden luminescence. And there was music. A wordless, ethereal melody that seemed to emanate from the light itself. It was a siren's song, but it promised no destruction, only an end to longing. It filled the hollow space in my chest, not with substance, but with a resonant peace. I was lost, but I was not afraid.
Then, I saw her. A silhouette within the heart of the light. A girl, her features blurred by the radiance, but her form achingly familiar. She was there for only a heartbeat, a promise etched in light, before she vanished.
---
The golden world dissolved.
I was standing in a library of impossible scale. Bookshelves of dark, polished wood stretched into infinity in every direction, vanishing into a misty gloom. The air smelled of dust and old paper and… ozone. The books had no titles on their spines, but they hummed with a low energy, as if each contained a sleeping world. I reached for one, but my hand passed through it like smoke.
Before I could process this, The world lurched violently, the endless shelves crumbling into silent, star dusted blackness. The air vanished from my lungs. I was in the vacuum of space, a silent scream trapped in my chest
Then, freezing water. Not the dry cold of space, but a wet, brutal freeze as I was plunged into a black, churning sea... I flailed,sinking, the pressure crushing my lungs. I was drowning in silence and despair.
A hand.
Slender, solid, real. It grabbed my arm, pulling me up with impossible strength. I broke the surface, gasping, and a presence pressed close in the dark. Soft lips kissed my cheek, a touch both chilling and electric. A whisper, breathed directly into my ear by a voice I knew in my soul, a voice from a erased file and a ghost's touch.
"Find me. I am here."
---
I woke with a violent gasp.
I was in my bed. Moonlight, pure and silvery, streamed through the window, painting a perfect rectangle on my sheets. My heart was hammering against my ribs. My cheek burned. I touched it, my fingers came away smeared with a single drop of fresh blood.
And I was not alone.
The shadows in the corners of my room were deeper, thicker than they should be. They held a presence. The hollow feeling was still there, a void in my center, but it was no longer empty. It felt… held. Cradled. As if the same hands that pulled me from the sea were now wrapped around the emptiness inside me, keeping it from consuming me whole.
The comfort was terrifying. And it was the most real thing I had felt in days.
I looked out the window, to the full moon. It wasn't just a rock in the sky anymore. It was a hole. A hollow, brilliant eye staring back at me, and its gaze was not cold. It was an invitation.
The siren's song echoed faintly in the back of my mind, a fading melody on the edge of memory.
Tap.
The sound didn't come from the window.
It came from the darkest shadow in the corner of my room.
Tap. Tap.
A slow, patient sound. Not a beak on glass.
It was the sound of a fingernail, tapping on the spine of a book.
The tapping stopped. The shadow in the corner seemed to contract, to solidify. It wasn't a trick of the light anymore; it was a defined shape, a man-sized darkness that drank the moonlight around it. From within that form, a single object slid forward, emerging into the silver light on my floor as if pushed by an unseen hand.
It was a book.