It happened without warning — like a pulse breaking through eternity, like a shadow splitting the marrow of reality.
One moment, I was a fragment adrift, nameless in the blue abyss, and the next — the world convulsed around me. The sea bent, the sky fractured, and something ancient tugged at my wrist, dragging me into a story I had never agreed to live.
I sank, no longer into water, but into a silence that bled louder than storms.
The red string coiled around my wrist like a serpent of destiny, pulsing — not with blood, but with the memory of a thousand forgotten forevers.
Each knot I touched burned with questions I never asked, yet always feared to know.
And then — the butterflies. Silver, translucent, fragile — yet their wings carved fissures into the sea itself. They were illusions wearing light, fragments of unfinished dreams, scattering like prayers no god ever answered. I chased them, foolishly, deliriously, until the wound of the string slipped from my awareness, until I abandoned the tether of fate itself.
But fate does not forgive. Fate waits.
A shiver clawed down my spine, less of fear, more of recognition. The embrace came like a shadow wearing warmth, arms circling me in a language older than time. I refused to turn — for to see his face would be to shatter the fragile lie that I was still myself. And yet, the string glowed brighter, so blinding it felt as though I was being erased and rewritten in his presence.
He whispered — not in words, but in meanings:
"We are the unfinished sentence that the universe keeps writing and erasing, until the ink bleeds into eternity."
The ocean convulsed. Blue devoured red, red devoured silver, silver devoured time. Everything became one vast hunger. The tangled threads unraveled into infinity, pointing to no end, no beginning — only him. Always him.
And in that moment, I understood:
The red string was never a path meant to guide me to him.
It was a vessel, binding me within him.
Two souls were never entwined — they were the same soul, endlessly divided, endlessly searching for its reflection in the mirror of existence.
He pressed his forehead to mine, and the ocean whispered through our veins:
"To love is not to find. To love is to dissolve."
And as the sea swallowed us whole, I could no longer tell if I was drowning, ascending, or simply… remembering.
°XIU WANG°