The car's engine idled softly in the damp, dawn air, the last murmurs of motion in a world gone still. Rosa sat motionless, hands slack in her lap, eyes unfocused, staring past the copper-blushed sky beyond the windscreen. The moorland stretched quietly around her, crisp and colourless under the early October light, all dew-rimmed grass and skeletal hedgerows. But she didn’t see any of it.

  She was avoiding looking.

  She should have stepped out by now. But she couldn’t. Her body stayed rooted, as if movement might break something fragile inside her. Her thoughts looped, unbidden and inescapable: Selina’s cry, Rowan’s final, shattered expression. They ghosted behind her eyes like figures glimpsed in a train window, moving further away with every heartbeat.

  LumiGard had brought her here. Cool, synthetic tones from the car’s satnav - precise, knowing - threading her down smaller and smaller roads until signs gave out and instinct gave up.

  Selina.

  Rosa’s chest tightened. Had they…

  She didn’t finish the thought.

  She could see her face - the flash of fear in her eyes when they were separated. Rosa’s stomach lurched with a sickening weight.

  And Rowan. His image flared again as her eyes fell to the AR headset on the passenger seat. His last act had been to shield her. She felt the impact of it now, delayed, a kind of retroactive gravity.

  The heat in the car became unbearable. She tried to recall when last she had eaten, or slept.

  She opened the door and stepped out.

  Cold air slapped her awake, sharp with the near-frost of dawn. She wrapped her arms around herself. Somewhere overhead, larks were beginning to move. The sky was cloudless.

  And still - she didn’t look at what was ahead.

  Not immediately.

  Her shoes crunched on the gravel verge. She turned slowly, as if her body decided for her, and saw it.

  The cottage.

  Instantly a suffocating fog rolled in - not around her, but through her - a lurching, visceral remembering. The memory came whole: the building half-lost in thick mist, its shape indistinct, looming like a whale beneath pale water.

  For a moment she was drowning in the grip of the flashback, the fog filling her lungs and her head.

  Then the light was different - she blinked. Dawn. October once more.

  She took a slow breath and stepped forward.

  The door at the front was locked, but around the back, she found a small pane beside the handle. She struck it sharply with an elbow. The glass gave with a dry crack. A moment later, she reached through and unlatched the door.

  The cottage wasn’t abandoned in the traditional sense. No cobwebbed ruins or lost glass, no smell of rot or decay. It was just… paused. The furniture was all here - plain, functional. Cushions slightly flattened. An overturned mug. Nothing dramatic. Whoever had left this place hadn’t done so long ago. A few months, maybe. Not enough for dust to claim everything, but long enough for a sense of absence to settle in like a second layer of paint.

  Dust motes danced in the weak shafts of light that filtered through the windows, and the silence was palpable, pressing in on her from all sides. The place seemed frozen in time - a chair in the corner, abandoned mid-movement.

  Rosa walked hesitantly into the kitchen, knowing beyond doubt that she'd been here before.

  The markings were everywhere.

  Layered and chaotic, curling in on themselves, they crawled upon nearly every surface. Some sharp and deliberate, others frantic, smeared into confusion. She could hardly tell if they were real or if her exhaustion was making her see things.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The longer she looked, the more they pressed against her - familiar in a way that made her stomach turn. Not remembered, exactly. But… recognised. As though her body knew what her mind could not.

  She took a step closer. Her fingers hovered near one of the chalk spirals, not quite daring to touch. Something had driven these lines into the walls - not as art, not as signal, but as compulsion. And somehow, impossibly, she knew her own hand had made them.

  Then the table.

  Modern, pine maybe, with straight legs and a once-glossy surface now dulled by wear. It should have been unremarkable. But Rosa immediately saw.

  Gouges - deep and crude - ran across the tabletop, dug in with something that had neither precision nor patience. The cuts intersected and overlapped, forming no overall pattern she could name, just desperate repetition. Her stomach churned - not just with hunger but with the dawning, sick realization of how much she’d sacrificed for this. She could feel her body faltering - tired, hungry, drained - but her mind kept pushing, like a cruel mockery of resilience.

  She stepped closer, fingers brushing the outline of an eye rough beneath her touch. Some gouges looked like letters, others like scratches left in panic or rage.

  And suddenly…

  She was there.

  Not here, now - but here, then.

  Her hands raw, nails split. Gripping something, a fork perhaps. Her arms moved with terrible force, scratching, not out of anger but urgency, obsession. The table swam in candlelight. Her vision tunneled.

  Eyes. She scratched eyes.

  Over and over.

  Open eyes. Closed eyes. Eyes leaking lines like tears or wires. She could feel them watching her even as she created them.

  She wasn't drawing what she saw.

  She was drawing so she wouldn't see it anymore.

  Blood in the gouges. Her blood. A cut along her palm she hadn’t noticed until it smeared the surface. A small laugh escaped her lips in that other time - a breathless, delirious laugh - and then…

  She gasped. She was back.

  The silence of the cottage pressed in again. Dust. Weak light.

  Her hands were trembling. One hovered still above the table. The gouges remained. The eyes remained. The spiral at the centre. They hadn’t faded. They hadn’t healed.

  She stood, just breathing.

  Then - a movement at the window. The shadow of a cloud passing over.

  Rosa started.

  She stared, unmoving. Carl Hammond’s cottage came back to her mind, the day she’d first seen Rowan. That same peculiar light - the sort that made everything seem too sharp, too vivid.

  Finding her feet finally, she stepped closer. The window now held nothing but early sunshine and the shifting branches of a hawthorn.

  Still, the feeling lingered. Rowan?

  She stepped outside. The sky was a high, polished blue, the kind that made the trees look theatrical. Leaves skittered across the grass, crisp and papery. The moor beyond the garden wall shimmered faintly in the autumn light.

  There was no sound but the idle tick of insects and a distant crow.

  And yet - something.

  She glanced back at the door - still open. She should close it. She should turn back.

  But her feet were already on the path that led out beyond the wall, where the scrub began. Where the bracken caught the light like glass.

  It wasn’t that she really believed Rowan was here. Not quite.

  More that something was easing back just ahead of her, just out of sight, and the space it left behind had to be filled.

  Words wafted through her head. “Ssssaid I was just… a way in. S ss story. Being read.”

  Beyond the tumbled wall, where the moor dipped and rose again in golden humps of bracken and heather, something moved.

  A flicker, not of wind or bird or hare - but something more fleeting than all three. A figure, perhaps, or the idea of one. It wavered between the gorse, impossible to fix with her eyes.

  She turned away and in her periphery, a shadow detached from the moor. It leaned, turned, tried to form - but couldn’t hold. Its edges shimmered as though the world itself rejected its shape. It was part of the moor and utterly alien to it - like bad code stitched into a landscape too old to recognise such tricks.

  "...ev vv veryone…”

  A breeze of thought.

  “bornnn…”

  “from n nothing... unspooling into life…”

  Rosa blinked. A haze clung to the air, just above the curve of the land. Heather mottled the slope in rough patches, purple faded to rust. Thin grasses bristled between stones, their tips catching pale light like old wire.

  “...like fiction… written…”

  “All… just information… pressing… forced through... blood and code... nerve and spark…”

  The land stretched, blunt and uninviting, lichen clinging to the flanks of rock outcrops like frostbite. Bracken lay flattened in places, bleached and skeletal. Beyond, the hills rolled in soft repetitions, each one greyer than the last - an old rhythm worn down to its bones.

  “n no… nothing once…”

  “then muscle, skin, breath - spat into the world…”

  “slick and raw and screaming. All life... clawed from silence... dragged into being by insistence…”

  “...intent.”

  There was no real path onto the moors, just worn tufts of grass and hollows where water had settled and dried again. The horizon was close yet unreachable, like a dream she couldn't step into.

  Rosa stood very still, the sound of her breathing the only thing reminding her she hadn’t slipped out of the world entirely.

  “…b but you… you are still… being written…”

  Far to the south, a kestrel hung in the hush of the sky, wings poised in a delicate tension, as if balanced on the seam between one moment and the next. It hovered without effort, a single thought held aloft in the wide, windless blue.