Riva was sorting books when the letter arrived.
It was placed on the orphanage desk without a sound—no knock, no footsteps, no voice calling her name. One moment the desk was empty, the next it wasn't.
The envelope was plain.
Her name was written neatly on the front.
Riva's fingers stilled.
She did not need to open it to know what it would say.
The feeling had already begun.
A pressure—gentle but insistent—wrapped around her chest, as if invisible hands were guiding her forward. Not dragging. Not forcing. Just… pulling.
Riva swallowed and broke the seal.
You are requested to travel to Lako City for temporary orphanage-related work.
Details will be provided upon arrival.
Lako City.
The words burned softly behind her eyes.
Her breath came uneven as emotions collided all at once—an unfamiliar excitement, sharp and bright; a strange happiness she couldn't explain; sadness that felt older than memory; and beneath it all, fear. Not panic. Not dread.
Recognition.
Her hands trembled as she folded the letter back into the envelope.
"So that's where it is," she whispered.
The pull intensified, threading through her ribs, her spine, her thoughts. For the first time in her life, Riva didn't fight it. She closed her eyes and let the feeling pass through her.
Something had been waiting for her.
Something she had met before—
not in this life.
Far away, in a place untouched by sunrise or sunset, a man sat alone in a vast stone chamber.
He was seated on a high-backed chair carved with symbols no language still remembered. His posture was relaxed, almost bored, yet his eyes never left the massive clock mounted on the wall before him.
The clock had not moved for a very long time.
Dust clung to its frozen hands. The air around it felt heavy, restrained, as though time itself had been held in place by force rather than choice.
Then—
Tick.
The sound echoed through the chamber like a crack in glass.
The man straightened slowly.
Tick.
His lips curved into something that was not quite a smile.
"So," he murmured, standing. "You've begun."
The clock's hands lurched forward, stiff at first, then smoother—seconds chasing seconds as if making up for lost time.
The man tilted his head, listening, not to the clock—but to something deeper. Something old.
"It is time," he said quietly.
"Open the gate."
The chamber darkened as unseen mechanisms stirred beneath the stone.
Beyond cities and known roads, past places marked on maps, lay a forgotten area where the land itself felt wrong.
Abandoned houses leaned toward one another like conspirators, their windows dark and hollow. Trees grew wild and twisted, roots cracking through stone paths, branches scraping the walls as if searching for entry.
The air was thick. Stagnant.
No birds flew here.
No voices lingered.
At the center of it all stood one house unlike the others—older, heavier, its structure bowed inward as though resisting something pressing from within.
The wind rose suddenly.
It howled through broken streets, tearing leaves from trees, slamming shutters against walls. The abandoned houses groaned in protest, but the sound came strongest from that one house.
Its walls shuddered.
Once.
Twice.
The door rattled violently, the wood bending outward as if struck from inside. Dust poured from the cracks, and the windows pulsed faintly, like a chest struggling to breathe.
The wind screamed.
And for a single, terrifying moment, it looked as if the house itself was beating—alive, furious, desperate to be released.
Then—
Silence.
The wind died. The house stilled.
But something had awakened.
Something that had been waiting for direction.
Back at the orphanage, Riva packed her bag.
Her hands were steady now. Her heart was not.
As she stepped outside, the pull tightened once more, stronger than before, aligning her thoughts toward a single place.
Lako City.
She did not know who had called her.
She did not know why.
But deep within her, beneath fear and excitement and sorrow, one truth echoed clearly:
This time, the pattern would not repeat quietly.
And somewhere, beyond abandoned roads and locked gates, something was already listening.