The rain had been falling for hours, relentless as if the heavens themselves grieved for her. Each droplet hit the windowpane with the rhythm of a slow, cruel lullaby. In the dim light of her candle, Pillyse Loventhal sat at the edge of her narrow bed, her hands clasped so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
The house moaned in the wind, a lonely, and aging creature that had seen too much pain. The walls bore witness to years of arguments, to glass shattering, to the quiet sobs muffled behind locked doors.
She had long since stopped hoping for peace.
From the parlor below came the sound of her father's boots striking the floorboards like gunshots. His voice followed, harsh and venomous.
"You think your silence makes you better than me?"
Her mother's softer voice replied, trembling, a thread fraying under too much weight.
"Please, not tonight… she can hear you."
"Let her!" he snarled. "Let her know how useless she is in this house! Just like how useless you are! I never wanted this to happen...I never wanted that thing to be born in the first place!"
Pillyse pressed her palms to her ears. The words still found her. They always did.
The wind outside shrieked through the cracks in the window. It sounded like laughter, cruel and distant.
Her breath trembled as she whispered into the empty room.
"I didn't ask for this life.... I didn't ask to be born here. I don't know what to do.....i don't even know who i am or what i am anymore."
Pillyse is slowly breathing just to avoid gettting her father's attention.
" Please...just make it all stop!"
"The candle flickered violently, its flame bowing low, as if the air itself pitied her.
She lay back, staring up at the cracked ceiling. She could still smell the smoke from the fire her father had nearly caused the night before. The scent clung to the furniture, to her skin burnt wood and bitterness.
"Just one quiet night," she murmured. "Please."
But the quiet that came was wrong.
It was the kind of silence that pressed against the chest, thick and heavy. Her eyelids fluttered. The exhaustion that had stalked her for days finally pulled her down yet something was different this time.
She felt her body drop as though the ground had vanished beneath her, a slow, sinking plunge into an unseen abyss.
A sharp tug pulled through her, violent, hollowing, leaving her breath hitching at the terrifying sensation of being torn from herself, as if she were dying one slow heartbeat at a time.
Her breath hitched.
Her fingers wouldn't move. Her body had become stone. Panic surged in her throat.
"Mother?" she tried to whisper, but the sound was thin, strangled.
No answer.
"Father?"
Nothing.
Only the soft hum of the storm outside and the eerie groan of the old clock downstairs.
At the edge of her vision, shadows stirred shifting across the walls as though alive, pooling into corners, whispering. Their murmurs were faint, like a language remembered only by the dead.
Her pulse pounded in her ears.
"Who's there?"
The whisper grew clearer. Not one voice, but many.
"You've waited long enough."
Her eyes widened.
"What do you mean? Waited for what?"
"To be free."
Her body trembled though it could not move. The air around her grew colder, dense, alive.
"No," she gasped. "Please...what are you doing to me?"
"You have cried too long in silence. Let us take it away."
The walls seemed to pulse. The ceiling melted into smoke. The bed beneath her dissolved, leaving only a sensation of falling and floating at once.
Her tears hovered in the air, glistening like tiny stars before vanishing into nothing.
"Stop!" she cried, voice breaking. "I don't want to die!"
A pause. Then a softer voice emerged, a single voice, close to her ear, calm and steady.
"You are not dying, Pillyse."
She stilled as if the very air around her drew in a breath.
That voice… it wasn't cold like the others, nor distant, nor cruel.
It was warm. Human. Almost trembling with something that sounded achingly like grief.
"Who… who are you?" she asked, her voice barely a note, a fragile thread trying to hold onto the world.
"Someone who has been waiting for you," the voice murmured, "across time… across silence… across death itself."
Her heart staggered in her chest, a heartbeat caught between disbelief and a longing she couldn't name.
"Waiting… for me?"
"Yes," the voice said, softer now, as if speaking too loudly would shatter her. "You were never meant to walk this life alone.… you had to release the chains that kept you in the dark."
Her eyes stung, the world around her blurring until everything looked like melting watercolor.
"I don't want to let go," she whispered, the words breaking on her tongue. "I haven't even lived. I've never been happy. I've never even—"
Her throat tightened painfully.
"I've never even been loved. I just… I want to matter. Just once. Even for a moment. Can't I?"
The voice exhaled a sound so full of sorrow it felt like it pressed a hand against her heart.
"Then you will be given a chance," it promised gently.
"A chance to choose your own path. A chance to become someone… not because the world demands it, but because you do."
Around her, the darkness began to shift thin threads of shadow curling into strands of light. Shapes bloomed from the glow, hands reaching, faces flickering, memories she did not own drifting past her like smoke. Her body felt as though it were unraveling delicately, silk slipping off a spool. Strange, weightless.
She saw her reflection hovering above the bed still, pale as moonlit porcelain, the life drained from it.
"W‑what's happening to me?" she whispered, fear and wonder trembling through every syllable.
"You are being rewritten," the voice said—reverent, certain. "Every wound you carried… every ache you hid… they are becoming your strength. So you may stand. So you may walk again."
"I don't understand…" she breathed.
"You will," the voice murmured, the warmth of it wrapping around her like a promise. "In time… you will."
The voice faded, but warmth bloomed in her chest, a pulse of something ancient and familiar.
And then came stillness.
The world exhaled.
The rain slowed.
Her final breath never left her lips, it drifted upward, glowing faintly like the ghost of a sigh.
The light flickered once, twice, and then vanished into the darkness.
All that remained was her empty shell and the echo of her whisper
"There must be something more."
Outside, the wind carried her words away. Somewhere beyond the storm, another heart stirred a man's, distant yet tethered to hers. He woke with a start, breath sharp and eyes wide, whispering into the night as if he had just heard her name.
"Pillyse…"