Rain fell sideways, sharp as broken glass.
Arien Vale woke lying in a field of bones, the world around him twisted and wrong.
He didn't remember how he got here—or why the sky was black even though the sun should have risen.
The air smelled of iron and rot.
A hand, pale as frost, reached up from the earth.
Then another. And another.
A thousand hands clawed desperately from the ground, writhing toward him, yet recoiling as if they feared his touch.
He tried to scream. Nothing came.
A voice whispered, soft and dry, in his ear:
"Welcome home, Arien."
He spun. No one was there.
Only a girl.
Her eyes were stitched shut, black threads running like veins across her pale face.
She smiled, but it wasn't a smile. It was a warning.
"You shouldn't exist."
Arien staggered backward. His chest ached, his mind screamed, and yet… the voice echoed in him, familiar.
He had heard it before. Countless times.
And yet he remembered nothing.
The girl's hands twitched, pulling something invisible from the air. Shadows bent toward her like water, forming shapes that made his stomach twist.
A figure loomed behind her: tall, thin, and wrong. Its face was a spinning ring of broken clocks, its hands ended in shards that could tear through time itself.
"Thirty-ninth…"
The word rolled over him like thunder.
Thirty-ninth what? He tried to ask—but his throat closed.
The stitched-eyed girl grabbed his arm.
"Run, or it will remember you first."
Behind him, the ground erupted. Skeletons clawed up from the soil, screaming in silent horror.
The air became heavy, viscous, as if the world itself were trying to suffocate him.
Arien ran, his legs moving faster than thought, faster than memory. Every step was a heartbeat of terror. Every heartbeat was a reminder of deaths he didn't remember dying.
The figure followed, but it didn't walk—it undid the world as it went. Grass decayed into soil, soil into dust, and the air itself quivered and snapped.
"Why am I here?!" he shouted.
The stitched-eyed girl didn't answer. She only pulled him harder, closer to the house that wasn't a house—but a memory, breathing.
Its door loomed ahead: black wood etched with impossible symbols, twisting as if alive.
And as they neared it, the voice returned. Low, patient, ancient:
"Arien…"
His knees buckled.
He recognized it.
Not the girl's voice, not a threat—but his own.
A version of himself long dead, calling from the shadows.
He couldn't move. Couldn't think. Couldn't scream.
The stitched-eyed girl whispered again, almost pleading:
"Inside… waits the truth.
But beware—the first truth you see will try to kill you.
Because you are a paradox.
A mistake that refuses to die."
The black door groaned open.
Arien froze.
The smell of iron, rot, and smoke rolled out like a tide.
From the shadows inside, something whispered:
"Welcome back, Arien."
And for the first time, he remembered dying.
Not once. Not twice.
But thirty-eight times before.
The house waited for him.
And this time… it would not let him leave.