The morning sun had barely managed to clear the horizon, its pale, watery light filtering weakly through the dusty windowpanes of Haya's bedroom. On the desk, a half-empty plate of fried rice sat cold, the grease beginning to solidify into a dull, white film around the edges. Haya had forced himself to swallow a few spoonfuls earlier to appease his mother, but his throat felt tight, constricted by the lingering heaviness of the previous night.
He lay flat on his back, his body sinking deeply into the mattress as his thumb mindlessly swiped upward across the cold, glowing screen of his smartphone. A meaningless stream of social media feeds, viral videos, and text notifications blurred past his eyes, but none of it registered. His focus was entirely fractured. The phone was merely a shield, a visual distraction to keep his hands occupied while his mind spun backward in a relentless, exhausting circle.
Why was she so terrified?
The question beat against his skull like a muffled drum. The raw, jagged image of his mother collapsing against his chest, her fingers clawing into the dirty fabric of his shirt as if she were trying to physically anchor him to the earth, refused to fade. It wasn't the standard, structured anger of a parent whose teenager had simply stayed out past a curfew. It was a visceral, primal panic. It was the behavior of someone who had seen a ghost—someone carrying a deep, unhealed trauma that had suddenly been triggered by his absence.
Haya lowered the phone, letting it drop onto his chest with a dull thud. He stared blankly at the ceiling tiles, counting the faint water stains in the corner.
Did I do something? his inner voice whispered into the quiet room. Did I do something so terrible, so completely reckless when I was a kid that it left her scarred like this? Is that why everyone treats me like I'm made of glass?
The silence of his own room offered no answers. The empty spaces in his memory remained vast and heavily guarded. Realizing that the walls of his own mind were a dead end, Haya swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His feet hit the cold floor tiles, sending a sharp chill running up his spine. He needed to push someone for an answer, even if it meant tearing a small hole in the carefully maintained peace of the house.
He stood up, crossed the threshold of his room, and stepped into the dim hallway. Three short steps took him to the adjacent door. He didn't knock. He simply turned the handle and pushed it open.
Inside, the room was exactly as it had been yesterday. Inari was sprawled out on her side across a mountain of tangled blankets, her knees bent and her bare feet swinging slowly through the air. A fresh volume of manga was held inches from her face, the bright, dramatic ink of the pages absorbing her entire attention.
As the door clicked against the wall, Inari didn't even lower the book. She merely let out a sharp, irritated click of her tongue.
"What do you want, Haya?" she asked, her voice flat, her eyes tracking the text bubbles. "Can't you see I'm in the middle of a chapter?"
Haya didn't leave. He stepped further into the room, leaning his lower back against the edge of her wooden study desk, his arms crossing over his chest. "I just want to ask you something. It'll only take a minute."
"Whatever it is, the answer is no," Inari muttered, flipping a page with a loud, deliberate sffft. "Go bother Amar."
"Amar isn't here," Haya said, keeping his tone steady, refusing to let her casual dismissiveness turn him away. He took a slow breath, his eyes locking onto the side of her face. "Inari... did I ever do something really bad when we were younger? Something so terrible that it would make Mom act the way she did last night?"
The rhythmic swinging of Inari's feet stopped instantly.
For a fraction of a second, the entire room seemed to drop in temperature. Inari's fingers tightened slightly against the edges of the manga, the thin paper crinkling under her grip. She froze, her eyes staring fixedly at a single panel, her breath caught in her throat. The hesitation was brief—almost imperceptible—but to Haya, who was watching her like a hawk, it was as loud as a gunshot.
Then, just as quickly, she forced herself to relax. She flipped another page, though she clearly wasn't reading anymore. "Why are you asking stupid questions so early in the morning? Go away."
"I'm serious, Inari," Haya pressed, his voice dropping an octave, becoming heavier. "Mom's reaction last night... it was too much. It was way beyond normal."
Inari finally snapped the book shut, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and sitting upright. Her expression was pulled into a sharp, defensive scowl. "What? Overreacting? Is that what you think she did?"
"No, that's not what I mean—"
"You should be down there begging her for forgiveness right now, Haya!" Inari interrupted, her voice rising in a sudden burst of genuine irritation. "You completely vanished for an entire day without saying a single word to anyone! Your phone was dead, you didn't show up at the shop, and you just expect everyone to be perfectly fine with it?"
"I'm not trying to ridicule how she felt!" Haya said, stepping closer to the bed, his hands extending slightly in a gesture of frustration. "I know I should have told someone I was going out. I accept the fault for that, okay? I know what I did wrong. But I want to know why she was that specific kind of terrified. I didn't go to some dangerous place. I just went for a ride around our own village. Why does me going out alone feel like a death sentence to her?"
Inari glared up at him, her eyes wide and flashing with an emotion that looked dangerously like a mix of anger and hidden fear. She opened her mouth to speak, but her jaw clenched shut. She looked away, her fingers digging into the fabric of her blanket. "As long as you know you were wrong, that's enough. Just don't do it again."
"But you still haven't answered my question," Haya said, his inner self growling with a deep, unsatisfied frustration. "Inari, look at me. What are you all hiding from me?"
Inari's face twisted into an expression of pure annoyance. She scrambled off the bed, her small frame moving with sudden, aggressive speed. "You're being so incredibly annoying today! Go away! Go back to your room and stop projecting your weird theories onto everyone else!"
Before Haya could react, Inari grabbed him by the forearm and forcefully shoved him toward the open hallway. She was surprisingly strong when she was angry. Haya stumbled backward out of the doorway, and before he could plant his feet to argue, the heavy wooden door was slammed violently in his face.
BAM.
A second later, the sharp, distinct click of the deadbolt sliding into place echoed through the corridor.
Haya stood in the dim hallway, staring blankly at the painted wood of her door. The anger inside him began to recede, replaced by a desperate, hollow exhaustion. He stepped closer, leaning his forehead against the cool surface of the door.
"Inari," he called out softly, his voice pleading through the wood. "Come on. Just open up for a minute. Let's just talk like normal. I'll... I'll buy you that expensive matcha ice cream from the town square later. The one you always complain is too pricey. Just talk to me."
He waited. He pressed his ear against the door, listening intently. But the room inside remained dead silent. There was no rustle of blankets, no shifting of feet, no angry retorts. Just a cold, unyielding wall of isolation.
Haya let out a long, ragged breath and straightened his posture. He turned his gaze toward the door at the end of the hall—Amar's room. He took two steps toward it, intending to knock, to demand that his older brother give him the truth man-to-man. But as his hand rose to knock, a sudden memory halted him. Amar wasn't home. He had left early that morning to help their mother manage the heavy weekend rush at the nursery store.
He was entirely alone in the house.
Defeated, Haya walked back into his own room and let the door swing shut behind him. The air in his bedroom felt heavy and stale. He dragged his feet across the floor and collapsed heavily onto the unmade bed, his body feeling like it was made of solid lead. He rolled over onto his side, staring out the window at the distant, shimmering green fields, his mind spinning into a dark, inescapable loop.
Why? Why the silence? Why the anger?
The endless calculations, the visual glitches of the casuarina tree, the phantom girl in the white dress, and his mother's weeping face all bled together into a chaotic, exhausting blur. The physical toll of the past three days—the heavy labor of building the open hut, the intense heat, and the emotional battery of his own fractured mind—finally caught up to him. His eyelids grew heavy, the real world began to lose its edges, and within minutes, Haya sank beneath the surface of consciousness, falling into a deep, heavy slumber.
The transition into the dream world wasn't a peaceful drift; it was a violent, regressive pull.
The reality of his bedroom dissolved completely, replaced by a suffocating rush of sensory details. The air turned bitingly cold, thick with the rich, heavy scent of wet clay, damp mountain ferns, and wild earth. He was in the forest—the deep, labyrinthine forest of the foothills he had wandered through the previous afternoon.
The dream possessed a strange, cunning familiarity. Haya stood perfectly still among the towering, ancient trees, his eyes darting frantically across the shadowed landscape. The entire environment felt alive, shifting and warping around him like a living canvas.
Suddenly, a movement directly ahead caught his attention.
A young boy was picking himself up from the jungle floor. The boy looked to be no older than nine or ten, his clothes covered in dark mud and bits of dried leaves as if he had just suffered a hard fall. As the boy stabilized his balance and stood up straight, another figure stepped into the clearing directly across from him.
Haya's heart gave a violent, painful thud within the dream state. His breath caught sharply in his throat, rendering him completely speechless.
It was her.
The figure was wearing the exact same white, one-piece summer dress, its pristine fabric flowing effortlessly despite the heavy mountain air. The wide-brimmed straw hat sat tilted on her head, the blue ribbon vibrating with a sharp, impossible contrast against the deep emerald green of the jungle. It was a sight that felt so profoundly, agonizingly familiar that it made Haya's soul ache, yet he couldn't grasp why.
Without a single word, the young boy and the girl in the white dress suddenly burst into a sprint, running toward each other before twisting away into a frantic, playful game of chase. They dashed through the thick undergrowth, their high-pitched, echoing laughter bouncing off the ancient tree trunks like silver bells.
Driven by an overwhelming, primal instinct, Haya began to run too. He pursued them through the dense forest, but he kept his movements calculated, darting from the shadow of one massive trunk to another, desperately ensuring he remained completely hidden. He didn't want them to know he was there. He was a phantom observer tracking his own ghosts.
The chase led them rapidly upward, the incline becoming steeper and steeper until the dense trees suddenly gave way to a sharp, blinding expanse of open sky.
They had reached the summit—a sheer, rocky cliff edge that dropped into an endless abyss of green canopy far below.
Haya skidded to a halt behind the final boundary of bushes, his chest heaving as he watched the scene unfold. The girl in the white dress reached the very edge of the precipice and stopped dead still, her back turned to the drop, her dress billowing violently in the high-altitude wind.
But the young boy didn't slow down. He was moving with absolute, blind momentum, his small face filled with a desperate, frantic determination to catch her, to lock his arms around her. He lunged forward, his hands reaching out to embrace the white fabric.
No! Haya wanted to scream, but no sound could leave his throat.
Right as the boy's arms were about to close around her, the girl in the white dress vanished into thin air. There was no flash of light, no slow fade—she simply ceased to exist, dissolving instantly like a phantom hallucination created by the heavy mountain mist.
The boy's momentum carried him forward into empty space. His foot slipped violently on the loose, wet clay at the cliff's edge. His eyes widened in sudden, absolute terror as his balance failed, and with a short, muffled cry, he tipped over the brink, disappearing down the sheer face of the mountain.
The paralysis binding Haya snapped.
"No!" he screamed internally, his legs moving before his brain could process the danger. He burst from the bushes and sprinted toward the edge of the cliff. Reaching the precipice, he dropped flat onto his stomach, crawling frantically forward until his head overhung the deadly drop. He gripped the rough rocks, his eyes scanning the vertical stone face, desperately praying the boy had caught a root or a ledge—that he could still be saved.
But there was nothing. Looking down, his vision traveled through layers of thick, swirling mist into an endless, suffocating ocean of black-green forest beneath. The boy was gone.
Haya let out a ragged breath, his heart hammering against the stone floor of the cliff. He braced his palms against the dirt, preparing to push his upper body back up onto the safety of the ridge.
SNAP.
Before he could lift his weight, a hand shot upward from the empty space below the cliff edge.
It was a pale, bloodless hand, its skin looking unnaturally smooth and cold. The fingers were small, delicate, and slender—unmistakably the hand of a young, teenage girl. The grip was instantaneous and horrifyingly absolute. It latched onto Haya's right wrist like a vice made of solid ice.
Haya's eyes widened in raw, unadulterated terror. He began to thrash violently, using his free hand to scratch and claw at the pale fingers, trying to break the hold. "Let go! Let go of me!" he screamed into the void.
But the delicate hand possessed a terrifying, supernatural strength. It didn't budge an inch. Instead, with a sudden, violent downward jerk, the hand pulled. Haya's anchors failed. His body slid over the smooth clay of the edge, and before he could scream a second time, he was dragged into the empty, rushing air, falling backward into the bottomless abyss.
The fall felt infinite, the wind roaring in his ears, stripping the air from his lungs. The green canopy rushed up to meet him like a solid wall of stone.
THUD.
The impact was instantaneous, a jarring, full-body shock that shattered the dream state.
Haya's eyes snapped wide open. The darkness of the fall vanished, replaced by the blurry, distorted lines of a ceiling he didn't recognize for a split second. He was lying flat on his side, his face pressed against a hard, cold surface. He blinked rapidly, his vision slowly clearing, tracking the floorboards.
Directly next to him, lying in the exact same twisted position on the floor, was the young boy from the cliff.
The boy was completely still, his clothes torn and stained with dirt. Haya's breath caught as he forced his blurry, trembling vision to focus on the child's face. He crawled an inch closer, his eyes tracing the line of the jaw, the shape of the nose, and the small mole near the lips.
The features solidified. The realization hit him like a physical blow to the chest.
The boy's face was his own. It was a mirror image of Haya when he was nine years old.
The sheer, overwhelming horror of the sight ripped through his chest. The boundary between slumber and reality collapsed completely, and Haya snapped.
"AAAAAHHHH!"
He let out a violent, lung-shattering scream, his entire body convulsing as he threw himself backward away from the phantom image.
BANG!
The bedroom door was thrown open with such force that it bounced violently against the wall.
"Haya! Yo, Haya! You okay, man?!"
Amar rushed into the room, his face pale and tight with an immediate, defensive panic. He took two frantic steps inside before stopping dead in his tracks, his eyes scanning the space. He looked at the bed, which was completely empty, and then lowered his gaze to the floor.
Haya was tangled in his own bedsheets, sitting slumped against the base of his desk, his chest heaving in ragged, violent gasps, his face completely drenched in a thick layer of cold sweat. His hands were shaking so hard he had to press them flat against the floor tiles to keep himself upright.
Amar blinked, his tense posture relaxing just a fraction into an expression of sheer bewilderment. "What... whatcha doing on the floor, man?"
Haya looked up, his eyes bloodshot and wide with a lingering, terrified confusion. He looked down at his own hands, then at the empty floorboards beside him where the dead child had just been lying. There was nothing there. Just dust motes dancing in the dim light.
"Huh?" Haya rasped, his voice cracked and raw from the scream. "I'm... I'm on the floor?"
"Yeah," Amar said, slowly closing the door halfway, though his eyes remained fixed on his brother's disheveled state. "You're on the floor. Did you roll off the bed or something?"
Haya shook his head rapidly, trying to clear the residual horror from his brain, but the image of the pale hand and his own childhood face remained burned into his retinas. "Huh? Amar? Why... why are you here? I thought you were at the shop."
Amar let out a soft, dry laugh, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned against the doorframe. "The shop? Haya, I've been back for hours. I came up here to see what you were doing. You've been buried in this bed the whole day."
"The whole day?" Haya repeated, his voice barely a whisper. He turned his head slowly toward the window.
The bright, blue-sky landscape of the morning was completely gone. Outside, the world had dropped into a deep, heavy twilight. The sun had already sunk beneath the horizon, leaving behind a bruised, bleeding trail of deep violet and dark orange across the village plains. It was already seven in the evening. He had slept away the entire day, trapped inside a nightmare that felt more real than the room he was sitting in.
"Yeah, the whole day," Amar said softly, his tone shifting into something a bit more gentle, though his eyes carried that same guarded, watchful weight. "Come on. Go wash your face up and come downstairs. Mom's already setting the table. Food is ready."
Amar paused, waiting for a response. When Haya only managed a weak nod, Amar turned to leave, tossing one last sentence over his shoulder. "I'm going to wait for you downstairs. Don't take too long."
The door clicked shut as Amar left the room, his footsteps fading down the wooden stairs.
The moment the silence returned, Haya collapsed backward against the desk, his head hitting the wood with a soft thud. He closed his eyes and began to breathe heavily, his chest rising and falling in deep, ragged hollows.
He was terrified. He was completely, profoundly terrified.
The confusion in his head had shifted from a frustrating mystery into a living, breathing horror. The dream wasn't just a random collection of thoughts born from a fever. It was a memory. A repressed, shattered memory that had finally forced its way to the surface.
He had been on that cliff. He had chased that girl. And the little boy who had fallen—the boy his family was so desperately trying to protect, the boy his mother was traumatized over—was entirely, undeniably himself.