The days after the Threshold felt unreal, like the world had been wrapped in glass—visible, fragile, and too quiet.
Nothing exploded. No skies split open. No armies marched through our street.
And somehow, that was worse.
Kristina sat at the kitchen table, tracing circles in a notebook she hadn't written in for years. The pencil moved, stopped, moved again. Shapes formed—half-forts, half-symbols—then blurred into lines she erased immediately, as if afraid they might remember themselves.
I watched from the doorway.
"You always do that when you're thinking," I said.
She looked up. "Do what?"
I hesitated. "That little line thing. With your pencil."
She stared at the page, confused. "I don't."
A thin crack ran through my chest.
Grandma noticed it too. She always did.
"Memory isn't a light switch," she said later, when Kristina stepped outside with Mom. "It flickers first."
I leaned against the counter. "So this is it? It's starting?"
"Yes," Grandma replied. "But gently. Malachor doesn't want to alert you too early. He wants doubt. Confusion. You questioning whether anything is wrong at all."
I clenched my fists. "I won't let that happen."
Grandma met my eyes. "You won't stop it. But you can outpace it."
Training began that night.
Not with explosions or glowing circles—but with stillness.
Grandma made me sit on the floor, palms open, eyes closed.
"Imagination isn't about force," she said. "It's about permission."
"Permission from what?" I asked.
"Reality."
I scoffed. "Reality doesn't ask permission."
She smiled. "Exactly."
I focused. Thought of the fort. Of Kristina laughing inside it. Of the world bending, just a little, because it trusted us.
The air shifted.
Not visibly. Not dramatically. But I felt it—like a muscle I hadn't known I had finally flexing.
"That's it," Grandma said softly. "You're learning."
Across the room, Kristina watched from the couch, pretending not to.
"You look stupid," she said.
I opened one eye. "You're just mad I'm better at sitting still."
She rolled her eyes, then paused. "Why are you doing this again?"
The question hit harder than any attack.
"You know why," I said carefully.
She frowned. "I do?"
I forced a smile. "Yeah. You do."
She laughed it off—but later that night, I heard her crying quietly into her pillow.
Far away, in a world stitched together from fear and obedience, Malachor observed through fractured mirrors.
"The first tremor has begun," a general reported. "The girl shows early symptoms."
"And the boy?" Malachor asked.
"He adapts faster than predicted."
Malachor's fingers curled slowly.
"Then accelerate the pressure elsewhere," he said. "If the curse cannot break the girl quickly, it will reshape the world around her."
"Yes, Sovereign."
Malachor turned back to the mirror, watching me sit beside Kristina as she slept, counting her breaths like a prayer.
"Run," he murmured. "Grow. Train."
His eyes darkened.
"It will make the fall… exquisite."
The next morning, Kristina forgot the name of her favorite song.
She laughed it off, pretending it didn't matter.
I didn't.
I wrote it down. Along with everything else.
Because if memory was the battlefield—
Then I would become the archive.
And this time, imagination wouldn't just play defense.
It would prepare for war.