Location: Reykjavik, Narrow Street, Elias's House.
Time: January 2026. Midnight.
The ink was still damp on my fingertip. That black stain wasn't just a color; it was a slap in the face of the laws of physics. How could a woman who vanished in Scotland nine years ago write in a diary inside a locked room in Iceland nine years later?
"432 Hz..." I whispered. My voice bounced off the corners of the room and echoed back.
My heart felt as if it wanted to pierce through my chest. My mother's love for Interstellar wasn't just an interest; it was a messaging language between the layers of time and space. The red diary on the table no longer looked like a stack of paper to me; it looked like a living, breathing entity.
At that exact moment, the door opened silently. Elias Thorne stood in the doorway. He held a cup of hot herbal tea in his hand, but the expression on his face was colder than the tea itself. Elias's eyes flickered first to me, then to the diary lying on the floor.
"Lyra? Still not asleep?" His voice sounded muffled. As he entered the room, he brought with him the scent of dampness and the old books he always carried. "Are you looking at those sorrowful pages again? I told you to put them on the furthest corner of the shelf."
I quickly placed the diary on the table, trying to hide the ink stain in the palm of my hand. But Elias's eyes were sharp. He had spent years tracking the slightest tremors of the stars. He took a step toward me.
"What happened to your hand?" he asked, his voice suddenly sharpening. He approached the table and looked at the diary again. In that moment, I saw the color drain from Elias's face. He saw it too. The shimmer in the writing, the freshness...
"This is impossible," Elias whispered. He didn't even notice how he set the cup down; tea spilled over the edges, soaking into the old wood. "This is Elara's handwriting. But... I checked this diary yesterday, Lyra! This page was blank!"
"She is here, Elias!" I lunged forward and grabbed his arms. "The ink hasn't even dried yet! My mother is sending me a message. She's calling out to me from that place where my father summoned her!"
Elias pulled his arms away from me. An expression of mixed fear and anger crossed his face. "No! This is a trap, Lyra. Or you... you're starting to blur the lines between reality and delusion. Your mother was torn apart at that lighthouse nine years ago! I saw it with my own eyes!"
"You only looked, Elias! But you didn't see!" I shouted. The wall of unshakable loyalty between us suffered its first major crack. "My mother said reality is a veil. And I have found the frequency on the other side of that veil!"
"Go to sleep, Lyra!" Elias's voice boomed through the room. "I will destroy this diary tomorrow. I promised your mother I would save you from this darkness. Even if I have to protect you from yourself!"
Elias reached for the diary, but I moved faster, grabbing it and clutching it to my chest. He looked at me with pitying eyes, took a deep breath, and walked out. The metallic sound of the door locking felt like a sting in my heart. Elias didn't want to lock me in this room; he wanted to imprison me in his own reality.
432 Hertz and the Shattered Mirror
Once the sound of Elias's footsteps faded down the hallway, I immediately reached into the hidden compartment under my bed. There lay the old Sony radio receiver—the only inheritance from my father that Elias claimed to have "thrown in the trash," but which I had secretly salvaged.
I turned the radio dial with trembling fingers. Static... Hiss... Crackle... Finally, I landed on the number 432.
In that instant, gravity seemed to vanish for a single second. The pens on the desk lifted slightly into the air, hovered, and fell back down. From the radio came not music, but the sound of a breath. It was like the sound of water flowing with a groan beneath a massive glacier.
I looked out the window. The Reykjavik night sky was shrouded in a violet mist. I stepped in front of the mirror. I wanted to see the fear on my face, but what I saw froze me.
I blinked. My reflection in the mirror did not. I took a step back. The Lyra in the mirror remained still, her hand touching the glass from the other side as if reaching out to me. A full second of delay. The "reality lag" I had read about in quantum physics classes was now happening in my room, in my body. I was no longer on the same wavelength as my own time.
"Mom?" I asked in a whisper.
My reflection's lips didn't move, but in the background, on the old Arrival movie poster on my wall, numbers began to glow in a violet light: 11:11.
This couldn't be a hallucination. This was a summons. I grabbed my bag from the desk and shoved my mother's diary inside. The door Elias had locked was no longer an obstacle for me; if reality could tear this easily, I could pass right through that tear.
I opened the window. The cold Reykjavik air hit my face like a sword. Below, a strange shadow flickered on the walls of Solveig's house, but it wasn't a human shadow. It was like a wave waiting for me.
"I'm coming," I said to the darkness.
And leaving nine years of silence behind, I took my first step into the icy night, toward the address of the first puzzle: "The 11th House."