The drowned sky

The moment Sage stepped into the pool, the world let go of her.

She didn’t fall.

She didn’t swim.

She floated through a place where time and direction didn’t seem to matter—only light, and sound, and a strange sense of recognition, as if the stars around her knew her name before she ever learned it herself.

It was like dreaming underwater. Stars drifted past her shoulders. She could feel memories brushing against her skin—hers, and others’. Some were warm and golden, others sharp and cold, like fragments of lives that ended too soon.

And then, all at once—

Stillness.

Her feet touched solid ground. Her breath caught. She was standing in a forest—but it was not the one she knew.

The trees were impossibly tall, with bark like polished silver and leaves that shimmered like glass. The ground beneath her was soft, glowing faintly with blue moss. The air was heavy with quiet—not silence, but something deeper. Stillness with weight.

Sage turned in a slow circle.

This place was beautiful. Ethereal. But wrong.

There were no sounds of animals. No insects. No wind.

And the sky above was not sky at all—it was a black mirror, stretching in every direction, reflecting the forest below like a second world hung upside down.

Her grandmother stood beside her, barefoot, robes dusted in stardust. She looked even older here—tired, but brighter, like the magic of this place lived in her bones.

“This is the Between,” she said softly. “The place where memory and reality meet.”

Sage stepped closer. “It’s… beautiful. But it doesn’t feel alive.”

Her grandmother nodded solemnly. “It used to be.”

They began walking through the mirrored forest, their reflections moving beneath their feet like shadows. As they passed under arching branches and broken stone gates, Sage noticed something strange: the silver bark on some trees had turned black at the roots. Cracked. Diseased.

She knelt beside one of the dying trees, touching the darkened wood. It pulsed under her fingers—like it was afraid.

“Something’s poisoning it,” she whispered.

“Yes,” her grandmother said. “The Hollow One. A creature born from what we forget. What we abandon. It found its way into the Between when the last gate was left unguarded.”

Sage’s chest tightened. “Was that you?”

Her grandmother didn’t speak right away. Then she looked at her with heavy eyes. “Yes.”

They came to a clearing filled with strange stone structures—columns twisted like smoke, with ancient symbols carved into them. In the center stood a monument shaped like an open eye.

The eye blinked.

Sage staggered back. “What was that?”

“A Watcher,” her grandmother said. “It sees anyone who enters the Between. It remembers every name that’s ever been spoken here. And it knows you.”

The eye turned. Focused.

A voice rang out, though no lips moved:

“The child has come. The forest chose. The forest risks everything.”

Sage’s blood ran cold. “What does that mean?”

Her grandmother placed a hand on her shoulder.

“It means, Sage… that you are now the forest’s final choice.”

⸻

To be continued…

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