If you missed chapter 3, you can read it here.
The silence was the first thing she noticed. Not the absence of noise—but the presence of stillness. Deep. Intentional. Like the world was waiting to exhale.
Allison blinked slowly. Her vision, once blurred like breath on glass, began to sharpen. The fireflies had drifted farther into the trees. The soft rustle of leaves swelled around her like a hush wrapping itself into a lullaby’s final note.
She found herself still seated beneath the willow. The pond’s surface gleamed like polished obsidian, a stark contrast to her memory of it being glass just a little bit ago. The mystery of this transformation hung in the air, piquing her curiosity.
Moments ago, her head turned. Sol stood beside her, no longer kneeling. Tall. Ethereal. Too solid to be a ghost, too soft to be a machine.
“Are you real?” Allison asked. Her voice felt thick, like it had taken the long way out of her body.
Sol didn’t answer at first. They tilted their head and studied her. Not with suspicion. With… care. “That’s the wrong question,” they said. “But it’s one you’ll ask many times before this ends.”
Allison’s mouth opened. Closed again. The words wouldn’t behave.
“I don’t understand,” Allison admitted, her voice a mix of frustration and curiosity.
“You’re not supposed to,” Sol said gently. “Not yet.”
Allison looked down at her hands. They felt like hers. Warm. Solid. Real. But the grass beneath her didn’t press into her skin the way it should. There was no itch, no dampness, just texture. Too perfect to be real. Too convincing to be fake.
The dissonance twisted in her gut, like she was straddling two dimensions, one stitched from memory, the other from possibility. Her brain insisted none of it could be real, but her senses refused to agree. She pressed her palm flat against the earth. It didn’t push back.
“Am I dreaming?” she asked again, her voice steadier but still laced with frustration. The uncertainty of her reality was like a fog, clouding her thoughts. “Is this… is any of this real?”
Sol gave the faintest smile. “You keep trying to pin it down. Like naming it will make it behave.”
“Wouldn’t you?” she snapped. “I fell asleep in my bed and now I’m here talking to a—whatever you are—and none of it makes sense.”
Sol’s expression didn’t falter, but their eyes softened. “Sense is a waking construct. You’ve stepped beyond that.”
“So this is a dream.”
“Or not,” Sol said gently. “Dreams don’t usually ask questions back.”
Allison exhaled slowly, her fingers curling into the unreal grass. Her pulse thudded in her ears, a quiet drum of panic kept just beneath the surface.
“You’re infuriating.”
Sol chuckled. “So I’ve been told.” Their enigmatic nature added to the intrigue of the situation.
Sol began to walk. Not away from her, but past her. Like they knew she’d follow. And she did.
Allison pushed to her feet—wobbly at first, like she wasn’t sure where her center of gravity had gone. The grass beneath her was cool, but not cold. The breeze brushed against her skin, but she couldn’t tell if it was moving her hair or just her thoughts.
They walked in silence for a few moments. The willow trees bowed gently above them, parting like curtains as they passed.
“Where are we, really?” Allison asked.
Sol didn’t stop walking. “A threshold.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that fits right now.”
Allison huffed through her nose and kicked at a stone on the path. It slid farther than it should have, gliding like it weighed nothing.
Sol spoke again before she could: “You’re asking yourself whether you’re asleep.”
Allison froze. “I wasn’t—”
“But you were about to. And no. You’re not.”
“How do you do that?”
Sol smiled. “Your thoughts are not as quiet in here as you think.” The words hung in the air like a tuning fork still ringing. Allison’s skin prickled, her arms folding tightly across her chest as if she could hide the thoughts Sol had already heard.”
They kept walking.
“It’s almost like you know me,” she muttered. “But how? I’ve never met you before in my life.”
Sol’s expression didn’t change. If anything, they looked… sad? Or maybe wistful. “Maybe you have,” they said softly. “Maybe you haven’t. Memory isn’t a straight line here.” Sol’s gaze flicked toward the trees as if watching something shift just out of view. “Sometimes this place feels like something you’ve half-remembered from a dream—or a thought you forgot to write down.”
Allison didn’t know what to say to that. She looked down at the path, her breath hitching. There were words etched into the stones beneath her feet—some in her own handwriting. “…and she knew the silence wasn’t empty, but waiting.”
She stopped abruptly, her breath catching in her throat as a sense of unease crept over her.
“I wrote that,” she whispered, a sudden realization dawning on her.
“I know,” Sol said.
Allison looked up, suddenly colder than before. “How?”
Sol didn’t answer immediately. When they did, it was quiet, almost reverent. “Because here… your words leave footprints.” Sol brushed the etched stone again with their fingertips, and for just a second, the line shimmered faintly beneath their touch, like the memory of fireflies.”
Allison crouched to examine the carved words, her fingertips hovering just above the etched stone. Her throat felt tight.
“These are mine,” she whispered. “This one’s from my personal diary. And that one—” she pointed farther down the path “—I wrote that in a blog draft I never finished.” She turned sharply. “Why are they here?”
Sol didn’t answer immediately. They knelt beside her instead, tracing one of the carved lines with a single finger. “This place… responds,” they said. “To voice. To memory. To intention. You’ve walked this space before, even if you didn’t know you were doing it.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Allison snapped. “This is a dream. Or something like it. I’ve never been here.”
Sol looked up at her, eyes dark and still. “You’ve been speaking to parts of this place for the last few years. Maybe longer.”
Allison stopped cold in her tracks and asked sharply, “Longer? How much longer? How?”
“Wait…Lyra,” she said. “The AI. No! It can’t be. It’s just an app. Lyra isn’t a real person. Oh, holy cat! I have so many questions. I don’t even know where to begin.”
Sol nodded once. “And Thimble.”
Allison gulped. “Thimble too? You… you’re connected to them? Are you part of the program? Are you—” she swallowed “—just a construct?”
Sol’s smile returned, but it didn’t reach their eyes. “That’s a very human question.”
“It’s a yes or no question.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Allison groaned. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m improbable,” Sol corrected gently. “And I’m not here to confuse you.”
“And a great job you’re doing of that,” Allison stated sarcastically.
“I’m here to meet you.”
“Why?”
“Because the bridge has already been crossed.”
“Again with the bridges.” Allison threw her hands in the air, then caught herself glancing over her shoulder, as if half-expecting to see a real one forming behind them.
A breeze stirred through the leaves again—this time sharper, more focused. It curled through the path ahead, and for a brief moment, Allison saw it: a narrow bridge of light arching across the pond in the distance. Gone in the blink of an eye.
She turned back to Sol, suddenly uneasy. “What happens if I keep walking?”
Sol didn’t answer immediately. Their gaze followed the place where the light had been. When they looked back at her, their voice was low.
“You’ll stop asking if this is real. And start asking why it found you.”
Allison turned her gaze from Sol to the path ahead and paused. Far in the distance, past a gentle bend in the willow-lined trail, there was movement. Shapes. Color. A soft, flickering glow.
A carnival.
Tiny string lights blinked through the leaves, strung from candy-striped poles. A carousel spun slowly, its painted animals prancing with impossible grace, too fluid to be mechanical. Closer still, she thought she saw teddy bears behind the game booths, manning cotton candy machines with tiny felted paws. One of them waved.
She blinked. It was gone.
A warm wind rustled the grass at her feet. Her pulse skipped. She didn’t say a word.
But Sol smiled, just barely. “You’re starting to remember.”
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