He didn't make a sound when he arrived.
No rustling leaves, no snapping branches.
He simply… stopped not being there.
Sera sensed him before I did. Her grimoire trembled.
—"There's something else with us," she said.
I turned toward the cabin's entrance. The air thickened, like reality itself was holding its breath.
And then we saw him.
A tall, slender man wrapped in a seamless gray coat. His face was indistinct, like a memory you're already misremembering.
But the most unsettling thing was what he lacked: a shadow. Not even under the cabin's dim light.
—
"You shouldn't have read the journal," he said.
His voice didn't come from his mouth. It came from inside my head.
"Who are you?" I asked, tightening my grip on the knife.
"I'm not a what. I'm a when."
—
Sera stepped forward, defying her own trembling.
"Are you part of the system?"
"No. I'm what's left outside when the system rewrites itself. The residue. The glitch. The memory of a timeline that was erased."
—
He looked at me. Not with his eyes, but with an intent I could feel in my teeth.
"Ryouhei, every step you take off-script creates a crack. And there are things—people—who live in those cracks."
"You?"
"Me. And others. Some want to help you. Others… see too much of themselves in you."
—
Sera swallowed hard.
"And what do you want?"
The man without a shadow smiled. A tired, sad smile.
"I want to see if someone can reach the end this time… without becoming the monster they were trying to stop."
—
With that, he walked toward the far wall.
And passed through the wood as if it wasn't there.