Part 1: Back to Normal (But Not Really).

  The sun came out that morning, almost like it had something to prove.

  The sidewalks were dry. The clouds were soft. The wind had calmed into something mild enough to forget.

  And still, the walk to school felt heavier than it should have.

  Rin walked beside Aurenya. Not too close, not too far. Neither of them spoke.

  Behind them, a few steps off pace, Mika kept her earbuds in — but the music wasn’t playing. She wasn’t sure if either of them knew. She wasn’t sure if she cared.

  When they reached the gate, Aurenya slowed. Looked up at the school building like she was seeing it for the first time — again.

  It didn’t get easier, this whole pretending-to-be-normal thing.

  But she nodded once, as if to herself.

  Then they stepped inside.

  Homeroom moved like a machine.

  Announcements. Attendance. A reminder about some upcoming event no one cared about.

  Rin sat stiffly in her chair, hands folded, gaze ahead but not focused.

  Aurenya sat near the window, hair pulled back today, eyes following the clouds instead of the class board.

  Mika pretended to copy notes.

  And Suzu… well, Suzu was building something.

  At first, no one paid attention to the soft clicks and rustles coming from the far left row. But by the time the second period bell rang, she had fully assembled what appeared to be a homemade dowsing rod from two plastic rulers, a shoelace, and something suspiciously fork-like.

  The teacher stared.

  “Suzu, please put that away.”

  “I’m investigating,” Suzu said solemnly.

  “Investigating what?”

  “Unholy vibes. I’m pretty sure the ghost of emotional repression is haunting this classroom.”

  The teacher blinked.

  Suzu blinked back.

  Rin, despite everything, huffed out a small breath of laughter.

  Even Aurenya smiled — quietly, faintly.

  Mika didn’t. She just looked sideways across the room.

  When class ended, the students spilled out into the hall in a wave of motion and sound. Lockers slammed. Voices overlapped. Everything was moving again.

  Mika stood near the end of the row, watching the others gather their things.

  She glanced over just in time to see Aurenya shift her sleeve up — adjusting her bag strap.

  There, for a second, she saw it.

  A thin glint of silver on her wrist. Not jewellery. Not paint.

  It moved.

  Mika looked away fast.

  She didn’t want Aurenya to know she’d seen it.

  Didn’t want Rin to look over and catch the way her expression cracked.

  She turned down the hall and disappeared into the crowd before anyone could say anything.

  In the quiet that followed, Suzu leaned toward Rin and whispered, “Okay but seriously… if Aurenya ever starts levitating, I get dibs on filming it.”

  “She’s not going to levitate,” Rin muttered.

  “Not with that attitude.”

  Rin sighed.

  The hallway seemed louder than usual today. But somehow, everything inside her felt quieter.

  Like something was preparing to change again.

  Part 2: Lunch Fractures.

  The cafeteria was louder than usual — all overlapping voices and scraping chairs, the chaos of ordinary noise.

  But at the table in the back corner, there was a kind of stillness.

  Rin sat with her lunch half-picked apart, not really eating. Aurenya sat across from her, unbothered by the noise, calmly observing the room as if trying to decode what everyone was pretending to be.

  They weren’t talking.

  But they were not talking, either.

  It was the kind of silence that only existed between people who knew something important had already been said.

  Mika walked in three minutes late with her tray balanced on one hand, hair a little messier than usual. She paused just inside the threshold, eyes sweeping across the room.

  She spotted them.

  Aurenya. Rin. Together, again.

  She hovered there for a moment — tray still in her hands, pretending to look for an open seat.

  Then she turned and dropped into a nearby table instead. Not too far. Not too close.

  Just enough to keep from being noticed.

  Or so she hoped.

  Then came the hurricane.

  Suzu.

  “LADIES,” she announced, dropping her bag with a thud and setting her lunchbox down like it contained national secrets. “You will never believe what I found in the vending machine.”

  “We’re not guessing,” Rin said.

  Aurenya tilted her head, amused. “Was it food?”

  “No,” Suzu said darkly, “it was a challenge to my very existence.”

  She pulled out a mangled snack bag and set it on the table like evidence. “How am I supposed to interpret this? Three cheese sticks and a granola bar. This is what betrayal looks like.”

  Rin blinked. “…I don’t think that’s betrayal.”

  “IT’S CLOSE.”

  Mika, at the next table, stabbed at her rice without looking up.

  Suzu plopped into the seat beside Aurenya. She offered her a juice box. Aurenya blinked, then took it politely.

  “I’m assembling a theory,” Suzu announced as she opened her bento.

  “Of course you are,” Rin muttered.

  “Something’s off this week. You can feel it, right? Like we’re all pretending it’s just homework and vending sabotage, but really someone’s going to sprout wings or fangs or, like, antlers.”

  She took a bite of her sandwich.

  Then, without warning — quiet, conspiratorial, but somehow cutting right through the noise — she added:

  “So… what do you do when your crush might be a ghost or a shapeshifter or something?

  Asking for a friend.”

  The table went still.

  Rin didn’t speak. Her face gave nothing away — but her fingers tensed slightly against the table edge.

  Aurenya looked down at her tray. Said nothing.

  Mika, from the next table over, froze with her fork halfway to her mouth.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The silence stretched.

  Suzu took another bite, perfectly casual.

  “I mean,” she said through a mouthful, “they’re hot, but still. Complicated, right?”

  Rin stood suddenly, gathering her tray. “I’m going out for some air.”

  She didn’t wait for a response. She just walked away — fast, but not quite running.

  Aurenya waited three heartbeats.

  Then stood and followed.

  Suzu watched them go.

  She didn’t smile.

  Didn’t crack a joke.

  Just sipped her backup juice box and stared thoughtfully after them.

  Mika didn’t touch her food again.

  She sat there quietly, her throat tight.

  She wasn’t mad.

  She wasn’t.

  She just…

  She missed her friend.

  And somehow, that hurt worse than anything.

  Outside, in the school’s back courtyard, Rin stood near the fence, arms folded. The wind tugged gently at her jacket.

  She didn’t turn when Aurenya approached. But she didn’t move away either.

  They stood in silence for a while.

  Then Aurenya said, “I… didn’t mean to make everything harder for you.”

  Rin looked at her.

  Her expression was soft — tired, but real.

  “You didn’t,” she said.

  “It just is hard.”

  Part 3: The Bookstore Scene.

  They took the long way home.

  Rin hadn’t said why — she’d just suggested it, casually, like they both needed the air. Aurenya hadn’t questioned her.

  The streets were quieter this time of day. Students filtered off in different directions, bikes clattered in the distance, and the city softened just enough to seem kind.

  They passed a bookstore Rin liked — narrow, old, wedged tightly between a café and a dry cleaner.

  The windows were filled with faded fantasy novels and hand-written recommendation cards. The bell over the door gave a soft, mournful chime as they stepped inside.

  Rin was looking for something Suzu had mentioned — a bizarre, genre-bending manga that involved sentient vending machines and accidental necromancy.

  Aurenya drifted away from her almost immediately.

  There was something in the smell. Not just dust and paper — but something older. Like stone left out in the rain.

  Her fingers brushed over spines she couldn’t read the titles of.

  Then she felt it.

  A pull — gentle but certain — like something inside the shelf recognized her before she recognized it.

  She stopped.

  The silver mark on her wrist began to pulse. Not with heat — with pressure. Like it wanted her to remember something she’d never known.

  She reached out toward a worn, clothbound book.

  Before she could touch it, it fell open.

  The pages fluttered to a stop midway through the volume.

  A faded diagram stared up at her — circular, spiralled, not quite symmetrical. At its centre: a mark too close to hers to be coincidence. Slightly warped, slightly older, but recognizable.

  Below it, part of the page had been torn.

  What remained was a passage — equal parts folklore and poetry:

  “She came with no name, only memory.

  She stepped between mirrors.

  Hunger not for flesh, but for truth —

  to remember the shape of her own soul.”

  The diagram seemed to ripple.

  And for one brief moment — like a whisper crossing a dream — her vision tilted.

  The bookstore flickered.

  The rows of books were gone, replaced by white stone walls. Her hand was no longer human — longer fingers, faint silver lines running beneath translucent skin.

  She blinked hard.

  It was gone.

  The clerk stumbled from behind the counter.

  “Did… did the lights flicker just now?”

  He looked pale, confused, as if he’d woken up too fast from a dream he wasn’t supposed to have.

  Aurenya quickly stepped back, closing the book.

  The mark on her wrist flared, then faded again under her sleeve.

  Rin appeared beside her, slightly breathless.

  “You okay?”

  Aurenya nodded — or tried to.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. “Just… didn’t expect that one to fall.”

  But her voice sounded far away to her own ears.

  They left the shop quietly, the clerk still rubbing his forehead.

  Outside, the air felt heavier — not dangerous, just different. Like it knew something they didn’t.

  They walked side by side for a few minutes before Rin spoke.

  “It’s happening more often, isn’t it?”

  Aurenya didn’t answer at first.

  Then, softly:

  “I think… I’m starting to remember things that haven’t happened yet.”

  That night, Aurenya sat alone with her notebook open on her lap.

  She redrew the diagram from the book — as close as she could recall. Her lines weren’t perfect.

  But her wrist responded anyway.

  The silver mark shifted. It didn’t glow — it reshaped, slightly — realigning itself until it matched the symbol on the page.

  And then, without warning, the corner of the notebook curled inward.

  A thin line of smoke rose up, as if the paper had burned from inside.

  Aurenya stared at it, unmoving.

  Then, softly — not afraid — she whispered:

  “What am I?”

  Part 4: Something Watches.

  Suzu was walking home alone, which wasn’t unusual.

  What was unusual was that she was doing it without headphones, snacks in both hands, or a long rant about local squirrel conspiracies.

  Instead, she had one juice box left, no music, and a weird sort of silence hanging over the street. It wasn’t even sunset yet, but the shadows felt like they were sneaking in early — long fingers stretching across concrete, just a little too fast.

  She kicked a stone ahead of her and muttered, “Okay. If I get kidnapped by a shadow demon, at least I’ll have been stylish about it.”

  Her hoodie had three different pins on the chest — one sparkled in the wrong lighting. Her backpack was decorated with peeling stickers, and it jingled slightly every time she moved.

  “Maybe I should’ve stayed at school. That vending machine owed me a rematch.”

  She turned down a quieter street, one that curved along the back of a narrow park.

  Still alone.

  Still quiet.

  She pulled the straw from her juice box with a pop and took a sip.

  Then stopped walking.

  Frowned.

  Listened.

  She could hear… her own footsteps. Sure. The wind.

  And one more sound.

  Footsteps.

  But not hers.

  They echoed after she stopped. Too slow. Too delayed.

  Like someone was just a breath out of sync with her — following, but not close enough to catch.

  Suzu slowly turned around.

  The sidewalk behind her was empty.

  Nothing moved.

  No shadows darting behind trees. No creepy figure in a trench coat. Just a quiet street and one squirrel chewing aggressively on something plastic.

  “…not the vibe I wanted today,” she mumbled.

  Still, she walked a little faster now.

  The wind lifted again — soft, but strange. Cold, even though the day had been warm.

  Somewhere behind her, metal scraped faintly across pavement.

  Like something dragging.

  A bike? A chain?

  Or a blade?

  She didn’t look back this time.

  “Okay,” she said aloud, more to the air than to herself. “If this is some metaphor for my abandonment issues, I’d like to formally decline.”

  A leaf tumbled past her sneaker.

  Nothing answered.

  But she didn’t slow down.

  Ten minutes later, she slammed her apartment door shut behind her and leaned her back against it.

  Home.

  The sound of a documentary hummed from the TV in the other room. Someone was narrating the mating habits of cave bats. A cat meowed. Life resumed.

  But Suzu’s heart still thumped just a little too fast.

  She took a long breath, kicked off her shoes, and pulled out her phone.

  Opened her chat with Rin.

  Hovered her thumb over the text box.

  Didn’t type.

  Then backed out, opened a note app, and typed instead:

  “You ever get the feeling that something’s coming?

  Not bad. Just big.

  Like the part of the game where the music changes.”

  She stared at it.

  Didn’t send it.

  Didn’t delete it either.

  Later, in her room, Suzu curled up on her floor with a fuzzy blanket and her newest theory board.

  It was complete chaos.

  String. Stickers. Glitter pens. Folded notes from two weeks ago. A flyer from the occult club. And smack in the center, a printed photo of Aurenya from that time she accidentally photobombed Suzu’s selfie.

  She’d circled Aurenya’s eyes in red and drawn fangs over her mouth in Sharpie.

  Underneath, she’d written:

  Vampire??? Witch???

  Or just super weird and hot??

  Then, in smaller handwriting:

  She’s not the only one being watched.

  Part 5: The Mark Changes.

  The apartment was still.

  The kind of stillness that came only at night — not silence exactly, but the hush between things. The hum of the refrigerator. The distant, irregular rhythm of someone turning over in bed. A muted song leaking through Mika’s half-shut door.

  Rin stood near the living room window, arms folded loosely as she looked out into the quiet street.

  The moon was low. Waning. Its light silvered the curtains, her hands, her thoughts.

  She’d almost knocked on Aurenya’s door earlier.

  But she hadn’t.

  Not because she was afraid — not exactly.

  Just… not ready yet.

  Inside her own room, Aurenya sat at her desk, notebook open, light dimmed to its softest setting.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there.

  The book from the store — or what she remembered of it — had left an imprint in her mind. A spiral, looping back on itself. A center that wasn’t a point, but an absence.

  She tried to draw it again.

  The lines came easily at first — too easily, like her hand had already practiced without her knowing. But then the shape shifted, subtly, like the pen was tugging in a direction she hadn’t intended.

  She stopped. Looked down.

  The drawing on the page was no longer what she had started.

  It was closer to the mark on her wrist now.

  Aurenya pulled her sleeve back slowly.

  The mark glimmered faintly. Not glowing — not bright — but… aware.

  It pulsed once, then shifted slightly. The spiral deepened.

  Her breath caught.

  She touched it lightly with her fingertips.

  It was warm.

  No — not warm. Alive.

  She sat back, heart steady but fast.

  Then turned the page and wrote.

  Not full sentences. Not journal entries. Just thoughts — pieces that had nowhere to land.

  I was someone else once.

  I feel it when I breathe too deeply.

  She saw me. The real me.

  And she didn’t run.

  I am not what they think I am.

  I’m not sure I’m what I think I am.

  I remember being something sharp.

  And then I broke.

  She thought of Rin.

  Of the alley. Of the blood. Of the question.

  Would you be afraid of me… if I was something you couldn’t explain?

  And Rin’s answer.

  No.

  I’d be afraid of not understanding. But not of you.

  She whispered into the stillness:

  “I want to believe her.”

  Her lamp dimmed.

  Not a flicker. Not an outage.

  Just a soft exhale of light — like the room was holding its breath.

  Aurenya looked down at the page.

  Her drawing was shifting again. Not redrawing itself, but becoming something else — lines thinning, curling inward, like vines growing under glass.

  She blinked.

  A single drop of ink fell from her pen.

  It hit the notebook with a quiet dot.

  Didn’t soak in.

  Didn’t spread.

  Just stayed there — round, black, and unmoving.

  Like an eye.

  Watching.

  If something in it stayed with you — a moment, a line, or even just the mood — I’d love to hear what.

  ko-fi.com/youngieii