Sonata

The first thing I noticed was how quiet it was.

Not the kind of quiet that soothed, but the kind that followed a disaster — the air so still it made my heartbeat sound like an intruder.

I floated. Or maybe I was falling.

It was hard to tell in a place that had no direction, no color, just a silvery haze that bent light like the inside of a soap bubble. My skirt rippled faintly with each breath, its glow dimming against the slow pulse of the void.

I'd been through mindscapes before — psychic residue fields, dream loops, even the mirrored halls of memory constructs from a pesky rogue sorceress or two that tried to trap me.

But this was different. There was no malice here. No architecture. Just a strange, weightless stillness that hummed faintly beneath the skin, like an old radio tuned between stations.

Then came the sound.

A note low, human, humming from somewhere deep in the dark. It was rough, imperfect. A voice, not an instrument. And yet it moved the air around me, pulling faint strands of pink light from my fingertips.

"...Hello?"

My voice came out softer than I meant. It didn't echo. The sound just… folded in on itself.

I blinked. "That song…"

I didn't recognize it consciously. But I could recognize my body did. My pulse matched the rhythm unconsciously — one beat, two, pause, hum.

The void shimmered.

A ripple of light spread outward from me, and shapes began to form. It was like a stencil being lifted from a photograph, and suddenly the world was being drawn around me. I found myself floating in a hallway I recognized more deeply than the back of my own hand.

The honey-golden light of late afternoon slanted through the leaded glass of the front door, catching dust motes dancing in the air like tiny stars. The floorboards creaked under my boots with the familiar, reassuring music of a house well-lived-in. I'd been taken out of this home at a tender, young age, but the memory was so vivid I could taste the honey my mother used to put in my tea.

My home.

No.

My childhood home.

My chest ached with a sharp, sudden pang of recognition so intense it almost brought me to my knees.

The faded floral wallpaper in the first floor hallway, the slight scuff mark on the banister where I'd once slid down it too fast and my father had scolded me with a smile in his eyes, the little alcove under the stairs where I'd built forts out of pillows and dreams. It was all here. Perfectly preserved.

The air smelled faintly of ozone and solder. I felt gravity return, just enough to place my feet on a half-formed floor.

The voice continued humming. Male. Warm. Faintly amused, the way someone hums to themselves when they think no one's listening.

I walked down the hall, my boots silent on the polished wood. My fingers trailed along the wall, the texture of the wallpaper a ghost against my skin.

I turned a corner that didn't exist a second ago and froze.

A man sat there — or rather, a memory of one. His form flickered, light stitched from static and wireframe shadows. He was working at a table full of tools, his hands moving with patient precision as holographic symbols drifted lazily through the air. His face was clear for a heartbeat — messy hair, a day's stubble, a tired smile that somehow still looked kind.

The hum came from him. The same lullaby.

"P...Papa?"

The word slipped out of my mouth, a fragile, childish thing I hadn't allowed myself to utter in years. It felt foreign on my tongue, a relic from a life I'd buried under layers of duty and despair.

He didn't look up. Just kept humming, his fingers deftly manipulating a glowing blue wire, attaching it to a small, intricate joint on the thing he was crafting.

"Papa," I tried again, my voice a little stronger, but it was swallowed by the unnatural stillness of the room.

I took another step forward, my boots sinking slightly into the floor, as if it were made of soft, yielding memory. The scent of ozone and solder was stronger now, a comforting, familiar smell that brought tears to my eyes.

But as I drew closer, he began to fade.

His image flickered, unfinished, like an echo playing on bad glass. His hair was a mess of slate black; his sleeves were rolled up past his elbows. He was humming as he worked - still the same tune, still imperfect, but there was warmth in it. Human warmth.

He didn't see me.

He couldn't.

My throat tightened. I wanted to reach for him, to touch his shoulder, to do something to make him turn.

But my hand passed through the air like smoke, breaking the light where it met his outline. He didn't react. The hum continued — low, constant, steady, as though the sound itself were holding this place together.

I'd forgotten the exact cadence of his voice. The way his humming used to wander off-key, only to find its way back again like it was teasing itself.

That imperfection… that was him.

My chest burned.

The little girl inside me, the one who used to sit at the workbench beside him while he built her wind-up birds and clockwork toys, stirred awake.

What was going on here?

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I was here to rescue Ikki from... whatever was after him. Yet now... I was in my childhood home.

Was this some sort of trap? Some illusion designed to make me let my guard down?

But there was no malice. No sense of a predator waiting to pounce. Just this... suffocating, perfect nostalgia.

Then, the memory of the skirmish surged back.

The creature. The armored girl. The look of pure, protective fury in her eyes.

Was this her doing? How? Why?

My voice came out a whisper again. "Papa… what are you making?"

He didn't answer. His movements slowed, the memory stuttering as though the question itself had broken the rhythm of this illusion.

The air warped like heat off asphalt and the sound of his tools faltered. The hum fell out of tune.

I took a careful step closer. The smell of solder was sharp now, undercut by something faintly floral — honeysuckle, maybe, or something that only existed in memory.

He was still there, but thinner somehow, less real.

His outline bled into the light that filled the room, like he was being remembered from too far away.

He paused over the thing on his table a small shape, delicate and incomplete. He hesitated, then adjusted it gently, like a parent fixing a blanket on a sleeping child.

I couldn't see what it was.

Every time I tried to focus, the details slipped away.

It wasn't important what he was making. It was the feeling that mattered - the way he bent toward it, the quiet patience in his hands, the love threaded into every motion.

His hum returned, softer now. The tune wavered like he was listening for someone else to join in.

For a heartbeat, I almost did. The melody sat at the edge of my tongue, aching to escape. I could remember the nights he used to work like this, when I'd sit on the counter and fall asleep to the sound of him building the world one screw at a time.

It would have been so easy to forget why I was here. To forget everything.

But then — a flicker. The light around his shoulders stuttered. The warmth in the air turned brittle, and for a split second, I saw another version of him.

Not the patient craftsman. Haunted. His eyes ringed with sleepless nights, his hands shaking around the same invisible object. A hollow version of the hum escaped him. Not music, but habit.

And behind him, faint and disjointed, came another voice. A girl's voice.

"Why are you sad?"

The question was so gentle it could have been imagined. Yet I felt it - like the universe itself had asked.

He didn't answer her either. His fingers clenched, and the memory shook itself apart.

The house folded in on itself walls dissolving into ribbons of orange light. I stumbled back, my heart hammering.

My resolve sharpened, slicing through the fog of nostalgia. I wasn't here to indulge in a ghost's grief. I was here for Ikki.

I closed my eyes, letting the warmth of my own aura push back against the encroaching void.

The ribbons of orange light twisted and recoiled from my touch, curling back into the silvery haze like frightened animals. For a heartbeat, I caught the faint sound of static — no, breathing — somewhere ahead.

"...Ikki? Are you here?"

Nothing. Only that same fragile hum, fractured now, as if the world itself was trying to remember how to sound human.

I pushed forward.

Each step remade the ground beneath me — hardwood melting into mist, mist reforming into tile, then tile into something crystalline and alien. The geometry of the house was gone; it was just corridors of memory folding over one another. Soon, it was just a dark walkway, lit up by surreal mosaics of colors playing like film reels above me. Like the images I'd abstractly remembered playing through my infant mind before I'd achieved true consciousness.

Every few seconds, I thought I saw motion in the corner of my eye. A flicker of pink light, just like mine, but moving out of sync.

The further I walked, the clearer the sensation became: I wasn't walking through the echo. I was walking against it.

A pulse ran through the haze - faint, rhythmic, mechanical.

Something in me recognized it.

I squinted, and a faint silhouette shimmered ahead, bathed in soft orange light - crouching in the middle of the path in darkness.

It was a silhouette of a small girl with small hands, swirling her hands in something on the ground. She tilted her head as I approached, curious and hesitant.

My steps slowed.

"Hey there," I said quietly, almost instinctively.

The shadowy figure shirked back, covering its eyes with its hands like a two year-old.

"You don't have to hide. I'm not here to hurt you."

The small silhouette peeked through its hands.

No response.

Just a flicker of white light from its eyes flashing — like an old film skipping frames.

"Do you know where he is?" I asked. "Ikazuchi? Ikki?"

The silhouette tilted its head again, then - it pointed behind me.

I turned.

The pitch black walls had become a corridor of reflections — hundreds of translucent panes of glass showing flashes of other scenes, other lives. Some were mine. Others weren't.

The reflections quivered as though breathing.

One by one, the glass panes melted into streams of light, merging into a single silver corridor that pulsed faintly beneath my boots. The little orange silhouette darted ahead, barefoot, weightless, her steps leaving ripples that lingered like candlelight on water.

I followed.

The corridor widened until it wasn't a hallway at all but a shoreline.

Before me stretched a river — not water, but liquid luminescence, flowing slow and heavy like molten glass. Its surface shimmered with drifting shapes - origami boats made of folded light, hundreds of them, gliding silently along the current.

The girl knelt at the river's edge, her hair a luminescent silver. She reached into the flow, cupped her hands around another fragment of light, and folded it gently into the shape of a boat. When she set it adrift, the water glowed a little brighter.

I crouched beside her.

Each boat that passed carried an image - a flash of warmth, a smile, a touch of laughter caught in glass. I could feel their weight, faint and familiar. They weren't mine. They were varied in number. But I understood.

They were peoples' memories of care.

A father's hands, steadying a child's first steps.

The crackle of solder.

The lullaby.

The little girl turned her head just slightly, as if listening to something I couldn't hear. Then, with the simplicity only children possess, she leaned in and whispered.

"Go home."

"Home?" I asked.

The girl did not respond. She just kept her gaze on me. Her eyes were like stars shimmering in the void.

One of the boats drifted close to my hand. I hesitated, then touched it. The paper dissolved instantly into pink light that wrapped around my wrist and sank into my pulse.

The river responded - a slow heartbeat beneath the current.

I stood. The child was gone.

But her boats continued downstream, glowing brighter as they went.

I stepped into the water. It was warm. Impossibly, heartbreakingly warm.

The current didn't pull - it gently guided.

My aura flared faintly in response, each beat of my heart syncing to the rhythm of the river until I wasn't walking anymore - I was being carried even as I tried to break into a run.

The current narrowed into a radiant throat of color, lifting me upward. The light around me condensed, coalescing into a bridge suspended between nothing and everything.

Beneath me: void, endless and unkind.

Above me: drifting constellations of bllue and orange circuitry, as though the sky itself had been built from someone's imagination of heaven.

Every step left pink dust in its wake. Every breath redrew the bridge ahead - an iridescent rainbow with a pink core. The rhythm of the river was still in my blood — one beat, two, pause, hum.

And then I saw him.

A faint silhouette of a boy glowing blue at the far end, suspended in a cocoon of glass gears, each one turning at a slightly different speed. They scraped against each other like teeth grinding in a dream.

"Ikki!" I called, though my voice barely carried. The bridge trembled, shivering with every note.

He didn't hear me. Or maybe he couldn't. The gears around him were collapsing inward, pressed by shadowy tendrils and an orange ring - their precision unraveling into chaos. Each rotation bent the air, distorting space with every failure to complete the pattern.

The bridge began to crumble behind me.

I started forward. Then faster. Then running — each step disintegrating into dust the instant I left it.

"Hold on! I'm here!"

He didn't respond.

The halo around him constricted. A web of light sealed across his body, suffocating the glow within. I pushed harder, leaping gaps as they formed. My body felt weightless, my lungs burning from the strain of believing the bridge would still exist beneath my next step.

When the final gap opened, there was no choice left. I leapt - my aura lighting up like the sun.

Time fractured — a heartbeat stretched to eternity. The bridge collapsed behind me, its fragments spiraling like dying stars. My aura flared to its limit, streaks of pink and gold trailing behind me like comet tails.

I crashed into him.

The world exploded into color — orange and gold, pink and blue, the hues of two realities meeting and refusing to separate.

The glass gears froze mid-turn, then began to breathe.

And then, the void shattered.

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