Aria awoke on the floor of her bedroom.
Her throat was raw, as if she had been screaming, though she remembered no sound leaving her lips. The first thing she noticed was the clock-its hands frozen at 3:03 a.m., unmoving, though dawn light spilled faintly through the curtains.
Time itself had fractured.
She sat upright, fingers brushing against the covers. They were damp-salt-damp, like she had been dragged from the sea. Her mind wrestled with fragments: the lighthouse, the journal, the voice whispering too close to her ear.
But one image lingered with unnatural clarity-
the boy in the iron room.
She did not know him.
And yet... her bones did.
Aria stumbled to her desk where Pari's old sketchbook still lay. She flipped through frantic pages until she stopped-heart seizing.
A drawing.
Years old.
A boy behind iron bars, eyes hollow, whispering to something that bent the air around him.
Beneath the drawing, in Pari's scrawl:
> "The one the sea refused to claim."
Aria's hand trembled. Pari hadn't only known.
She had seen.
And she had left this sketch behind as a message.
But a message for whom?
***
That night, she returned to the lighthouse.
Not because she wanted to—
because she had to.
The stairs groaned in familiarity, yet something was different. At the base of the lantern chamber, she found the journal again, but the pages were no longer blank.
Symbols swirled in spirals, reshaping themselves as she read, letters arranging into words she could finally decipher:
> "Three doors.
One opens to memory.
One opens to sleep.
One opens to him.
Choose wrong, and the sea keeps you."
Her pulse hammered.
She raised her head.
The walls of the chamber had shifted, forming three narrow archways where there had once been only stone. Each yawned open into pitch-black corridors.
The first smelled of rain.
The second of burnt wax.
The third of iron and salt.
And then, from the third door—
that voice again, deep as undertow:
> "Aria."
Her name.
Spoken like it had been waiting.
She stepped forward, torn between instinct and inevitability, her hand brushing the journal's page once more.
But new words had appeared beneath the riddle.
> "Do not trust the door that knows your name."
Her breath froze.
Because the voice from the third door spoke again—this time clearer.
It wasn't just her name.
It was Pari's.