The scratch of a pen against rough paper was the only marker of passing time.
Inside a library smelling of old dust and dried ink, I sat across from her. Elyra. A figure who seemed forged from frozen moonlight.
"A meja is a table... A pena is a pen..." Her voice was gentle, yet it carried an unfamiliar echo in my ears. "To say you are writing in this book... I am writing on this book..."
I repeated after her. My tongue felt stiff, trying to articulate sounds that did not belong to me.
We sat too close. The scent of jasmine and something inherently cold emanated from her. My breath caught in my throat. Not from some adolescent nervousness, but from the stark realization of our differing existences. She was eternal; I was ephemeral. She belonged to this world; I was an anomaly.
Later, in the library's backyard, beneath the shadow of an old oak tree whose roots jutted out like the earth's veins, I dug a hole.
The soil here was damp and smelled of fungi.
Beside the shallow pit lay a nearly shapeless heap of fabric. Jeans stiff with dried blood and swamp mud. A black t-shirt that was more hole than cloth. A white shirt, now a dull gray—a silent witness to the three months I had spent crawling, just trying to survive in an uncharted forest.
They were not merely clothes. They were my old, rotting skin.
"Are you burying yourself?"
The voice arrived without the prelude of footsteps. Elyra stood there, her white dress completely unblemished by the muddy ground.
"It's trash," I answered flatly.
"It is an identity."
Her slender hand reached out, lifting the garments from the dirt. "What a shame," she murmured. "These threads were woven with an absurd density."
Elyra shook her head slowly. "Step back a little."
She placed the clothes on a flat, moss-covered stone. She did not take out needles, thread, or a loom. She simply spread her palm over the pile of fabric. Her eyes closed. The air around us vibrated. The sound of the wind abruptly ceased, as if nature itself were holding its breath.
"Temporal Rewind," she whispered.
It was not a blinding light that emerged, but a distortion. Like watching a mirage hover over hot asphalt. I saw it with my own eyes, yet my logic refused to accept it.
The mud stains did not just vanish; they lifted, reverting into dust that drifted away. The crusted, dried blood liquefied once more, then evaporated into a thin red mist before disappearing entirely. Torn and missing threads writhed like living worms, seeking out their partners, reattaching themselves, reweaving the bonds that had been severed.
The dull gray of the shirt slowly faded, replaced by a pristine white that almost hurt the eyes. The indigo dye of the jeans returned to its deep, rich hue.
Time was wound backward. Confined entirely to those objects. Three months of torment in the woods, erased in three seconds.
Elyra lowered her hand. Her breathing was slightly labored—the only sign that the magic had demanded a toll.
"I told you, didn't I?" she said, handing the neat pile of clothes back to me. "Rewinding time on inanimate objects is far easier than on living beings. A soul refuses to step backward, but an object... an object always obeys."
I took them. The smell... the faint scent of detergent. The smell of a store. The scent of my original world, before everything changed.
"Why?" I asked.
She turned her back, leaving me alone with the gaping hole in the earth. "So you remember. That you were once there, and you survived."