The wind fell away by midday.

  Not stilled — taken.

  There were no birdsong, no rustling branches, not even the distant drone of insects. The forest was too quiet. The kind of silence that presses against the ears, as if it wants to be heard.

  Yuki and Aoi crossed into the hush without speaking.

  The red thread was gone now. Only the terrain remained — twisted and gnarled, as if shaped by thoughts left unfinished. Stones rose like frozen waves, bark bore patterns that almost resembled handwriting. And the air felt… thin. Not cold. Just empty.

  Aoi stopped first. “Do you feel it?”

  Yuki nodded. “This is the place. The Memory Hollow.”

  They didn’t know what to expect.

  And that, perhaps, was the point.

  At the heart of the Hollow was a pool.

  Still as glass, black as ink. It didn’t reflect the sky — only those who looked into it.

  Yuki knelt beside it, breath caught in his chest.

  A ripple formed without touch.

  And from within… a voice:

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  “Do you wish to be remembered, or to remember?”

  Yuki flinched.

  Aoi took a step forward, her hand brushing his.

  Then the water shifted again — images blooming across its surface like ink in paper.

  Rin.

  A girl with midnight hair and a smile that made spring feel like a secret.

  She was laughing beside Yuki on a train.

  Crying into his coat on a rainy bridge.

  Running through fields of sunflowers as he chased her, notebook in hand.

  Then — standing alone at the mouth of a tunnel. Waiting.

  And waiting.

  Until time forgot how to move.

  Yuki’s voice cracked. “She waited.”

  Aoi looked away. There was something cruel in witnessing a moment that wasn't hers.

  He reached toward the water — not to touch, but to offer.

  “I remember her,” he whispered. “So she doesn’t have to be alone.”

  The Hollow pulsed.

  And then the water spilled outward — not in a wave, but in light.

  A ribbon of silver danced from the pool, wrapping around Yuki’s wrist like a bracelet of memory. It pulsed once, twice…

  And settled.

  The silence broke — not with sound, but knowing.

  Yuki staggered to his feet.

  “She’s in the north village. The one past the Ridge.”

  Aoi blinked. “How do you know?”

  He touched the bracelet. “Because she dreamed of it. And I remember her dreams.”

  They left the Hollow behind.

  It didn’t follow.

  But the memory did.

  Not just Rin’s, but every moment Yuki had lost in his own shadow.

  And Aoi… she walked beside him not as an echo, but as something real.

  The past had its place.

  But the future?

  It had two sets of footsteps now.