He didn’t make a sound when he arrived.

  No rustling leaves, no snapping branches.

  He simply… stopped not being there.

  Sera sensed him before I did. Her grimoire trembled.

  —“There’s something else with us,” she said.

  I turned toward the cabin’s entrance. The air thickened, like reality itself was holding its breath.

  And then we saw him.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  A tall, slender man wrapped in a seamless gray coat. His face was indistinct, like a memory you’re already misremembering.

  But the most unsettling thing was what he lacked: a shadow. Not even under the cabin’s dim light.

  —

  “You shouldn’t have read the journal,” he said.

  His voice didn’t come from his mouth. It came from inside my head.

  “Who are you?” I asked, tightening my grip on the knife.

  “I’m not a what. I’m a when.”

  —

  Sera stepped forward, defying her own trembling.

  “Are you part of the system?”

  “No. I’m what’s left outside when the system rewrites itself. The residue. The glitch. The memory of a timeline that was erased.”

  —

  He looked at me. Not with his eyes, but with an intent I could feel in my teeth.

  “Ryouhei, every step you take off-script creates a crack. And there are things—people—who live in those cracks.”

  “You?”

  “Me. And others. Some want to help you. Others… see too much of themselves in you.”

  —

  Sera swallowed hard.

  “And what do you want?”

  The man without a shadow smiled. A tired, sad smile.

  “I want to see if someone can reach the end this time… without becoming the monster they were trying to stop.”

  —

  With that, he walked toward the far w

  all.

  And passed through the wood as if it wasn’t there.