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CHAPTER FIVE — ECHOES IN THE WAKING WORLD
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2025-12-13 00:12:14Nora’s Point of View
I woke with my heart pounding. Not from a nightmare. Not from fear yanking me upright. But from the strange heaviness that followed me out of sleep like a second shadow. The dream replayed behind my eyes. The room that wasn’t my room. The blue moonlight. The cloaked figure who shouldn’t exist. That impossible voice speaking my name. I tried to tell myself it was nothing. Stress. Exhaustion. Too much caffeine. The kind of dream people had when their life suddenly felt off-balance. But the Death card on my pillow said otherwise. I didn’t touch it at first. I pushed myself upright, rubbing both hands over my face, trying to smooth the trembling out of my breath. My fingers were cold. My whole body was cold. “Get a grip,” I whispered. My voice felt small in the quiet room. I reached for the card, bracing for it to feel warm or icy or somehow wrong. But it felt normal. Ordinary. As if it had not changed in my hands the night before. As if it had not shown my name. As if I had not heard a voice behind it. I turned it over. Still my name. Still wrong. Still undeniable. I set the card down and pulled my knees to my chest, hugging them. I stayed like that for a long moment, fighting the urge to unravel. I should have been terrified. Calling someone. Running. Doing anything but sitting there. But I wasn’t terrified. Not the way I should have been. The dream had been frightening. His presence had chilled me deeper than any winter wind. But something about it felt controlled. Not safe, exactly, but deliberate. Focused. Like a storm that chose not to sweep me away. I didn’t know why that mattered. I didn’t know why I cared. I closed my eyes and whispered, “It wasn’t just a dream.” The room stayed silent. I stood slowly and stretched out my stiff muscles. My reflection caught my eye from across the room, and I stepped closer. My face looked the same. But my eyes… I leaned in. I looked tired, yes, but also different. A little clearer. A little older. As if I knew something I wasn’t ready to admit out loud. My pulse jumped. “What is happening to me?” The mirror didn’t answer. I turned away abruptly, needing motion. I made coffee. I sat at the tiny kitchen table. I watched the steam rise and pretended this was just another morning. But the moment I lifted the mug to my lips, I froze. A voice flickered through my mind. “Dreams are doors, Nora.” The sound wasn’t in the room. It pressed through my thoughts, cold and certain. I set the mug down too hard. It clattered against the table, and I flinched. “No. You’re not doing this,” I muttered. “You are not hearing him.” But I was. Not clearly. Not like the dream. More like a memory refusing to fade. I rubbed both palms over my eyes. “I couldn’t just let him die,” I whispered. This time the words didn’t echo in my mind, but they still felt like a reply. Fear tugged at me. Curiosity pressed harder. I wanted to know what he was. Why he came to me. Why I could hear him. Why he cared that I changed something. I should have been terrified of wanting answers. I wasn’t. And that frightened me more than the dream ever had. I pushed back from the table, needing distance from my thoughts. I stepped toward the hallway, but the overhead lights flickered. Once. Twice. A slow dimming, as if something vast passed between me and the world. I froze. My breath fogged. A whisper brushed my ear, close enough to raise every hair on my arms. “Nora.” Not imagined. Not remembered. A voice in my mind again, but sharper this time. I spun around, heart slamming so hard it hurt. Nothing. Just the empty kitchen. Just the hum of the refrigerator. Just the Death card lying face-up on the table. Except… It wasn’t the same. A second word had begun to form beneath my name, the ink spreading across the surface as if alive. Coming. My pulse stopped, then kicked painfully. “No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.” Another word bled into shape, curling beneath the first. For you. The kitchen lights snapped off. Darkness rushed in. And somewhere behind that darkness, something ancient exhaled and stepped closer.
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The world has returned to its ordinary rhythm. Not peace, but steadiness, the way a vast mechanism resumes its hum after a brief disturbance. Threads continue to flow. Lives continue to bend toward their ends. The Weave holds, as it always does. And still, something refuses to align. It is not shattered. It is not broken. It is shifted, and stubbornly so. From my vantage, existence resembles a living map. Luminous lines bend toward one another, separate, then converge again. Birth arcs toward death. Choice ripples into consequence. Probability drifts beneath everything like an invisible current, always present and always accounted for. It is efficient. It is beautiful. It is merciless only in its consistency. Yet in the center of it all, a blank remains. A silence where there should be pattern. Nora. Her name carries weight now, though it should not. Names belong to mortals, fragile labels for fragile lives. To me, she should be a coordinate, a trajectory, a clean line
Claimed by Death Chapter Seventy-One — The Gravity of Us
Kieran’s Point of View The silence of the clearing is not empty. It is heavy, vibrating with the weight of things unsaid and the sudden, sharp proximity of a woman who has become my entire horizon. Nora lies on the blanket, her skin catching the moonlight until she looks less like a person and more like a celestial event. I have watched the birth of stars, the slow, violent churning of nebulae, but they were distant. Cold. This is warm. This is breathing. I shift, propping myself on one elbow to look down at her. My hand finds the curve of her bare shoulder. The dress she chose is a soft, dark fabric that leaves her collarbones and shoulders exposed to the night air. Under my touch, she is electric. “Nora,” I whisper. Her name is a prayer I didn’t know I was capable of offering. She turns her head toward me, her hair spilling across the blanket like ink. Her eyes are dark, the pupils blown wide as she tracks my movement. I lean in, my breath ghosting over the shell
Claimed by Death Chapter Seventy — Where the World Once Paused
Nora’s Point of View The morning does not rush us. We move through it slowly, as if neither of us is quite ready to name what it is yet. The light shifts across the floor while I move around the kitchen, pulling things together from habit more than thought. Eggs. Bread. Butter. The quiet rhythm of something familiar grounding me after everything that came before. Kieran watches. Not in the distant way he usually observes the world, but with a kind of focused curiosity, like he’s trying to understand why any of this matters at all. I crack eggs into a bowl and glance back at him. “You’re staring again.” “I’m observing,” he says. “There’s a difference.” I smile despite myself. “Is there?” “Yes.” His gaze follows my hands as I whisk. “You’re doing this without thinking. But it’s intentional.” “That’s just cooking.” He tilts his head slightly. “No. It’s preparation. You’re making something because someone will receive it.” The way he says it makes my chest tighten. “I guess,”
Claimed by Death Chapter Sixty-Nine — Morning Light
Nora’s Point of View I wake slowly. Not all at once, not with the jolt of panic or confusion that usually pulls me out of sleep, but gently, as if the morning itself is being careful with me. For a moment, I don’t move. I don’t open my eyes. I just breathe. There’s warmth beside me. Steady. Solid. Real. It takes a few seconds for my mind to catch up to the sensation, to remember why the weight against my side feels unfamiliar but not unwelcome. When I do open my eyes, it’s to the quiet light of early morning filtering through the curtains. Pale and soft, the kind that makes everything look a little kinder than it did the night before. Kieran is lying on his side, facing me. He looks peaceful. Not guarded. Not distant. Not like he’s bracing himself against something unseen. His face is relaxed, lashes resting against his cheeks, breath slow and even. He looks asleep. I watch him longer than I mean to. There’s something about seeing him like this that feels almost unreal, lik
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Claimed by Death Chapter Sixty-Seven — Small Denials
Nora’s Point of View The first thing that goes wrong is stupid. I miss the bus. Not dramatically. Not because I overslept. I’m standing at the stop with time to spare, phone tucked into my coat pocket. I even see the bus turn the corner at the end of the street. Then it doesn’t stop. It passes me by with a soft hiss of air, the driver’s eyes fixed straight ahead like I’m not there at all. I stare after it, blinking. “That’s… weird,” I mutter. I check my phone. No delay alert. No reroute notice. Nothing to explain it. The schedule insists the bus stopped exactly where it was supposed to. Where I was standing. I shrug it off. Small things happen. People miss buses every day. I pull my phone back out and open my messages. My thumb slows when I see her name. Claire. The woman from the café. The one who sat down already knowing how her day was supposed to end. The one who stayed instead. The one who keeps choosing to wake up. My fingers move without hesitation. Running a litt
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