Chapter Fourty Five: Echoes Beneath The Blood Moon.

The first thing Lila felt was silence.

Not the comforting kind, but the heavy, breathing stillness that presses against the skull. The world was dim and silver, the air shimmering like glass. She lay on a bed of cold moss beneath a sky that never changed—black as ink, pierced by a full blood-red moon that refused to move.

Her head throbbed. Every sound felt distant, as if she were underwater.

She tried to sit up. The forest around her wasn’t the one she knew. It was older—too still, too symmetrical, like it had been painted from memory rather than grown. The trees rose in spirals, their bark glowing faintly with veins of blue light. There were no birds, no insects, no breath of wind.

Only that endless, crimson moon.

“Where… am I?” she whispered, but the words echoed twice—once from her lips, once from somewhere behind her.

When she turned, she saw herself.

Or rather, a version of herself. The same face, the same hair, but her double’s eyes were darker, colder, and her skin glo