Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 26

-------------James---------------

I woke up with a gasp. Not the kind that’s wild and choking like before, but a quiet, gutted breath. The kind that sounds more like a surrender than survival. I sat up. My shirt clung to my back with sweat, but I wasn’t shaking. The fear wasn’t there this time. Just pain. A deep, bone-echoing kind that didn’t scream, it hummed like a hymn. The dream again.

I was in that field. The same field I’ve visited for months now, rows upon rows of flowers stretching far beyond the edge of sight. But this time, everything felt... diffused. Like I was seeing through a stained glass window. Like the light had been baptized. There was no wind, but the petals fluttered. No sound, but somehow I heard music, soft and aching, like the notes of a church organ echoing through a cathedral right after a funeral. And she was there again. That girl. Her back was to me, standing at the far end of the field, just barely silhouetted against the golden light. I called out but no words came. Only breath. Only longing. I walked toward her, the grass brushing against my ankles, but no matter how close I got, she didn’t turn. And then, I realized. She wasn’t really standing in the field. She was inside a mirror. A massive one, freestanding in the middle of the flowers like it had always been there. She was on the other side of the glass. Her world slightly paler than mine. I pressed my hand against the surface, the chill of it biting into my skin.

“Please,” I whispered. “Let me in.”

And then----It cracked.

A single, delicate line spiderwebbed outward from where my hand touched the mirror. I staggered back, muttering “No.” The crack widened, split into a thousand fractures like lightning on the sea.

And then it exploded.

Glass ripped through me like shards of memory. One large piece flew straight into my eye, and that’s when I woke up.

---

I sat on the edge of my bed, fingers clenched tight against the mattress. I looked down at my palms. They weren’t bleeding. But somehow, I swore I could still feel the sting. Like phantom pain from a wound I never physically had. I don’t know who she is. But I miss her. Not in the way you miss someone you know, but in the way you miss heaven without ever having been. The way a sinner might ache for grace. Some mornings, I wonder if she’s even real. Maybe she’s just a figment stitched together by loneliness and all the faces I’ve let down. A patchwork of grief and guilt and the parts of me I still can’t forgive.

But then again---- Why does she feel so familiar? Why does her absence feel like a sermon unfinished? Maybe God has been trying to tell me something through these dreams. Or maybe it’s just my subconscious, breaking under the weight of the person I’m trying to become.

And yet… even in the pain, even when I woke up gasping--- I didn’t feel lost.

Just cracked.

And isn’t that what we all are in the end?
Cracked mirrors trying to reflect something divine.

---

The school felt alive.

Like a Sunday church right before the first hymn, buzzing voices, scuffed shoes shuffling along tiled floors, kids in bright class shirts zipping down corridors with last-minute props and face paint. Banners stretched across walls like stained glass banners of saints, red, green, yellow, and blue. And hanging in the center of it all, swaying in the breeze like a flag of joy, was a massive tarp that read:

“Welcome to the School Sportsfest!”

It was cheesy, loud, cringe. But somehow, it didn’t annoy me the way school events used to. Maybe because the moment I saw her--- Everything else blurred.