CasSandra

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Fields of Refrain

*Hope's POV*

The door shuddered under my hand. A pulse moving through the wood as if it were breathing. Lesly's fingers tightened around mine. Her skin cool. Her pulse trembling beneath the surface. The corridor's silence was unbearable, every step in the rafters like a held breath.

And then, she appeared.

"Don't."

Liora's voice. Soft and urgent, it cut through the air. She stepped out of the shadows. Her glow weaker than before. As though the storm had drained the light from her bones. The edges of her body blurred, flickering like the dying flame of a candle.

"Liora." Lesly gasped. Her voice broke with recognition, relief, and something deeper. Something I tried not to name. She started toward her, but I pulled her back instinctively.

"You shouldn't be here," I whispered, though I didn't know who I was saying it to...Liora? Lesly? Or myself?

Liora's eyes...strange and unearthly, yet still too human, fixed on Lesly. "The Hollow house grows impatient. It wants what it's owed. Once you cross this door, you will not walk in your world again... Not as you were."

Her words rang like truth, but not the kind that comforted. Lesly's hand slipped from mine, reaching forward as if drawn by a thread.

"Then why bring us here? Why save us at all?"

Something raw flickered in Liora's expression. Her mouth parted, but no answer came. She looked at me instead, as though the weight of her silence was mine to carry.

Before I could speak, the door opened. Not with a creak. Not with a rush of wind. It simply yawned wide. Darkness spilled outward until it swallowed everything.

Lesly stumbled, and I grabbed her close. But the corridor dissolved under our feet...falling away like ash.

***

It was endless. Grass swayed in every direction. Tall and whispering. Each blade shifting like words I couldn't hear but felt pressing at the edges of my skull. The ground was wet beneath my shoes, but it wasn't mud. It was glass. Mirrors stretched out beneath the grass. Each reflecting not us as we stood, but...us as we might have been.

There...Lesly in a hospital gown. Her eyes, lifeless. There I was, in a white dress, standing alone at an altar. Then, there was us...with a daughter in our arms. Smiling at a life I didn't remember living.

My stomach knotted. I tore my gaze away, but the reflections still clung to me like smoke.

"Hope," Lesly whispered. Her voice was shaking. "We've been here before. Not here, but...somewhere like this. In dreams. In the waves."

The sky fractured above us. Half twilight, half dawn. A seam splitting the heavens in two. And from the seam came the figure.

The Echo Judge.

It loomed, not with weight, but with presence. Its body was made of shifting silhouettes. Faces that almost formed. Voices that almost spoke. Every regret I had ever buried rippled across its form.

"You stand in the Fields of Refrain," it said. Though it was not a voice, but a chorus inside my skull. "Where every choice echoes. Where every thread of time trembled. You were called, once again...not by chance. Not by fate. But by both."

Two others appeared then, flanking the judge.

The first flickered in and out. One moment laughing, the next weeping. Juggling silver coins and dice that spun and vanished midair. The Angel of Chance. Wild-eyed. Its form unstable, like a game never finished.

The second was still as death. Taller and draped in threads of gold that coiled endlessly through its fingers. Its gaze was as cold as ice. Its voice, silence that somehow spoke. The Angel of Fate. Patient and immovable.

They circled us like predators debating a meal.

"Do you know what you've done?" the Angel of Fate asked. It's words like metal against bone. "Your love has bent timelines, rewritten patterns carefully laid."

The Angel of Chance laughed, tossing a coin that never landed. "Oh, but isn't it beautiful? To gamble everything, over and over again for love?"

Lesly swayed beside me. Her outline blurred. Flickering as though she were half there, half gone.

"Hope..." she whispered, reaching for me. I caught her, clutching her against me. Terrified at how light she felt, as though the House had already claimed part of her.

"No!" I said, louder than I meant. My voice cracked in the endless field. "You can't take her. Not again. Not in this place."

The Echo Judge's shadow bent closer. Its faceless form blotting out of the fractured sky.

"One more step," it said. And I felt the ground tremble under us. "And your souls will not only decide your lives...but theirs."

Cassie's face flickered in my mind. Sandra's voice rippled in the air. The pieces aligned.

The Fields held its breath. Waiting for us to choose.

To be continued...