Again

Again, the storm had come without warning.

Wind howled through the gnarled pines like a voice lost to time, and rain lashed against the old glass windows of the Bellhurst Inn. Inside, the guests murmured uneasily over their half-finished meals, the lights flickering as thunder rolled like distant drums.

Mara stood behind the reception desk, watching the barometer needle twitch violently. She had read about the strange weather patterns in this valley—how storms came and went in spirals, always on the same days, sometimes even the same hour. But this one was different. It felt... personal.

“Is everything alright?” asked a guest, a silver-haired woman in a red scarf.

“Yes,” Mara lied. “It’s just the weather.”

She watched the woman nod and turn back to her tea. Then Mara slipped into the back hallway, down the stairs, and into the cellar. There, behind a locked cabinet, behind cleaning supplies and crates of preserved pears, was the door.

The one no one else could see.

It had no knob, only a brass keyhole that pulsed faintly with a blue glow, like a sleeping eye. And in her pocket, Mara carried the key.

She had first found the door when she was eleven. Her father, a practical man, ran the Bellhurst with a stiff collar and a strict schedule. But he had never once noticed the door. Mara had only found it because she had followed a strange tune in the cellar—a kind of humming, like wind over glass—and there it was, shimmering faintly under a beam of sunlight that shouldn’t have reached so deep.

The first time she unlocked it, she was swallowed by light.

She woke up standing on a beach made of black sand, where a clocktower rose from the sea and seagulls cawed backwards. The sun spun in place like a coin on edge. She wandered for hours, days maybe, finding fragments of familiar places—her mother’s laughter coming from a broken radio, her bedroom ceiling etched into the bark of a tree.

Eventually, she stepped back through the door. No time had passed. The pears were still fresh in their crates. Her heart raced for days.

She never told anyone.

The door only opened when the storm came.

It took her years to figure that out, to map the storm cycles in her journal. They followed no earthly logic. The sky boiled, the air thickened, and always, that faint hum would rise from the cellar. And always, the key would feel warm in her pocket.

Mara learned to walk between the worlds.

Some were half-formed dreams, others vivid echoes of memory. One was a crumbling cathedral where her grandmother waited, young and vibrant, carving poems into stone. Another was a mirror-world where everyone she knew had different names, and she was a stranger in her own skin.

But one world—that world—she kept returning to.

The lake with the silver leaves.

The stone house on the hill.

And the boy named Ash.

Ash wasn’t a dream. She knew it instinctively. He remembered her between visits. He aged, slowly, but aged nonetheless. His world was quiet, full of long shadows and forgotten songs. He had no family, just a cat that spoke in riddles and books that rewrote themselves.

“Why do you keep coming back?” he asked once, as they lay beneath a sky stitched with two moons.

“I don’t know,” Mara admitted. “Maybe because it feels more real than my life.”

Ash nodded, as if he understood too well.

They built rituals over the years—tea by the edge of the lake, racing leaves down the stream, telling stories of the other worlds they’d seen. He never asked about hers, and she never pushed for answers about his.

Some things didn’t need words.

Then came the year she couldn’t find the door.

The storm arrived on time. The wind screamed, the cellar lights flickered—but the door was gone. Panic gripped her. She searched for hours, days, until she fell asleep on the cellar floor, clutching the key to her chest like a charm.

Weeks passed. The world outside resumed its rhythm. Guests came and went. Her father aged. And Mara felt herself thinning, as if the door had been the only thing anchoring her.

Then, one quiet afternoon, a letter arrived at the front desk.

No return address. Inside was a scrap of parchment and a single line, written in ink that shimmered silver:

“They forget who they are when they stop believing where they’ve been.”

It wasn’t signed. But Mara knew Ash’s handwriting.

The door returned that night.

She found Ash in the stone house, older now. Tired.

“It’s unraveling,” he told her. “This place... my world. I’m forgetting it when you’re not here.”

“I came back,” she said, holding his hands.

“You always do. But I’m not sure how much longer I can hold onto it.”

She didn’t know what to say. The wind outside howled through broken shutters. The silver-leafed trees bent low, as if mourning.

“I think I was meant to be a tether,” he whispered. “Or maybe you were. Either way, one of us keeps this real.”

“I won’t let it fade.”

But he only smiled, sad and knowing. “Even the strongest anchors rust.”

The final storm came like a scream.

Windows shattered in the Bellhurst. The wind uprooted trees. Guests fled. Her father collapsed in the hallway, clutching his chest. The world tilted.

And the cellar door burned with light.

She ran through, heart pounding, and found a wasteland.

Ash’s world was collapsing. The lake boiled black. The trees burned with white fire. The stone house crumbled stone by stone.

Ash stood at the center of the ruin, his face wet with rain or tears or both.

“I don’t know how to stop it,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

Mara reached for him, took his hand, and pulled the key from her pocket.

Together, they stepped through the fading light.

When she awoke, the Bellhurst was gone.

Or rather—it had never been. The valley was wild again, full of ash trees and thick mist. She stood with Ash on a new hilltop, looking down at a lake that shimmered gold, silver, then deep green.

“This is...” she began.

“A new door,” he finished.

They walked forward, barefoot through grass that remembered them, the key now only warm memory in her palm.

No inn.

No storms.

No need to wait for another cycle.

She had crossed over.

And she would never have to do it alone

Again.