Nora’s eyes fluttered open. The classroom was quiet, the other children still napping on mats that smelled faintly of crayons and disinfectant. Her tiny body felt heavy, almost weighted, though she didn’t know why. The memories pressed against her skull—not just today, not just yesterday—but fragments of lifetimes, battles, hospitals, caves, and shadows she had no words for.
She tried to speak, to tell the teacher about the threads, the lights, the sword, the Unmakers—but the words came out as toddler gibberish. The visions of the cosmic battlefield, the Solace machine, the dementia-fogged future, and the lobotomy-bound child in 1957 all collided in a swirl that made her stomach twist.
When her parents arrived, exhausted from work, they barely had the energy to pick her up. “Time to go, Nora,” her mother said, smiling tiredly. “Let’s get you home.”
Nora clutched her tiny hands together, desperate. “Mom… Dad… there’s—there’s threads… and the sword… the machine… Solas…”
Her father frowned, rubbing his eyes. “Silly stories, baby girl. Let’s go home.”
But the threads didn’t disappear. They shimmered faintly in her mind, bending around the classroom walls, touching the faint sunlight, stretching into places no four-year-old could have imagined.
A few days later, her father returned home early, a wide grin plastered on his tired face, holding a small carrier. “Surprise,” he said, placing it gently on the kitchen floor. “Meet your new friend.”
The kitten mewed softly, gray and tiny, paws too big for its body. “I thought you could use a companion,” he said, placing it down. “Her name… is Solas.”
The moment Nora’s fingers touched the soft fur, everything shifted.
The hospital, the Solace machine, the cosmic battlefield, the sword, the Unmakers—they all surged at once in a brilliant pulse. She saw Australia 2018, 1957, age fifty, and the battlefield at the same time. The kitten’s tiny mews became a beacon, pulling her threads together, anchoring her across realities.
And yet the collision was dizzying. Her tiny mind tried to hold it all: the fear, the battles, the comas, the fractures, the war, the loss. She hugged Solas the kitten tight, feeling its warmth, its soft purr vibrating against her chest, and somehow that fragile, living thread was enough to let the storm of realities settle—for just a heartbeat.
In that heartbeat, baby Nora understood something she could not yet name: the kitten, the machine, the sword, the threads—they were all part of her. All part of the same thing. All calling her forward.
And the worlds continued to ripple around her, waiting.