Serenya’s POV
The old woman is gone.
One moment she’s standing in front of me, hand half-raised, like she wants to say one last thing, like she’s about to imprint something crucial in the world before vanishing—and the next, she simply isn’t there.
I blink. I take a tentative step forward, as though movement could conjure her back. Maybe I looked away for a fraction of a second without realizing it. Maybe my eyes betrayed me. But the alley is empty. The air is stagnant, stripped of presence, like a photograph whose subject has been erased. No shuffling footsteps. No faint scent of smoke or flowers clinging to the space she once occupied. Nothing. Only the hum of distant city life, faint but hollow, like a pulse without a body.
I spin slowly, scanning the rows of shuttered shops, the cr
