Chapter Text
The dream came to Ludwig in streaks of colour and heat.
He was lying in the nave of a cathedral engulfed in flames, smoke curling around shattered stained-glass windows that dripped light onto scorched pews. The air was thick, choking, filled with the screeching groan of wood and stone giving way. He couldn’t move at first—his body was heavy, bones molten.
Then he saw it.
A small, singed drawing lay just beyond his reach at the far corner of the cracked altar. Through the smoke, Ludwig caught a glimpse of the picture’s content: a little girl with soft, curled brown hair and bright amber eyes, her expression open and trusting. She looked uncannily like Feliciano.
He crawled forward, dragging himself across the broken marble. Flames danced close to his skin. His fingers brushed the picture’s edge just as a beam collapsed overhead—
—and he woke up in a cold sweat, gasping.
The sky was still pale when Ludwig arrived at school. He barely remembered getting dressed, or packing his things. The vividness of the dream lingered, imprinting sensations on his skin: the heat, the smoke, the desperation.
His thoughts drifted as he walked, and when he passed Feliciano in the hallway, he barely registered his smile until it was directed at him.
“Ludwig,” Feliciano said cheerfully, waving him over. “I found something weird this morning.”
Ludwig blinked the haze from his mind and followed Feliciano to the art room. Spread out across one of the tables was a canvas—one of Feliciano’s older paintings. It depicted their school grounds, but not quite. The angles bent strangely, the trees seemed to ripple with motion even though they were fixed in pigment, and the light shimmered through the colours in a way that made Ludwig’s stomach twist.
“It looks like the garden from that day,” Feliciano murmured. “You know… the day with the ash.”
Ludwig nodded slowly. “But it’s distorted.”
“I painted this weeks ago. Before the butterfly. Before anything weird started happening.” Feliciano’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But when I look at it now… I feel like I’ve seen it before. Not just the garden. This garden. Like a memory I’m not supposed to have.”
Ludwig stared at the painting. His dream pulsed behind his eyes. He didn’t say anything, but his fingers curled tighter around the strap of his bag.
The rest of the day unraveled like a thread pulled too tight.
Lights flickered in the hallways. Lockers slammed themselves shut when no one was near. The temperature dropped sharply in some classrooms, students shivering despite the warmth outside.
During lunch, a shadow moved along the walls of the cafeteria, passing just behind Ludwig and Feliciano without anyone else seeming to notice. They turned at the same time, sensing the presence.
“Did you—?”
“Yeah,” Ludwig replied immediately.
Then the school bell shrieked—too loud, too long—and the sound rattled the windows. For a moment, everyone froze. Teachers muttered about faulty wiring.
But Ludwig knew better.
That night, he sat by his bedroom window again. The dream weighed on him. The girl’s face haunted him—not just because she resembled Feliciano, but because something about her expression had stirred an ache in his chest. A memory—or something close to one—he couldn’t retrieve.
He lifted a hand to his chest.
Something was changing.
It wasn’t just the strange events around them—it was inside him. A presence growing beneath his skin, like buried flame. It made his breath hitch and his hands shake. He didn’t know what it meant, only that it was connected to everything: the dream, the painting, the ash.
And Feliciano.
He didn’t know how or why—but the threads were tightening.
Something was coming.