Flooded Church, Empty Cross

The second time leaving home was a unique form of torture. Lio was a passenger in his own body, forced to watch a rerun of a tragedy where he was the only one who remembered the original broadcast. He lived in a state of excruciating suspense, waiting for the other shoe to drop, even when he knew exactly where and when it would.

He tried to change things. When his father began to despair over his maps, Lio suggested a different path, a route he knew was solid ground. But a sudden rockslide, impossibly convenient, blocked their way, forcing them back onto the familiar, doomed trajectory. He tried to "find" his father's brass compass early, hoping to avert the chilling revelation under the tree root, only to discover it wasn't in his pocket where he'd kept it from the last cycle. It was as if the world itself was a malevolent stage director, nudging its props and actors back into their starting positions for a scene it was determined to shoot.

After days of this slow, grinding horror, something changed. They crested a hill, and below them, where Lio expected to see the path leading toward the uncanny silence of Echo Town, there was something new. A church, half sunk in a newly formed lake, its steeple rising from the grey water like the mast of a foundered ship.

For his family, it was a landmark of convenience. "Shelter," Ira mumbled, the first flicker of practical thought Lio had seen in him since their departure. "We can rest there."

For Lio, it was a terrifying, exhilarating deviation. This wasn't supposed to be here. This was not part of the last loop. A wild, desperate hope ignited in his chest. If the path could change, maybe the destination could too.

They waded through the heavy doors, which had swollen in their frames. The inside of the church was a scene of tranquil devastation. Water, dark and still, filled the nave, submerging the pews until only the very tops of their carved backs were visible, like the spines of sleeping leviathans. Above, light filtered through high stained glass windows, casting shifting, bruised colors of blue and purple onto the water's surface. The air was thick with the smell of wet stone and decay.

The only dry land was the chancel, the raised platform at the front. The stone altar stood in the center, a solid, pale island in the gloom. Behind it, a massive, unadorned wooden cross was fixed to the wall, its base stained dark by the water. It was an empty cross in a flooded world.

They made a small, miserable camp on the altar's stone floor. Ira immediately fell into a fitful sleep. Sera stood at the edge of the platform, staring down into the murky water as if reading a story only she could see.

Lio watched Mina. She crept to the very edge of the stone, letting her small legs dangle just above the water's surface. And she began to whisper.

Her invisible friend was back. Lio felt a familiar knot of dread tighten in his stomach. He crawled over to her. "Who are you talking to, Mina?"

Mina didn't look at him. Her gaze was fixed on the dark water below. "To the drowned," she said simply.

Lio's blood went cold.

"The choir master says he's sorry he was so sharp with the tenor on the high notes," Mina reported, her voice soft and conversational. "He didn't know it would be their last song." She paused, listening. "And little Elspeth… she wants her mother to know she isn't scared. She found her wooden doll. It's floating by the third pew, on the right."

Lio's eyes darted to the spot Mina indicated. In the shifting, colored light, he could just make out a small, dark shape bobbing gently on the surface. He felt sick. This was new. This was worse than Echo Town. Echoes were just things; these were souls, their last regrets served up by his little sister.

He was about to pull her back, to tell her to stop, when she turned her head and looked directly at him. Her eyes, for a moment, seemed ancient, filled with a borrowed sorrow.

"They want to know why you're so sad," she said, her voice now holding a strange, melodic cadence, as if harmonizing with a choir only she could hear. "You've heard this story before. You already know the sad part at the end."

The words struck Lio with the force of a physical blow. They knew. The drowned, the ghosts, the whatever it was that spoke through his sister—it knew he was a repeat viewer. It knew he was trapped.

Mina turned back to the water. "They say it's a shame. To be given a second chance, only to find it's the same as the first."

The flicker of hope Lio had felt upon seeing the church was extinguished, replaced by a much more profound and suffocating dread. The loop wasn't just a blind, mechanical process. It was sentient. It could see him. And worse, it could change the script at will, adding new, more intimate horrors to the performance. He wasn't just a prisoner forced to watch the same play over and over; he was the personal audience for a cruel artist who was improvising a new and more terrible show, just for him.