She looked up at the stars, the constellations above seeming to twinkle in recognition. Missax rested in her palm, its hum now a gentle lullaby.
Unfurling it revealed a map—no ordinary map of streets and rivers, but a sketch of the town overlaid with strange symbols, ley lines, and a series of points marked with tiny, glowing dots. One dot sat precisely where the attic was, another at the old lighthouse on the cliffs, and a third at the abandoned railway tunnel beneath the park.
It was on one of those rainy Saturday afternoons, when the sky was a relentless sheet of slate, that Layla’s curiosity finally found its mark. The attic of the old Victorian house on Willow Street had been a treasure trove of forgotten relics ever since Layla’s family moved in. The floorboards creaked in a rhythm that matched the patter of the rain, and the air smelled faintly of cedar and old paper.
