By the time Aster reaches Number Seven Heart Lane, his hands are shaking so badly he nearly drops it when he lifts the third brick on the fourth step.
Beneath it, a cold metal key winks up at him in the weak streetlight.
He stares at it.
Then at the brick.
Then back at the key.
His brain, already waterlogged and halfway to mutiny, struggles to process the deeply inconvenient fact that hallucinations generally weren’t supposed to come with verifiable scavenger hunts.
For one wild second he considers that maybe this is just a spectacular coincidence. Maybe some poor bastard really does keep a spare key under the exact brick named by the exact hallucination he’d had while freezing to death in an alley.
And maybe the tooth fairy does payroll audits.
His hand closes around the key.
The metal is real. Cold. Solid.
“Oh, good,” he mutters, teeth chattering. “That’s not ominous at all.”
Every muscle in his body aches. His wet clothes cling to him with the intimate malice of a bad decision. The cold hasn’t left; it’s just gone deeper, settled into his joints and made itself at home. His hair drips steadily into his eyes as he fumbles at the lock, misses once, twice, then finally gets the key into the slot on the third try.
The click is quiet, but it lands in his chest like a verdict.
The door creaks open.
Aster hesitates on the threshold, peering into darkness.
Breaking into someone’s house now. Sure. Why not. It’s not as if the evening had shown any commitment to preserving categories like crime, hallucination, or dignity.
What if there’s a family inside? A kid? What if he gets himself shot before he even makes it to twenty-one?
But fear is mostly theoretical at this point. Desperation has already steamrolled logic, stolen its wallet, and left it face-down in a ditch.
He steps inside.
The hallway stretches out long and elegant, high ceilings and polished wooden floors faintly silvered by the spill of streetlight behind him. Three doors branch off ahead. The whole place is dark, still, silent—save for the drip of water from his clothes and the shallow, uneven sound of his own breathing.
Aster swallows.
“Hello?” he calls, voice hoarse and embarrassingly small. “Hi. Not a murderer. If anyone’s home, I’ll leave. Swear.”
No answer.
The silence hangs there, rich and expensive.
He waits another second, then huffs out a breath that rattles in his chest.
Maybe no one’s here. Maybe this is his now. Squatter’s rights, right?
His feet carry him deeper into the house, tracking little puddles over the floorboards as water drips from his clothes. He looks down at himself and blinks. He’s soaked. Like he’s been dredged out of a river and sent inside to ruin the upholstery.
Next to him, a light switch looms.
He hesitates—because turning on a light in a stranger’s house feels like the final flourish in the break-in—but then shrugs and flicks it anyway.
Warm amber light floods the hallway, soft and almost inviting. It should make him feel safer.
It doesn’t.
It just makes him feel visible. Like every molecule in the house is now aware he’s trespassing.
The cold clings harder, wet fabric plastered to him in miserable folds. He needs heat. Something to stop his bones from rattling apart.
He finds a bathroom—large, spotless, and equipped with a shower that looks like it belongs in a boutique hotel. His body makes the decision before his conscience can catch up. His hands are already yanking off wet clothes, stripping them away with the frantic efficiency of a man who has recently discovered he is no longer above crimes of opportunity if warm water is involved.
The shower roars to life.
When the first blast of heat hits his skin, it burns like fire. He gasps but leans into it anyway. Better the burn than the cold trying to tunnel into his marrow and switch off the lights.
He stands there for what feels like an hour, though it can’t be more than thirty minutes, letting the water pound life back into his muscles, letting the steam fog the room and soften the edges of the night. It washes away the grime, the rain, the alley stink.
But the warmth doesn’t wash away the hallucination, dream, vision—whatever you want to call it. Doesn’t make the robed man vanish from his memory.
Finally, he shuts the water off, stepping out on shaky legs, dripping as he stares at himself in the mirror.
At almost twenty-one, he looks older, worn out in that way poverty and stress tends to do to you. His face, the clash of his parents’ features, still shining through.
His mother’s deep complexion, his father’s lighter tone, mixing into that warm, coffee-cream skin he’s spent his whole life quietly resenting because no one ever seems to know which box to put him in.
His nose too strong. His lips too soft. His eyes still carrying something of his mother’s kindness, though the rest of him looks like he’s been assembled out of unfinished arguments and missed meals.
But the rest?
The bags under those eyes don’t help. Neither do the wild curls plastered damply to his forehead, or the scruffy beard that looks less rugged and more gave up.
He stares at that face like it belongs to someone else.
“A man in a dream,” he mutters to his reflection, voice flat, “told me where to find house keys hidden under a brick so I can break in, live here, and brew a magic potion to call him back.”
His mouth twists.
“Nothing weird about that.”
The laugh that punches out of him is too loud in the tiled room, too sharp around the edges.
And just like that, the fragile warmth breaks. The anxiety comes crashing back in.
He scrambles for a towel, wrapping it around himself like armour, pointedly ignoring the sodden heap of clothes he left on the floor. He is not putting those back on. Not now. Possibly not ever, if he can help it.
Pushing out into the hallway, he calls again, voice thin and strange in his own ears.
“Helloooo? Anyone here?”
No answer. Just more silence pressing in from every wall.
The house is pristine. Too pristine.
Brown sofas arranged with clinical care. White walls. Beige carpets. The whole place looks like someone had ordered upper-middle-class taste from a catalogue and staged it for a property listing. Perfect, tasteful, and completely dead.
Aster shakes his head, trying to force his thoughts into a single lane before they all pile up and catch fire.
Focus.
Clothes. Dryness. Sanity, or what remains of it.
He heads toward one of the doors.
The bedroom is big. Clean. Impersonal.
But it’s the open closet that stops him cold.
Clothes.
Dozens of them. All new. All neatly arranged.
And all his size.
His breath catches.
“The coincidences just keep coming,” he mutters, voice a little too tight.
His hands move before his brain can object, tugging on trousers and a T-shirt that fit so perfectly it makes his skin crawl. Not close enough. Not approximate. Exact.
He sits down hard on the edge of the bed, soft and immaculate beneath him, and buries his face in his hands.
“If the key, house, and even the bloody clothes are real…”
He can’t finish the sentence. His thoughts won’t hold still long enough.
The list.
Matter said there’d be a list. Ingredients. Instructions.
And if that list is real—
His heart kicks.
If the list is real, then maybe, just maybe, this isn’t insanity.
Or maybe it’s a much more committed form of insanity than he’d previously given it credit for.
Either way, his feet are moving before the thought finishes. He stumbles toward what looks like the kitchen, scanning frantically.
And there it is.
Tacked to the fridge with a little magnet, like it’s someone’s shopping list.
A yellowed note.
Big looping letters across the top.
Astral Potion.
Aster wakes sometime around two in the afternoon, blinking blearily at the ceiling like it’s personally offended him.
For a moment, he doesn’t move.
The bed—criminally soft, but with enough support to keep him from sinking into it like a cautionary tale—cradles him as though it thinks he deserves comfort. The silence is perfect. Too perfect. The windows blocking out every trace of city noise, every harsh blade of light, every reminder that the world outside is still doing its usual thing without him.
His body feels… rested.
Actually rested.
Not “passed out from exhaustion and technically unconscious” rested. Real sleep. A full bastard of a night without alarms, without panic jolts, without the usual scavenger thoughts worrying at the corners of his mind like rats behind drywall.
He’s been out nearly twelve hours. For most people, that might count as a decent lie-in. For Aster, who’s been surviving on four-hour bursts and spite since seventeen, it feels less like sleep and more like he’s stolen three consecutive nights from some richer, emotionally balanced version of himself.
Which, frankly, makes it suspicious as hell.
It should’ve made him feel human. Instead, that alone feels unnatural enough to send his pulse climbing.
It makes him feel vulnerable.
He sits up too fast.
Where the hell is he?
Barefoot, he shuffles toward the kitchen, the floor cool beneath his feet, and tries to piece together yesterday’s fever dream: nearly freezing to death in an alley, only to be slapped back into consciousness by a man in a robe who claimed the world would make sense if Aster just broke into a stranger’s house and brewed a magic potion in the kitchen.
He grimaces.
Even the memory smells like bullshit.
The house doesn’t.
The house smells like polish and lemon surface spray layered over the stale quiet of a place no one actually lives in. The sort of expensive stillness privately owned holiday homes cultivate after too many years of being visited only by cleaners and regret.
But something about it feels different. Personal. Not familiar, exactly—more like the shape of a place he might have belonged, if life had made one or two less vindictive choices on his behalf.
Almost like it could be his.
Which, obviously, makes him trust it even less.
Because nothing sends survival instincts into cardiac arrest quite like the sudden promise that everything might be okay. And Aster has lived long enough to know that any situation offering warmth, safety, and a marble countertop for free is either a scam, a cult, or both.
He stops by the counter and presses his palm onto the cool marble. It whispers nothing back—no spectral voices congratulating him with “well done, chosen one.” Thankfully, no robbery alarms either. Just that sterile, dead calm.
That’s when it hits him: he’s in a house a hallucination told him to find.
A house.
Given to him.
By a man who doesn’t exist.
Yeah, I definitely broke into an empty house and convinced myself a ghost gave it to me.
His chest tightens as the logic finally catches up with the fact of it. Every square inch of plaster suddenly feels hostile. The walls seem to edge closer. The ceiling leans down like it’s trying to overhear the breakdown.
There’s too much indoors in here. Too much implication.
He doesn’t think. Thinking is for people not in existential freefall.
He’s already moving, grabbing the still-damp clothes he arrived in last night, the ones hanging over a chair and smelling faintly of wet pavement, stale rain, and personal failure. He’s not about to start borrowing shirts from the ghost Airbnb.
He dresses quickly, the fabric cold and clammy against his skin, like punishment for every half-delusion he’s humoured in the last twenty-four hours. His fingers tremble—not from cold this time, but from that unmoored dread that starts in the chest and radiates outward until it’s indistinguishable from thought.
By the time he reaches the front door, his breath has gone shallow. He doesn’t even check if the letter—the envelope Matter mentioned—is still on the fridge or if he imagined that as well. He’s completely pushed it from his mind as too ridiculous to even humour, just another trick his brain’s playing to preserve him from giving up entirely.
Outside, the afternoon sun slaps him in the face with its cruel normalcy.
The courtyard almost glows. Birds exist. Somewhere, someone is probably having a perfectly ordinary lunch.
He steps onto the stone path, trying to tether himself to something mundane—friction, heat, gravity, the rough scrape of shoe against ground—anything to pile enough sensation between him and the fact he’s just fled a house because his hallucination had good taste in real estate.
Then, as his foot crosses the edge of the property, something pulls.
A surge tears through him. Not fear exactly. Something older. Sharper. An influx of pure adrenal dread driven straight through his spine like a live wire.
Every nerve in his body screams the same thing at once.
Something’s coming.
The hairs on his arms rise. His heartbeat turns percussive. For a second, everything else goes silent beneath the raw howl of instinct.
Move. Flee. Run.
Scream if necessary.
Preferably before reality caves in behind you.
Aster freezes on the path, breath caught halfway in his lungs. Every part of him wants to bolt.
He doesn’t.
After years of living with a brain that lies louder than reality, he’s developed a working relationship with panic. The trick is knowing when to ignore it.
So he does what any chronically under-medicated man would do: he files it under ongoing psychological collapse and keeps moving.
“Great,” he mutters. “Just another Tuesday.”
He walks faster, hoping motion will trick his nervous system into thinking he’s handling the situation.
The street outside is offensively normal. Nannies push strollers with the blank efficiency of women who have seen too much. Joggers perform the ancient middle-class ritual of pretending exercise is a personality. A pair of lunch-hour office workers argue about air-conditioning settings as if the planet isn’t actively trying to become a cautionary tale.
The city lives in a bubble so far removed from what Aster feels that the disconnect makes him want to vomit.
It’s too stable. Too clean. Too convincingly intact.
He can almost feel the normalcy trying to latch onto him, barbed hooks dragging through every crack in him, trying to pull him back into the version of the world where men in robes don’t appear in alleys to diagnose you with magical parasites.
Yeah, this is definitely not where I belong.
The thought lands harder than he wants it to.
Aster—the man with a long and decorated history of self-sabotage—has finally found a quiet, safe place and fled it like a rat from sunlight.
He laughs once, bitter enough to sting, and keeps walking.
Two blocks later, salvation appears in the form of a bus stop.
Rusted sign. Cracked glass. The smell of old gum and diesel. It’s practically holy.
He checks his pockets. Between loose change and a receipt for a meal he doesn’t remember eating, he scrapes together just enough coins for the fare.
The bus wheezes up like an asthmatic animal with union protections. He climbs aboard, nods at the driver without making eye contact, and drops the coins into the box with the solemnity of a man paying for temporary asylum.
Then he shoulders past a crowd of people in the throes of simply existing and collapses into a window seat.
The bus sighs, belches exhaust, and pulls away.