He climbed back into the open air and rubbed his hands together.
This was going to take time.
Green ropes uncoiled once more, reaching for the next grey cloud.
Could he feel tired here?
Hungry?
How long had he already spent inside this place?
The answer settled quickly: he was inside his own mind.
The memories themselves were proof enough.
He kept working, drawing the grey clouds down one after another.
Each one opened into a memory when he touched it.
Most were exactly as expected—ugly, painful, familiar.
Still he continued.
The sorted clouds disappeared downstairs into hell, neatly labelled and locked away.
With every one removed, the sky above him grew a clearer, deeper blue.
The warmth in his chest strengthened.
Control of the ropes became smoother; the time between each finished snow-globe grew shorter.
Then came a cloud that was pure black.
It felt wrong the moment he saw it.
Black ooze dripped from its edges.
Tiny shards of red lightning crackled along its surface.
His jaw tightened.
This had no place in his sky.
A simple snow-globe would not be enough.
He thought carefully.
Something this foul needed to be contained, controlled, kept far from everything else.
As he searched for the right shape, a sound reached him—faint, almost imagined.
A woman’s voice.
It seemed to rise from inside the cloud itself.
Could his ropes even hold it?
He thrust both hands forward and wrapped the blackness as tightly as he could.
The moment it drew near, the memory exploded open: a woman screaming, a man’s laughter, the entire cloud flashing a sickly, poisonous green.
He watched in rising horror as a dark figure hurled words at a beautiful woman with red hair —words he could not hear, yet somehow understood.
She was protecting someone.
Protecting him.
The scene repeated, over and over, until time itself seemed to stutter.
Rage, grief, and a sharp, unfamiliar pain flooded him.
That woman mattered.
He did not know why, only that she had tried to help him, and that this memory was old.
She might have been anyone—a friend, a stranger who chose kindness.
She might have pulled him out of the cupboard under the stairs if that black shadow of a man had not been there.
His eyes burned green.
The ropes tightened until they thinned back into threads, crushing and compressing the vile cloud with everything he felt.
He would not destroy it.
The woman deserved to be remembered—perhaps even avenged one day.
The Red Woman would be kept.
The cloud itself would not be tolerated.
Still shaking with anger, he turned and walked downstairs into the white wood hall.
Green threads, unnoticed, carried the finished black pearl behind him.
A wave of his ropes opened a section of the floor; bright red-carpeted stairs descended into a soft, cushioned room the exact colour of her hair.
This place would be hers—protected, safe.
His light shaped a tall, simple black pillar and covered its top with a bed of lily blossoms, the flower he loved most.
Carefully he set the black pearl in the centre.
For a long moment he stood in silence, anger still carved into his face, tears standing in his eyes.
Then he climbed back to the grass, drew a deep breath, and forced himself to calm.
If many more memories like that waited for him, he might break.
To discover that someone had once been willing to help him was almost too much.
Perhaps she existed in other memories, other clouds.
For now, though, he needed lighter colours.
He needed a break.
He began leaving certain clouds in the sky.
They were soft and white.
A few still needed dark edges trimmed away—moments of being caught outside without finishing work, or the rare times he had spoken to another child—but most were simply things he had once enjoyed without realising it.
One held the first time he had ever seen a flower.
Another carried the memory of a power cut in the village, when the night sky had filled with more stars than he had known existed.
He had not even known those moments were still inside him.
Watching the cleaned clouds drift past made him feel lighter, cleaner, almost bright.
Older clouds waited far in the distance.
He decided they could wait.
For a while he simply lay in the grass.
Time moved strangely here, yet he felt no urge to leave.
With fewer clouds crowding the sky and no dark ones left to fight, control of the threads, ropes, and even thick cords came more easily.
He was relaxed in a way he had never been outside this place.
Still, one more room had been necessary: a cupboard inside the cupboard, reserved for the worst of the Dursley years—the nights when the Fat Man, the Thin Woman, and Dudley had hurt him more than usual.
He had added tiny prison bars to those particular snow-globes.
The image of dozens of miniature tormentors locked away in a double hell made him giggle once, quietly.
It was more than they deserved, and that felt satisfying.
He looked down at his body.
The right arm remained longer than the left.
Years of poor food and heavy labour had almost certainly left the rest of his bones undersized and damaged as well.
Muscle and soft tissue worried him less; those had largely repaired themselves while he fixed the first break.
The important work, however, still waited.
The head.
He had taken too many blows there.
After the frying-pan incident his vision had never quite returned to normal; something inside had healed wrong.
Doubt flickered.
If the skull grew, would the brain remain safe?
Would the eyes?
Then he considered the alternative.
If everything went wrong, he would die here—on warm earth, beneath a soft wind that smelled of lilies, under an open blue sky.
It would be a better death than anything he could have imagined only days ago.
He would have fought for a death like this.
So why not risk it?
Resolve settled.
He gathered every thread, rope, and cord of green light and drew them into his skull.
The warmth behaved differently here.
Outside, the power had been limited, almost fragile.
Inside his mind it answered with far greater strength and far less effort.
Clearing the memories and refusing to bury the worst of them had sharpened his focus more than he expected.
As the light wrapped his skull, the inner world brightened.
Colours deepened.
Scents grew richer.
Even the soft rustle of wind through grass became sharper.
Then the warmth sank into his brain itself.
The world paused.
Suddenly everything was both moving and perfectly still.
Reality felt too real—the blue of the sky sharp enough to cut skin, the smell of grass loud enough to hurt the ears.
Faint popping sounds reached him as sections of bone cracked and shifted, as his eyes subtly reshaped, as his jaw loosened.
He felt teeth dissolve and regrow.
Pressure built steadily inside his head.