The sky splits like a wound. Not thunder. Not storm. A zipper pulled by nothing. The visitors spill out of the fold, half glitch, half prayer, resembling unfinished thoughts. They are tall. But also skewed. Sometimes winged. Sometimes unbearable ideas forced into shape. They speak in rust. In vapor. In V-belt dialects.
They don’t walk. They happen.
Charamaynne drifts among them, as if always meant to. S/He assembles themself from fragments, an interrupted goodbye, the hush between failed apologies, the shell of a radio that once played only static. Their body jitters, an unstable rendering, edges smeared like a dream refusing to collapse. At the center: a node. Quiet, bright, orbiting itself like a thought stuck in the throat.
The air bends inward. Soured. Too still.
“What is your shape?”
The question leaks. Doesn’t echo. Just seeps. Walls flush. Antennas twitch like nervous animals. A puddle forms a jaw and waits.
Vin’nyla enters in reverse. Built from misfiled paperwork, protest chants never heard, love letters sealed but never sent. Bones of feelings with no container.
“A human is an echo with hands,” Vin’nyla says, or maybe the concrete does. “They sculpt meaning. Then forget what it was for.”
Charamaynne thrums in agreement. Opens their chest. Pulls out a memory cube. Places it on the ground. It unfolds, quietly, slowly, into a spiral staircase that goes nowhere and refuses to end.
They begin to build. Not shelters. Not towers. Permissions. Elastic boundaries where reality gets optional. Time hums in loops. Gravity sighs, apologizes, let's go a little.
Rooms sprout from emotion. One wails softly when entered. Another sings your unsent messages in a key you’ve never heard but recognize anyway.
“Do you live here now?” someone asks.
“We dwell in the interval,” says Charamaynne. “Between grief and archive.”
Vin’nyla twirls once. Neon phrases drip from their fingers and land like dew.
“Home,” they say, “is the thing that repeats you back, gently.”