The next night, Lyra didn’t sleep.
She couldn’t.

Every time she closed her eyes, she felt like she was falling—not down, but upward, pulled into the sky like an invisible hand was reaching through the clouds to claim her.

And that voice...
Still echoing in her mind.

“The sky is not yours. It never was.”

She repeated it under her breath like a broken prayer. Over and over. Trying to find meaning in its distortion.

At first, she thought it was a dream.
But she never remembered her dreams this vividly. And dreams didn’t leave residual static in your recording files.

The morning sunlight was sharp, almost angry. Rivenhollow had always had strange weather, but today it felt artificial—like someone had pasted the sky on a canvas and called it a day.

At the breakfast table, her mother stirred sugar into coffee she wouldn’t drink.

“You’re pale,” she said, not looking up.

“I didn’t sleep.”

“Too much time on that recorder of yours, huh?”

Lyra gave a half-smile. Her mom didn’t believe in nightmares. Or frequencies. Or anything that couldn’t be folded into a spreadsheet.

She didn’t press. She never did.

At school, things were... off.

Her best friend Juno wasn’t in class. Not sick, not suspended—just gone. No texts, no posts, no explanation. She wasn’t even marked absent in the school attendance system.

Mr. Halloway, the science teacher who always wore a star pin on his collar, was gone too. The substitute didn’t mention him. No one seemed to notice or care.

In the fourth period, the school intercom crackled. Lyra glanced up at the speaker in the corner of the room.

A long, drawn-out static hiss filled the air for a solid six seconds. Then one word—barely audible.

“Repeat.”

The teacher kept talking like nothing had happened.
The students continued scribbling notes.
Lyra stared at the speaker until the bell rang.

By the time she made it home, the clouds had shifted into unnatural shapes. A spiral was forming above the ridge outside of town, just faint enough to miss unless you were paying attention.

Lyra noticed.

Because the sky hadn’t been right for days.

That night, she returned to her desk, the one nestled under her crooked bookshelf and covered in wires, broken headphones, and notebooks filled with spectral analysis logs.

She sat in front of her microphone.

The same one that she had whispered to her two nights ago.

She didn’t hit the record this time.
She simply… listened.

She focused.

To the subtle hum of her laptop fan.
To the electronic murmur of a plugged-in phone.
To the nearly imperceptible buzz of silence itself.

It wasn’t silence anymore. It had a frequency.

Low... high... low.

A pulse.

A rhythm.

She couldn’t hear it with her ears, but she felt it behind her teeth. In her jaw. In her bones.

The air in her room began to feel thick, like syrup.

She leaned forward, placed her hands over the mic, and whispered.

“Are you still listening?”

No answer.

But her waveform display on-screen twitched. Just slightly. Just enough.

Then—motion.

The visual display began to breathe.

And then came the sound.

Not a voice. Not a word.

A signal.

Low static waves. Intermittent hissing. A second tone weaving beneath it—like a melody buried under layers of white noise.

And then, beneath the chaos... a whisper. Fainter than before.

“Do not remember.”

“Third layer breached.”

Lyra froze.

It wasn’t just talking to her.

It was monitoring her progress.

She instinctively saved the audio file and backed it up in three locations.

She had no idea why. It just felt necessary.

But when she tried to play the file back...

It vanished.

Replaced by a blank folder titled [NULL].

No property. No metadata.

Just a blinking cursor.

Then her screen flickered and went black.

The entire room darkened.

Not just her laptop—everything.

No hum from the fridge. No ticking of the wall clock. No whir from her hard drives.

A blackout.

Then...

"Sleep is your safety. Dreams are your wall."

"You are breaking the wall."

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Not through speakers. Not through headphones. Through her skull.

Lyra collapsed to the floor, clutching her head as the sound twisted in her brain like a snake made of static.

It wasn’t a pain.
It was rewriting.

Then—silence.

When the power returned, her room was exactly as it had been.
Lights on. Laptop humming. The recording folder was restored.

Except now, a new file has appeared.

📁

staticdreams_.wav

She played it.

It was her own voice.

“If you’re hearing this… you’ve already gone too far.”

“But you always did. You never listen. You never sleep. That’s why they noticed.”

“And now you’ve started dreaming while awake.”

She didn’t remember recording it.

That night, she slept.

But her dreams weren’t dreams.

They were memories she’d never lived.

She stood in a glass city suspended upside-down in the sky.
People floated past her in reverse, mouthing words they’d never say aloud.
A massive eye, stitched into the heavens with lightning, blinked once—and every building shattered.

And in the center of it all... she stood alone.

A crown of static on her head.

Wires run from her fingers into the sky.

The same sky that whispered.

“Return to the static.”

“Forget the sky.”

She woke up screaming.

Cold sweat. Numb hands. Her pillow soaked through.

The clock on her wall blinked 4:44.

And for a moment—just a second—her reflection in the mirror across the room smiled before she did.