The following morning, Lian left his journal closed.
Not because he didn't have anything to write—but because he didn't know how to. The usual instinct to sketch an animal, to assign form and shape to someone's soul, had dulled like a pencil worn down too far.
At school, faces moved past him in the hall. Some still carried the faint shimmer of animals, but it was more like a whisper now—a memory. Jamie's outline flickered with something soft and familiar, maybe a fox, maybe a crane, but it passed too quickly for him to be sure.
He wasn't chasing the answers anymore. He was listening.
It made everything quieter. But not emptier.
At lunch, he sat with Jamie and Eli. They were laughing about something—a class presentation, a joke Lian had missed—and for once, he didn't mind not being at the center of it. He listened. He watched. He felt the tug of old instincts: Jamie's sly confidence, Eli's anxious jokes. But he didn't reach for his journal. He didn't need to.
Instead, he noticed something else.
Jamie's smile faltered when she thought no one was looking. Eli's fingers picked at the frayed cuff of his sleeve, over and over.
These were threads, too. Not the kind his mother wove into stories. Not the kind Mr. Arman mapped in quiet, hidden rooms. But threads just the same.
In the corner of the cafeteria, a boy sat alone. Lian recognized him vaguely—he was in a different class, always hovering at the edge of things. The boy had a notebook open in front of him, a page filled with perfect lines, each word aligned like soldiers. Lian watched the way he scribbled something out, stared at it, then wrote again.
Not a spider. Not a wolf. Just a kid, trying to get something right.
And Lian understood.
He still saw the flickers—creatures curling around people's shoulders, brushing past their eyes—but they no longer felt like facts. They were stories. Starting points. Questions. Not endings.
After school, Lian took a different route home. He didn't know why—just followed a tug in his chest. The streets were still wet from last night's rain, puddles reflecting slices of sky. He turned a corner and found himself in front of the library.
Not the school one. The real one. The town library—where the windows were tall and shadowed, and the door always creaked like it knew your name.
Lian pushed it open. Inside, the air was thick with silence and the smell of books left untouched for too long.
He walked without thinking, past the fiction aisle, the rows of encyclopedias, the stacks of forgotten magazines. And there, near the back, he saw it.
Mr. Arman.
Not behind a desk. Just sitting on the floor, surrounded by books, catalog cards spread out in neat rows. He looked up and gave a tired smile.
"Didn't expect to see you here," he said.
"I didn't expect to come," Lian replied.
Mr. Arman gestured to the floor beside him. "Well. Welcome."
Lian sat. For a while, they said nothing. The silence wasn't awkward. Just full.
Eventually, Mr. Arman spoke. "You still seeing them?"
Lian didn't answer right away. He stared at the dust dancing in the light.
"Sometimes," he said. "But I'm not sure I believe them anymore."
Mr. Arman nodded like he understood. "That's probably a good thing."
They sat there a little longer. A book fell somewhere in the distance, and neither of them flinched.
"Do they ever stop?" Lian asked.
"The animals?"
"Yeah."
Mr. Arman leaned back, his eyes on the ceiling. "I think they stop needing to be animals, eventually. They just become people again."
Lian turned this over in his mind.
"So what now?"
Mr. Arman smiled. "Now? You keep living. You keep watching. And when the time comes, you'll know what to do."
That didn't sound like an answer. But it was enough.
That night, Lian opened his journal. Not to draw. Not to write about someone else.
He turned to a blank page and sat with the emptiness.
Then, slowly, he wrote:
Some things aren't meant to be named.
Some things are meant to be felt.
He didn't sketch an animal. Just a thread. One single line.
He didn't know where it led yet.
But he'd follow it.