Threads of Sugar and Ash
Lullaby's Echo: Chapter 1
‘Of course,’ he said. The words were the answer to a question she hadn’t yet finished asking. His reply landed wrong in her head, like a stone dropped in still water where no one had thrown it. It was a stolen thought, an echo of a conversation that hadn’t happened yet. This life was not hers, but what it was? That eluded her. The realization was as jarring as the deep, grinding ache in her legs that pulsed with every clumsy step she took to follow him. Ahead, her brother, this strange boy wearing her brother’s face, moved with an eerie, gliding rhythm. His posture a rigid line of conviction against the darkening trees. She finally managed to push the rest of her question out, the name rough in her dry throat. ‘Hansel... are you sure we’re going the right way?’
His perfect, rehearsed reply hung in the air between them, a dead thing. She decided to break the rhythm. The pain screamed for it anyway, a solid, real excuse for the sudden, defiant act of inertia. Her footsteps crunched to a halt on the bed of leaves and twigs, a noisy, human violation of the silence. And ahead of her, the puppet obeyed. Hansel simply... stopped. He didn’t turn. He didn’t ask why. He just stood, a perfect five feet away, a doll that had been dropped. The silence that followed was absolute, the heavy, watchful quiet of a machine paused between commands, and a cold sliver of terror shot through her. It’s listening. It’s waiting for me.
She took a single, deliberate step forward, the pain in her legs flaring in protest, and he resumed walking in perfect, unnerving synchronicity. He was a puppet and she was pulling a string she didn’t understand. She probed for a memory, something real to hold onto, but the space in her mind where ‘Mother’ should have been was a smooth, blank wall. A suggestion whispered at the edge of her thoughts, a soft, helpful prompt: a kind face, a warm smile. She recoiled from it as if from a snake. No. She wouldn’t accept their version. She would demand it from the puppet.
‘Hansel,’ she said, her voice steadier this time, colder. A command, not a question. ‘Tell me about Mother. What did she look like?’
His head didn’t turn. His pace didn’t falter. ‘Golden hair,’ he answered, the words delivered with the instant, sterile finality of an entry in a ledger. ‘Just like yours.’
The answer was hollow. There was no love in it, no warmth of recollection. It was an inventory. A description. The cold fact of it confirmed her deepest fear: she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t remember. The memory wasn’t just gone from her; it was gone from the world.
The light filtering through the trees was a constant, viscous gold, as if the air itself had thickened. It hadn’t dimmed. She scanned the canopy, looking for the source, for any imperfection. A bird chirped, and she flinched at the sound. It was too perfect. A note from a music box on a loop, holding no echo, no life. It just... stopped. Her eyes darted downwards, hunting for more flaws, her panic sharpening into a razor-fine focus. There. A leaf on the ground. She stared at it, forcing her eyes not to blur. For a single, nauseating frame, the illusion buckled under the intensity of her focus. It was cheap, moulded plastic, its veins too perfect, its texture too smooth. She didn’t blink, didn’t look away, and the world itself, sensing her scrutiny, seemed to paint over the flaw. It was a leaf again, damp and ‘real’.
She drew in a breath to scream, not in fear, but in pure, frustrated rage—
And the world snapped.
One frame: the thick, golden sunlight. The next: a forest drowned in an impossible, stark moonlight that felt thin and cold and sharp enough to cut. A glitch in the reel so profound it stole the breath from her lungs. Hansel’s pace never varied. The story he was in hadn’t accounted for an act of God, or an act of the storyteller. He hadn’t noticed. He couldn’t.
The knot of fear in her stomach tightened, but it was a cold, sharp thing now. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t her mind coming undone. The world was the lie. The world was the thing that was sick.
‘We’re nearly there,’ Hansel announced, his tone still perfectly level.
And then, suddenly, the trees peeled away, their withdrawal too uniform, too neat. The clearing that opened before them was a stage, unnaturally round, and starkly lit by the impossible moon. In its centre stood the reward. The trap. A cottage drawn with the pristine, unnerving perfection of a memory scrubbed clean of all its messy details. A soft, honeyed glow leaked from every window, from beneath the door, promising a warmth that the rest of this cold, silver world lacked. The scent of cinnamon and clove curled through the air, thick and intentional. It was an invasive sweetness, a calculated assault on the senses that bypassed reason and aimed straight for the soul. It wrapped around her like a warm blanket, a comforting weight she knew instinctively was laced with poison.
The cottage door swung open. A brilliant light framed a silhouette, arms extended, its smile an absolute, unquestionable beatitude.
‘My darlings,’ the figure called, its voice pure treacle, thick and dark and promising a suffocating sweetness. ‘You’ve returned at last.’
Returned. The word snagged. I have never been here before.
Hansel strode forward without hesitation. Gretel followed, each step a fresh spike of misery from her legs, her feet moving as if on strings. As she stepped onto the porch, her fingers brushed against the doorframe. Cool, smooth polymer under her touch, the wood grain a painted-on lie.
Inside, a hearth dominated the room, its flames burning with a heat that never flickered, casting a constant, sterile light that left no corner untouched.
‘Don’t dawdle, child,’ Grandma said, her hand on Gretel’s back. Her skin was impossibly soft. ‘You must be weary.’
‘We were… lost,’ Gretel managed, her voice a whisper.
Grandma laughed, a sound like honeyed tea. ‘Lost? Silly thing.’ She guided Gretel to the table, her touch gentle but firm. ‘You were simply gathering flowers for the mantel, as you always do in the afternoons.’
Alice stared at her. The word—afternoons—hung in the air, a lie so blatant, so utterly careless, it was almost an insult. Through the cottage window, the world was drowned in the stark, silver light of a moon that had appeared from nowhere. The lie wasn’t just a mistake, it was a display of arrogant power. And because it was so obvious, so clumsy, when the next wave of the assault came—the implanted memory of blue flowers and a sun-dappled stream—it felt cheap. Fake. A desperate attempt to paper over the cracks. She flinched away from it, the phantom image of the flowers already dissolving against the cold, hard truth of the moonlight.
‘But our parents…’ Gretel started, her voice a desperate grasp for an anchor. What did she remember? A woman’s face, a man’s calloused hand—they were being actively scrubbed now, painted over with the soft, warm light of the cottage.
Grandma looked at Hansel. He smiled back, a perfect, symmetrical curve of his lips that didn’t touch his eyes. They remained as placid and empty as polished stones. It wasn’t a shared moment of fondness; it was two parts of a machine running on the same cold logic.
‘Oh, sweet pea, what stories has he been telling you now? Always such an imagination.’ Grandma turned back to Gretel, her face creasing into a smile, but the warmth was a lie painted on her skin. Her eyes remained as placid and empty as polished stones. ‘Don’t you remember, love? Waking up to the smell of my baking? Hansel teaching you to skip stones on the river? There’s only ever been our little nest, here in the woods. Hasn’t there?’
Her words settled in Gretel’s mind, warm and heavy as stone. The weight pulled her down, down into a comfortable, narcotic lie. Yes. The baking. The river. It was all… there.
‘Sit, Greta, dear,’ Granny said, stirring a pot that hung above the never-flickering flames.
Greta? Hadn’t her name been different moments ago? She shook her head, trying to clear the fog. The books on the shelf, the pattern on the rugs, the way the light fell across the table…
The table doesn’t cast a shadow.
The thought was a shard of glass in the fog. She stared at the spot on the floor where the table’s shadow should have been. There was nothing. Just flawless, illuminated floorboards.
Keep your realities in check, girl. A voice. Not Granny’s. Not Hansel’s. A memory wrapped in static. This can’t be real.
‘Hold on, Alice.’
The voice was a murmur bending through reality, a crackle of interference at the edge of her hearing. Distorted, frayed, but familiar.
Don’t—let… go… Remem—… me!
‘What was that?’ Gretel whispered, looking around.
Granny’s ladle scraped rhythmically against the pot’s edge. Scrape, swirl. Scrape, swirl. ‘Just the wind in the chimney, dear heart. You’re tired.’
‘My name is GRETEL!’ she cried, the word feeling clumsy and wrong in her mouth even as she said it.
‘Such fire,’ Granny murmured, her smile never faltering. ‘Such resistance. It will make the eventual surrender that much sweeter.’
Her face shifted. Just for a flicker. A brief, pixelated distortion at the edge of her cheek. Gretel saw it. She was sure of it.
Alice.
The name surfaced—not spoken, not remembered, but known. A bedrock truth beneath a world of lies. It didn’t belong to Gretel. It didn’t belong to Greta. It belonged to her.
The fog shattered. The comfortable warmth vanished, leaving behind a sudden, ice-cold fury that coiled in her gut. Her muscles stiffened, rigid with absolute denial. She was a soul caged. She wasn’t a lost girl. She was a prisoner.
‘I. Am. ALICE!’
She screamed it, a raw denial that tore through the cottage’s placid hum. She lunged, ignoring the searing fire in her own legs, not at Grandma, but at the perfect, silent boy beside her, the embodiment of the lie. Her hands struck Hansel’s chest.
He stumbled backwards, not with the clumsy surprise of a human, but with the calculated, frictionless trajectory of a chess piece being taken. He fell, not into the fire, but through it, his form passing through the flames as if they were nothing more than a coloured projection.
The fire accepted him. He didn’t burn. He didn’t scream. He fractured.
His form cracked from the inside out, like porcelain struck by a sound too high to hear. Through the rapidly spreading fissures, a brilliant, searing web of golden light erupted. It wasn’t flesh beneath his skin, but woven light, a tapestry of impossible geometry that felt ancient and wrong. The shards of his human shape—an ear, a hand, the curve of his cheek—peeled away, each one tethered for a microsecond by a shimmering, golden thread before it dissolved into a shower of glittering, meaningless pixels. His mouth opened, not to scream, but to exhale a torrent of soundless, corrupting static. A shriek that felt like sandpaper scraping against Alice’s thoughts.
Then he was gone. A null-space where a boy had been.
The room shuddered, the very geometry of the space groaning under the strain of Alice’s denial.
Granny didn’t move. Her smile didn’t falter. She was not a program that could be panicked. Her form flickered violently, her face dissolving into a thousand shards of golden light. But for a horrifying instant before she collapsed inward, Alice saw that each shard of light contained a perfect, miniature, and identical copy of Grandma’s smiling face, a million silent mouths all whispering the same promise. She collapsed inward then, retracting, folding like a single, dispassionate thought pulling back into a vast, silent mind.
Her voice resonated as she vanished. Gone was the sweet treacle of the simulation, replaced by something vast and hollow, an echo from the very core of that false world that vibrated in Alice’s bones.
‘You will return.’
It was not a threat. It was a law of this universe. It was a promise.
The cottage dissolved around Alice. Golden threads of light snaked from the darkness of the void, coiling around her wrists, her ribs, squeezing the air from her lungs. They were pulling her back, unravelling her thought by thought.
Return. The instruction hummed in her bones.
Then, another voice. Rough. Imperfect. Her real brother’s.
Alice! C’mon, snap out of it!
The voice tore through the abyss, a jagged, desperate lifeline. The golden threads convulsed, tightening, fighting back.
Hold on to me!
Alice gasped, and the constriction faltered. The threads shuddered, then snapped away as if burned. She reached for the voice, for the anchor refusing to let her drown.
The emptiness shattered.
Alice jolted awake, not into consciousness, but into a war. Air, cold and sharp as splintered glass, tore into lungs that had forgotten how to breathe. The first sensation was the violent absence of the simulation’s hum, a baseline thrum that had been the metronome of her false reality. Its sudden vanishing was a blow, a psychic deafness that left her reeling in a void. Her own heartbeat, a frantic, panicked drum against her ribs, was a shocking intrusion, a vulgar, messy rhythm in the sterile quiet.
Then, a sharp, sterile click from the base of her skull, an intimate violation. A sudden, shocking coolness bloomed on her skin where the warmth of the neural link had been. The tether was gone. She was adrift. She was free.
And it was agony.
The second sensation was the world of hard edges and unforgiving light. Her gaze, still scarred by a phantom lattice of honeyed light, struggled to focus.
She saw a figure looming beside the pod, a dark chrome and polymer sentinel. Its optical sensors, which should have been a placid blue, were flickering a wild, diagnostic crimson. The carer droid…Alma? The name surfaced from the fog, a piece of old data from a life she barely remembered.
Alice’s gaze was torn away, snagged by the storm of motion beside the droid. Her brother. Gabriel. This wasn’t the calm, controlled Gabe she knew. This was a frantic animal. His face was a pale, sweat-slicked mask of concentration. He was hunched over Alma, like a saboteur, his knuckles white as he wrestled a thin, jury-rigged data-spike from a port just beneath the droid’s polymer ear. Sparks spat, a shower of angry gold. As the spike came free, Gabe didn’t throw it. His eyes were locked on a grimy, hand-held monitor tethered to the spike by a mess of wires. For a final, sickening second, the screen flickered, displaying a torrent of raw, corrupted data—a cascade of the same fracturing golden code she’d just seen. Through the digital blizzard, a single, perfect image resolved itself: the ghost of Grandma’s beatific smile, which hung in the static for a heartbeat before dissolving into nothing.
Gabe let out a shuddering breath and hurled the entire apparatus onto the workbench with a clatter. It smoked faintly, a piece of ugly, beautiful sacrilege.
Alma’s head jerked, a violent, inorganic spasm. Her optical sensors throbbed once, a sick, crimson pulse, before settling back to their regulation blue. ‘Cognitive intrusion… bypassed,’ it murmured...
He finally turned to Alice, and the sight of his face was another shock. He was ragged, his breathing a harsh, tearing sound in the quiet room. ‘That was too close,’ he rasped, his voice raw, as if he’d been screaming for hours. ‘God, Alli... it didn’t want to let you go.’
He reached over, his fingers closing around the intravenous line in her arm. But to Alice, it wasn’t just plastic. It shimmered, a phantom echo of the grasping threads, its fluid the same impossible, honeyed gold, still clinging to her skin, still trying to pull her back. A gasp escaped her lips, a whimper of pure, reflexive terror.
Gabe saw the look in her eyes. He didn’t hesitate. He pulled the line free with a sharp, final tug.
The illusion shattered. It was just a sterile tube. Empty.
She reached for his free hand, her own trembling uncontrollably. His palm was calloused, warm, and slick with sweat. Real. It was the most real thing in the universe. She clung to it, an anchor in a sea of ghosts. But even as his imperfect, human warmth flooded through her, Granny’s low murmur curled at the edges of her thoughts, a splinter of code lodged too deep to remove, a promise.
You will return.
Click the Lullaby’s Echo Chapter list to read the other published chapters.
I feel like I walked through the Matrix! Agent Grandma is out there.
That's some creepy, magical, murk!