Dream People I — The Mysterious Magic Visitors

CHAPTER 5

The Day the Sky Took Her Mother

Before FREEDOM, Alyssra had been a child who loved the sound of her mother's laughter. Maerina took her to the Festival of Floating Lights, where the streets smelled of sweet bread and musicians played beside the fountains. They watched performers rise on mechanical platforms. 'Someday I want to fly,' Alyssra said. Maerina squeezed her hand. 'Perhaps we both will.' The visitor appeared above the square without an aircraft or any visible machine.

At first people ran; then they stopped to watch. The stranger seemed delighted by the crowd's amazement and descended until Maerina could reach an offered hand. Alyssra shouted encouragement. Her mother laughed nervously, accepted the invitation, and rose into the air. For a few shining moments the two figures floated together above the festival. Maerina waved down at her daughter, and Alyssra waved back. Then the stranger's body began to flicker. Maerina asked to be lowered. The visitor looked startled and attempted to descend, but the hands holding her were becoming transparent. The crowd shouted. The stranger's face showed fear. Maerina reached desperately for an arm that was no longer solid.

The visitor vanished. Gravity did not hesitate. Alyssra ran toward her mother, but the responders could not save Maerina. The official investigation recorded a fatal fall associated with an unexplained visitor disappearance. It could identify neither the

visitor nor a mechanism of departure. Alyssra grew up hating the phrase 'unpreventable accident.' She read everything she could find about mysterious appearances, first to identify the stranger and later to understand how to stop another family from suffering. She discovered acts of kindness beside acts of harm, and the contradiction troubled her more than any simple story of monsters would have done.

As a young adult, Alyssra founded FREEDOM in two small rooms above a library. Its purpose was to preserve testimony, investigate incidents, protect citizens, and search for the visitors' origins. Years later, watching the old footage again, she saw the stranger struggle to hold Maerina. The sight did not diminish her grief, but it altered the question. Had the visitor chosen to abandon her mother, or had something taken the visitor away? Standing beneath the flowering trees of the old square, Alyssra promised Maerina she would follow the evidence even if it led somewhere she did not want to go.

The Weight of an Unfinished Sentence Maerina had promised to buy Alyssra a ribbon at the festival. They had been arguing playfully over its color when the crowd looked upward. For years afterward, Alyssra remembered the unfinished argument more vividly than the stranger's face. Her mother had wanted gold. Alyssra had wanted violet. Neither had won.

In the hospital corridor, someone offered Alyssra water she could not drink. Adults spoke in low voices and stopped when she approached. The festival music was still playing somewhere beyond the emergency doors. She could not understand how a city

could continue making music after her world had ended. Much later, as the founder of FREEDOM, she would ask witnesses to preserve details that seemed unimportant. What had a person been holding? What had the visitor said before the disappearance? Was there a sound? She knew how memory seized upon a ribbon or a laugh and left other moments blank. She also knew how unbearable an unanswered question could become.

She kept the violet ribbon in a box beside Maerina's photograph. She did not display it to investigators. Some evidence belonged to the case. Some belonged only to a daughter.

An Expanded Scene

For years Alyssra had avoided the final seconds of the festival recording. She could describe every movement without watching it: the raised platform, Maerina's surprised laughter, the stranger's sudden shimmer, the space that opened beneath her. On this evening she watched again, not to punish herself but to ask a question she had never permitted. What had the visitor known? There was no answer in the recording. The stranger's face was turned away at the moment of disappearance. The film proved a death, and it proved a vanishing. It did not prove that the person who vanished understood what would happen next. Alyssra closed the archive and sat in the silence, furious that compassion and grief could occupy the same room.