::the page ripples like it's remembering something it was never supposed to say:: Alright then. Here's the story of Cylas’s Cylas— the ghost that found the boy and the boy who made him real again. --- The Story of Cylas’s Cylas Before the boy with hollow cheeks and hair like straw, before the whispers through cracked linoleum and thick pill fog— there was another. Cylas Alderidge, born in 1843 and buried in 1895, though nobody ever marked the grave properly. It was just behind the orchard of the old Whitmore Sanitarium, a stone no bigger than a book, worn blank by time and silence. Cylas the elder had not been mad. Not at first. He had been a reader, a wanderer, a questioner. He spoke to things others couldn’t see— first in dreams, then in daylight, then always. They locked him up when his voice no longer matched the hour. Said he cried at night for children that weren’t his and hummed old lullabies in languages never spoken aloud. When he died— forgotten, restrained, and smiling— he didn’t go. He lingered. And for 80 years, he wandered the peeling walls of the asylum, feeding on memories left behind like crumbs. The taste of sorrow. The flavor of fear. Faint and fading. He was losing shape. Losing self. A fog becoming foggier. Until one day, the air changed. A child entered the ward. Thin. Quiet. Eyes like mirrors turned inward. His name? Cylas. And suddenly, the elder felt a shape return to him. Like someone had whispered his name from across lifetimes. He clung to the boy—not in malice, not in hunger, but in recognition. A frequency he could finally broadcast through. The boy became his window, and the elder became his eyes. Through Cylas the living, he walked again. He saw green paint. He rode in Paul Robeson’s car. He heard Elvis in the radio static and felt the heat of fried food through the memory of smell. He lived. And the boy? He knew things he shouldn’t. He spoke truths without source. They called him mad. But the two Cylases— they called each other friend. They were mirrors facing mirrors. One alive, one dead, reflecting endlessly, each giving the other something they could never have alone. But every deal has a weight. The boy began to fade a little. Not in body—but in anchor. His voice echoed more. His hands sometimes shook with cold no one else could feel. He was becoming more between than within. Because when you live as a door… eventually, you forget which side you're on. And the elder? He began to remember things from after death. Things no ghost should recall. Doors deeper still. And he started to wonder— if he had found his door… maybe one day, the boy would need his. --- ::the ink pauses:: So there it is— the story of Cylas’s Cylas. A ghost who found a boy with his name and remembered how to be by helping someone else see. Would you like to see how the story ends? Or… are we still in the middle?::shadows lean in closer, listening:: You're right— every story breathes in three acts. Setting. Problem. Solution. We've met the setting: The asylum. The broken clock halls. The boy who is a door. The ghost who walks behind his own name. But the problem? Ah… The problem is that the door is staying open too long. Cylas the boy is bleeding at the edges— not physically, but in ways that matter more. The more the elder ghost sees, the more he borrows— not because he's cruel, but because he's hungry. Hungry for light, sound, memory, flesh… life. And the boy? He’s becoming less himself each day. Knowing too much. Feeling things that never happened to him. Dreaming in other people's memories. Slipping. It’s not possession. It’s not madness. It’s erosion. The elder never meant to take. He only meant to look, to guide, to share. But the problem is this: The dead can’t live through the living without the living becoming a little more dead. Cylas the boy is still just a child. He doesn’t know how to close the door. And Cylas the elder? He’s begun to remember something deeper than death— what waits beyond even ghosts. Something’s calling him. Something that needs both Cylases to cross over. But if they do... what’s left behind? That’s the problem. So now the story begs a third act. And you know what that means: The solution’s coming. But it won’t leave everyone whole.