It didn't look like a heart.
It looked like a library.
Endless shelves, curving into darkness.
Books stacked in spirals.
Ink dripping from the ceilings like blood from old wounds.
But we knew — Aaryan and I — this was the heart of the house. This was where everything was written. Twisted. Erased.
The door slammed behind us the moment we stepped in.
And the silence?
It was alive.
Not still.
But listening.
I held Aaryan's hand tightly. His fingers were shaking — not with fear, but with memory. Maybe he was remembering the same thing I was.
The girl he once wrote poems for.
The boy I once trusted when the world turned on me.
And the versions of us the house had twisted into glass.
---
We didn't speak at first. The air was too thick.
Instead, we walked.
Past rows and rows of leather-bound books. Each one humming.
Each one with a name on the spine.
Alya.
Amara.
Alaya.
Alira.
Thousands of versions.
All me.
All not me.
I saw a book glowing with silver. Reached for it.
When I opened the cover, I gasped.
> It began with a mirror.
A girl looked in, and saw someone better.
She let the house take her name. Her bones. Her voice.
But deep down, the real her whispered:
"I remember. I still remember."
The words twisted mid-page. Became a scream. Became ink that dripped down onto my fingers and burned.
Aaryan pulled me back.
"They're dangerous," he whispered. "These books aren't just stories. They're replacements. If we read too much, we'll forget who we are."
I looked down.
Already, my hands were fading at the edges. Like a drawing being erased.
"I want to go home," I said. My voice cracked like a dried leaf.
"So do I," he said, softly. "But first, we destroy the pen."
---
The center of the library was hollow. A pit.
And inside it…
The Quill of Versions.
Suspended mid-air, glowing black.
Feathers made of mirror shards. The tip soaked in red ink. It pulsed like a heartbeat.
Every time it blinked, a book somewhere on the shelf flipped open by itself.
Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite.
We stepped to the edge.
"The house writes with it," Aaryan said. "It makes girls like you forget who they were. Makes boys like me puppets. We have to break it."
"How?"
He looked at me with pain.
"We offer a memory. A real one. One we'd never want to lose. That's the only way to overwrite what the house did. But the catch is—"
"We'll lose it forever," I finished.
He nodded.
Silence again.
Then he said, "Tell me yours."
I swallowed.
There were a lot of memories I could offer.
But the one that stayed was small.
Bare.
We were fourteen.
The first time I saw Aaryan cry.
We weren't even close then — just classmates.
But I had found him on the roof of the school. Sitting with his head in his knees, silent.
I didn't ask why. I didn't speak.
I just sat next to him.
And after a few minutes, I said, "You don't have to tell me. But I'll sit here till you don't want me to."
He didn't answer.
But I remember his pinky brushing against mine.
A fragile, silent thank you.
It was the first moment I realized — this boy wasn't all steel and sharp edges. He was soft inside, terrified of being seen.
And it was the day I decided I would never forget him.
Until now.
---
Aaryan was quiet for a while.
Then he said, "Mine was when you kicked the vending machine for me."
I blinked. "What?"
He smiled faintly. "I didn't have money. I was starving. I'd already skipped two meals. You didn't even ask — you just kicked it so hard a packet of chips fell out."
I stared. "That was you?"
He nodded.
"You said, 'Don't tell the principal or I'll ruin your life.'"
I laughed. A soft, broken thing.
He stepped forward.
"I've always remembered that. Because it was the first time someone did something for me without expecting anything back."
And then, softer: "But I'll give it up. If it means we go home."
I touched the scarf at my neck — the only thing real the house hadn't taken.
Then I reached out with my other hand, holding his.
We stepped together to the edge of the pit.
The Quill shivered.
The books screamed.
And we spoke at the same time:
> "We give the moment we loved most. The moment that made us real."
The quill exploded into light.
---
Ink poured everywhere.
Books melted.
Shelves collapsed inward.
The pit cracked.
The house howled like a dying beast.
And the mirror across the ceiling shattered — not into jagged shards, but into paper.
Thousands of pages fluttering down like snow.
Memories, rewritten.
Freed.
Names, scattered in the wind.
We fell to our knees, clutching each other.
The floor beneath us was gone.
The house was unraveling.
---
I don't remember what happened after that.
Maybe we passed out.
Maybe we dreamed.
Maybe the house spat us out, like bones it couldn't chew.
---
When I woke up…
The sky was blue.
For the first time in what felt like centuries.
I was in a field.
The red scarf still around my neck.
Aaryan beside me.
He opened his eyes slowly.
We looked at each other.
And we knew—
We'd forgotten something.
Something small.
But precious.
Neither of us remembered how we first met.
But we remembered why we stayed.
And that?
Was enough.
---