The Glow That Shouldn’t Be

The shard hadn't flickered in months.

It sat there, cracked and quiet, on the edge of Babai’s desk like a severed pulse from another life. Dust crept along its facets. Its glow—the one that used to throb every time she spoke—had long gone cold. And yet... he hadn’t thrown it away.

Of course he hadn’t.

In the dim hush of a dying evening, Babai sat in his armchair, back curled, fingers wrapped around a lukewarm mug of tea. He hadn't touched the drink in hours, just let it grow still. Like everything else in this room.

“Some people don’t leave,” he thought, eyes half-lidded, “they just get lost inside their own storms.”

The travel journal lay open on his lap, its spine broken, corners frayed. Page after page of circled destinations, their names marked in red: The Sea of Stillness. The Skyrealm. The Lantern Isles. Places he and Monjolika once whispered about during midnight calls that stretched into morning.

He’d crossed them all out.

She was supposed to go with him.
Now the notebook just held dead plans and dying ink.
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The glow returned without warning.

A tremble. A flicker. A single, sharp pulse of light from the shard that hadn’t moved in 112 days.

Babai froze. His mug dropped to the floor with a dull ceramic clink. The room breathed around him—walls tightening, shadows bending—and the shard... spoke.

Not words. Not fully. Just sound. Glitched static wrapped around a single fragile syllable.

“…Still…”

And then:

“…here…”

The world paused. Or maybe it was just his heart. He reached for the shard with shaking hands, his breath uneven, like it had forgotten how to function without grief weighing on it.

“Monju...?”

But there was no reply. Just the slow, rhythmic blink of soft violet light. Her name didn’t echo from the shard. But her voice was there—hidden between static and memory, like a dream just out of reach.
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That’s when the cat appeared.

Through the open window, across the windowsill, over the chaos of his spilled tea and disbelief, came a sleek, dark-furred creature with eyes like two flickering notification dots.

It sat down neatly, tail curling, and stared straight at Babai.

Then it spoke.

“Mrr... name Typo. Mewsenger from the Echo Realms. You drop tea. Sad-boy protocol detected.”

Babai blinked.

“What—”

“Thread to ‘Monjolika’ not broken. Fractured. Echoes still... flickering.”

Babai stared at the cat, then at the shard, then back again. His grip on reality had already been slipping, but this? This shoved it off a cliff.

“You’re a talking—”

“Typo is not ‘talking cat,’ Typo is Emotional Logistics Entity Class 3-C,” the cat cut in, hopping up onto the desk. “Your emotional thread still active. Weak. Leaking. Urgent retrieval required.”

Babai stood slowly, like someone walking on the surface of a dream.

“Why now?”

The cat didn’t answer immediately. It turned its head toward the shard, ears twitching.

“Because time is memory’s cruelest thief. And yours is about to be robbed.”
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Babai opened the drawer beneath his desk.

Dust. Old tech. A faded photo. And beneath it all—Connector gear he hadn't touched since the day Monju stopped responding.
The gloves that helped sync emotional threads.
The compass that once glowed warm every time she came online.
Now it just twitched, barely lit.

He grabbed the locket—the one meant to carry the Heart Shard—and pressed the crystal inside. It pulsed once.

A heartbeat.

He looked toward the window. The sky outside was no longer evening. It had turned violet, thick with the low fog of something not entirely real.
The border between realms had begun to thin.

“First stop,” Typo purred, leaping onto his shoulder. “The Realm of Still Waters.”

Babai exhaled, long and low. His hand tightened around the locket.

“Of course it starts with repression.”

And with that, he stepped out the door.