Lifelines and Ley Lines

The weight of the laptop felt like a lead brick on her knees, a personal anchor tethering her to the depths of her own failure. The glow of the screen was a harsh, unforgiving light, illuminating a digital wasteland of rejected applications and automated “we regret to inform you” emails.

“Did you find anything yet?”

Samantha’s voice, warm with concern, sliced through the thick fog of Kaliyah’s spiraling thoughts. Kaliyah jolted, her heart giving a painful thump against her ribs. For a moment, she’d been miles away, lost in a familiar loop of self-recrimination.

The reality was a sucker punch: a thirty-year-old woman, fired… again. A possible, no, a *probable* prognosis of ADD from a doctor who’d actually listened, which explained a staggering amount of what had gone wrong in her life. And the crushing guilt of imposing on her best friend Samantha, her last remaining port in a hurricane of her own making, for a place to stay until she could somehow, miraculously, get a new job.

“Sorry, not yet Sam,” Kaliyah said, her voice raspy from disuse. She gestured weakly at the screen. “I’ve been looking all day for even the lowest paying jobs, anything so to speak. I don’t even get to a point I can interact with a person. Everything is behind a paywall of AI this and AI that. I don’t know if I am even fit to be trying.” The words tumbled out, tinged with a bitterness that surprised even her.

Samantha crossed the small living room, her footsteps soft on the worn rug. She didn’t offer empty platitudes. Instead, she wrapped her arms around Kaliyah’s shoulders from behind, resting her chin on her head in a gesture so familiar and comforting it made Kaliyah’s throat tighten. “I know you are trying Kali, and I’m here for you. Have you gone to the doctor this time?”

Kaliyah twisted in her chair, the dam of her emotions cracking. “Yes! And we’ve talked for almost an hour and I’ve never felt more validated or understood or… or.. I don’t even have words to explain. For once not being told that I’m doing things on purpose but that’s something chemically different that it can be something done about it and that—”

“Easy there, you rant,” Samantha interrupted gently, a smile in her voice. She knew the signs. Left unchecked, Kaliyah’s hyper focus on this new, life-altering information could fuel a monologue lasting well into the night. And she only had minutes left before her new favorite isekai episode would be aired; her one sacred hour of guilt-free, after-work vegetating. “So, did it work as I’ve told you? Did the doctor give you something?”

“A prescription,” Kaliyah said, the word feeling foreign and powerful on her tongue. She fumbled in her bag, pulling out a small slip of paper as if it were a holy relic. “Stimulants. She says it should help with the… the noise. The constant static in my head. Help me focus. I’ll pick it up from the pharmacy tomorrow.” She stared at the slip, her name printed neatly next to the drug’s unpronounceable name. It felt less like a medication and more like a key. A key to a door she’d been pounding on her whole life, never realizing she’d been born without the keyhole.

“That’s amazing, Kali! Seriously.” Samantha gave her one last squeeze before heading to the kitchen to pour two glasses of wine. “A fresh start. Tomorrow. You get the prescription, you take it, and you start anew. A new Kaliyah Solomon. The one who remembers to pay her electric bill on time and doesn’t get fired for ‘inconsistent attention to detail’.” She said the last part with a mocking, corporate tone, making Kaliyah snort.

“A new Kaliyah,” she echoed, the idea feeling both daunting and exhilarating. She took the offered glass of wine. “From tomorrow.”

As if on cue, a chime echoed from the laptop. An email. Another rejection, no doubt. Kaliyah went to dismiss it with a practiced flick of her wrist, but her hand froze. The sender wasn’t a nameless ‘noreply@’ address. It was a human name. A HR manager from ‘Aethelred Technologies’, a company she’d applied to… gods, months ago. She’d completely forgotten.

Her heart did that painful thump again, but this time it was laced with pure, undiluted terror.

“What? What is it?” Samantha asked, seeing her face go pale.

“I… I got an email,” Kaliyah whispered.

“Another rejection? Delete it. You don’t need that energy.”

“No. Sam… it’s not.” Her fingers trembled as she clicked it open.

*Dear Ms. Solomon,*

*Thank you for your patience. We have reviewed your application for the Junior Data Coordinator position and would like to invite you for an interview…*

The rest of the words blurred. An interview. After months of radio silence. A hysterical laugh bubbled up in her chest. Of course. The universe had a truly wicked sense of timing. The day before her potential life-changing medication, a glimpse of the old life she’d failed at comes knocking.

“No way! Let me see!” Samantha rushed over, reading over her shoulder. “Kali! This is incredible! See? Things are turning around!”

Before Kaliyah could fully process this whiplash of fortune, her phone buzzed on the coffee table. An unfamiliar number, but with a local area code. Hesitantly, she picked up.

“Hello?”

“Kaliyah? Hey, it’s Ben. Ben from your old team at Kronos? Listen, I heard about… well, you know. That sucks. Anyway, I jumped ship to a new place, it’s way better. Was just thinking about you and figured I’d see how you’re holding up.”

Ben. Sweet, slightly awkward Ben with the nice smile who always remembered to refill the coffee pot. They’d shared a few lukewarm lunches and laughed about their terrible boss. Her brain, already overloaded, short-circuited. He was asking her out. For coffee. This weekend. She heard herself saying yes, her voice sounding miles away. They exchanged a few more pleasantries before hanging up.

Kaliyah sat in stunned silence, the phone clutched in her hand. A diagnosis. A prescription for a new brain. A job interview. A date. Four lifelines, all thrown to her in the span of a single hour. It was too much. The crippling anxiety of the last few months began to morph, fermenting into a fragile, giddy hope. Samantha was beaming, already talking about what Kaliyah should wear to the interview and dissecting every word of her conversation with Ben.

This was it. The turning point. The universe wasn’t punishing her; it had just been waiting for her to get the right tools. Tomorrow, she would get the prescription. She would be focused, capable, *normal*. She would ace the interview. She would go on a date and not spend the whole time mentally composing grocery lists. A new life was starting, and it was starting *now*.

The rest of the evening passed in a blur. Samantha watched her show, periodically interrupting to excitedly plan Kaliyah’s future. Kaliyah tried to focus, but her mind was a fireworks display of possibilities and anxieties. She finally retreated to the guest room—*her* room, for now—claiming she needed an early night to be sharp for her big day tomorrow.

She lay in the dark, eyes wide open, tracing the patterns of streetlight shadows on the ceiling. The frantic energy wouldn’t leave her. The hope was so bright it was almost painful. She practiced interview answers in her head. She imagined a version of herself who arrived on time, who remembered names, who could follow a conversation without getting lost in a daydream.

Down the hall, she heard the familiar closing theme of Samantha’s anime. A moment later, her friend’s bedroom door clicked shut. The apartment was quiet, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic.

And then, another sound.

A whisper. No, not a whisper. A chant. Faint, as if coming from a dozen blocks away, yet impossibly clear inside her own head. It was layered, multiple voices speaking in unison, their words guttural and ancient, scraping against a part of her brain she never knew existed.

It was nonsense at first. Then, the words began to cohere, their meaning etching itself directly onto her consciousness without the need for translation.

***“...exaudi invocationem meam, o magnum propugnator…”***

Goosebumps erupted across her arms. She sat bolt upright in bed, her blood running cold. She clutched the blankets, her heart hammering a frantic, terrified rhythm against her ribs. This was it. This was the psychotic break the doctor had warned her about. The stress had finally broken her.

***“...advenire coram me…”***

The voice grew louder, more demanding. The air in the room grew thick, charged with a strange pressure that made her ears pop. The shadows in the corner of the room didn’t just look dark; they looked *deep*, infinite.

***“...et terrorem affer his qui nocere mihi quaerunt…”***

“Stop,” she whimpered, pressing the heels of her hands against her ears. It didn’t help. The voice was inside her skull. The streetlight shadows on the wall began to writhe and twist, stretching towards the center of the room like grasping claws. The air hummed with a power that was utterly alien, a sensation of being unraveled at a molecular level.

Terror, pure and absolute, swallowed her whole. This wasn’t hope. This was madness.

The final words of the chant slammed into her, a command that brooked no refusal, each syllable a hammer blow to her soul.

***“ACTIVA!”***

The world didn’t go black. It *shattered*.

There was a sound of tearing reality, a scream of fracturing physics that was also completely silent. The room, the bed, the familiar shadows—they all fragmented like a pane of glass struck by a stone. She was falling, but there was no air. She was screaming, but no sound came out. She was being pulled apart and crushed into a single, infinite point all at once.

The sensation lasted for an eternity and was over in a single, horrifying heartbeat.

The nauseating vertigo ceased. Hard, packed earth met her knees, the impact jolting up her spine. The air that hit her lungs was wrong—it was cold, thin, and carried the acrid stench of ozone, burnt hair, and coppery blood.

Disoriented, blind with panic, Kaliyah gasped, her body convulsing. She was on her hands and knees, her vision swimming, trying to process the sensory overload.

She was not in her room.

She was in a clearing, surrounded by towering, twisted trees with bark like bruised flesh. The light was a sickly, twilight purple from a pair of moons that hung in a star-strewn sky.

And she was not alone.

A few yards away, a scene of brutal chaos was frozen mid-action. A group of figures—adventurers, her brain supplied unhelpfully—were in various states of distress. One was slumped against a tree, clutching a bleeding arm. Another was on the ground, scrambling backward. Their armor was dented, their faces streaked with dirt and terror. They were all staring past her, their eyes wide with a fresh wave of horror.

A guttural, clicking snarl echoed through the clearing, a sound that vibrated in her teeth.

Kaliyah followed their petrified gazes.

The monster was like a nightmare given form. It had the general shape of a horse, but that was where any familiarity ended. Its body seemed woven from solidified darkness and shifting ashes, absorbing the sickly light rather than reflecting it. Its legs ended in cruel, hooked talons that dug into the soil. And its eyes… its eyes were pits of smoldering embers, from which slivers of angry, crimson fire sparked and fell, sizzling against its own ethereal cheeks.

It pawed the ground, lowering its head. A mane of writhing shadow flowed down its neck. With another earth-shaking snarl, it ignored the wounded party entirely. Its burning gaze was locked solely on her.

It took a step. Then another. Its movement was unnervingly fluid, a gallop begun in slow motion, building with terrifying speed. It wasn't charging *at* her. It was charging *through* the space she occupied, its trajectory aiming for the forest behind her, its path a direct line that would trample her into paste.

The adventurers stared. The monster charged. And Kaliyah Solomon, thirty years old, unemployed, and utterly, completely powerless, could only kneel in the dirt of another world and watch her death gallop toward her.