Part III: The Core of It
It started quietly, the way all impossible things do — not with fanfare or lightning, but with a teacup.
A woman at a corner café — a cheerful sort with orange lipstick and a cardigan made of crocheted suns — declared, quite matter-of-factly, that her chamomile blend could mend a broken heart. She said it to no one in particular, but her tone carried the unshakable weight of someone who knew. And, just like that, it did.
Ash, still in the shape of a lanky boy with a sharp nose and restless shoulders, watched from across the street as the woman served a cup to a weeping man in a pinstriped suit. He drank. He blinked. Then he straightened his tie, exhaled deeply, and walked off humming something dangerously close to a love song.
"Tea shouldn't be that powerful," Ash muttered. "That's how cults start."
Down the street, a different oddity unfolded. A short man in a lemon-colored hat swore — swore on his mother's china — that his cat could talk. And the cat, a sleek gray creature lounging in the window of a bookstore, promptly leaned forward, locked eyes with Ash, and said, "You look like a failed poem."
Ash reeled. "Did that cat insult my haircut?"
"It did," Sol said flatly, watching the feline stretch with the smug satisfaction of someone who'd been waiting years to speak.
Sol, for their part, had taken a quieter route into the chaos. Inside the town library — a tall, ivy-covered structure that smelled of ink and dried daisies — they struck up a conversation with a bespectacled librarian who was re-shelving books without touching them.
"Books should rearrange themselves," she'd said, adjusting a pin shaped like an open eye on her collar. "By personal importance. Not some arbitrary number system."
She barely finished the sentence before the shelves began to hum, then shiver. With a great sigh, the books lifted themselves like birds, flapping into new configurations. One row rearranged to spell "TRUTH IS SUBJECTIVE" down the spine labels. Another formed a perfect, if slightly snide, circle.
Sol watched silently. Even they — someone who had seen clocks bleed and staircases argue — had to admit, this was new.
Outside, the sky held a strange stillness. No clouds moved. The sun hovered above the horizon like it had second thoughts about leaving. And that's when the mayor arrived.
She didn't walk so much as arrive — a presence in heels that clacked like declarations. Her eyes were sharp, cold, calculating — like she could spot a weak argument from fifty paces. Her jacket was covered in brooches, each shaped like punctuation marks: question marks, quotation marks, a pair of exclamation points near her shoulder like medals.
She stood at the fountain and gathered a crowd with nothing but the force of her own certainty.
"We finally realized," she announced, her voice crisp and clear, "that objectivity was tyranny. Why let logic rule, when faith in oneself is so much kinder?"
The people applauded like she'd solved loneliness.
Ash, a crow now perched on his shoulder, muttered, "Kindness has a strange smell here."
And then, like a dam breaking, the beliefs spread. A man on a park bench whispered that gravity was optional — and floated off mid-sentence, his feet dangling like loose shoelaces. His screams faded somewhere above the rooftops.
A child near the schoolhouse threw her arms up and declared, "Night is a lie!" The sun, obedient as a well-trained pet, refused to set. Hours passed. People began sweating through their shirts. A girl fainted near a smoothie stand. No one questioned it — because questioning was the only sin here.
A florist boarded up her shop after telling a passerby that bees were spies. By sunset — or what should've been sunset — every flower in town had withered into crisp, papery versions of themselves. A man tried to revive his begonias by insisting they were immortal. They crumbled to dust.
Contradictions tangled like vines in an abandoned garden. Streets warped. Buildings shimmered between states. A café briefly believed itself a zoo. A dog claimed to be a weather expert and barked predictions that came true — until three people believed it was actually a reincarnated professor. Then it developed an accent and requested a chalkboard.
Sol stood in the middle of it all, eyes narrowed, heart quiet. The truth was no longer fractured — it was flooded. Everyone was right. And so, nothing was.
Reality had become a quilt stitched with incompatible threads. Beautiful. Chaotic. And impossibly fragile.
Sol watched a man insist the town was perfect as smoke poured from his ears. A woman screamed joyfully that pain was a myth while limping on a twisted ankle. A street sign argued with a mailbox about the concept of direction.
Ash, now pacing as a small boy again, picked up a piece of confetti that hadn't been thrown and said softly, "It's not breaking."
Sol turned to him.
"It's bursting," Ash said.
And Sol, watching a house blink in and out of dragonhood, finally understood. This town wasn't surviving.
It was hallucinating.
Part IV: The Departure
They left before dawn. Again.
The sky above was no longer sky so much as a stubborn ceiling of peach-colored denial, painted on by a child too proud to be corrected. No stars. No moon. Just a heavy, pinkish hum hanging over everything, like the town had made a wish and refused to wake up.
Sol and Ash walked in silence, their feet muffled by the strange softness of the cobblestones, which had started to believe they were marshmallows. Sol could feel their boots sink slightly with each step, and for once, didn't try to correct it.
Ash padded beside them, small now, a wolf pup with silver streaks around his eyes and a low, disgruntled growl trapped in his throat. He hadn't spoken since they packed up their things — not that they'd brought much — but he had snarled once, low and sharp, at a streetlamp that flickered insistently above them.
The lamp had a little sign nailed to its post:
"MOON, 24 HOURS A DAY. YOU'RE WELCOME."
Ash had bared his teeth. The lamp flickered in embarrassment.
The rest of the town was quiet. Not asleep, not even resting — just quiet in the way a room gets after an argument no one really won. Windows blinked in and out, undecided on whether they were windows at all. One house, squat and brick-red, was mid-transformation into a carousel. Another had decided it was a ship and sat proudly on a yard of fake waves, sails made of pillowcases.
Everything shimmered, warped, humming slightly from the strain of too many realities pulling in opposite directions. It wasn't just delusion now. It was a town unspooling at the seams, too polite to admit it.
Sol glanced back once, just once. The central tower, the one that had been a library yesterday, now flapped leathery wings against the morningless sky. Scales rippled down its bricks. Someone still inside was calmly checking out books through a dragon's nostril.
Next to it, the post office puffed out a cloud of powdered sugar. "Free croissants with every letter," its sign promised. A line of people — barefoot, eyes glassy, still smiling — waited patiently with envelopes in hand.
Ash finally spoke, his voice low and scratchy, like it had been kept in a drawer overnight.
"I kept wanting to shout the truth," he said. "But it would've just made more noise."
Sol nodded. There wasn't anything to add. The truth, in that town, was a grenade no one wanted to pull the pin on.
"They weren't looking for truth," Sol murmured. "Just reassurance."
Ash didn't answer, but his ears flicked once — in agreement, or irritation, or both.
As they stepped past the invisible border — that invisible line where the world began again and madness politely ended — the air changed. Not much. But enough. The colors got quieter. The air stopped shimmering. Time, which had been wobbling uncertainly on one leg, remembered how to walk in a straight line.
The road stretched ahead, long and gray and blissfully undecorated.
Behind them, the signs at the edge of the town had transformed.
Where once they'd read:
"YOU'RE RIGHT TO BE HERE"
now stood a single wooden placard, worn but firm:
"YOU MIGHT BE WRONG."
A few steps later, another:
"UNCERTAINTY AHEAD."
Ash, now shifting — as he often did when he wasn't thinking too hard about it — became a pale teenager again, arms tucked into his sleeves, his tired eyes blinking up at the honest morning.
"I like not knowing," he said suddenly, smiling just a little. "It means I can still learn."
Sol said nothing. But they kept walking.
The wind was honest again. The clouds were allowed to be wrong-shaped. And slowly, finally, at the very edge of the horizon, the sun — real, golden, imperfect — began to set.
Not because someone told it to.
But because it was time.