Lina didn't fall asleep like most children.
She slipped.
As if the house took her hand each night and led her somewhere just sideways of dreaming.
In this in-between place, the air was syrup-thick.
Colors didn't hold still.
Walls moved when she wasn't looking.
And Annora was always waiting.
Not in front of her—but beside her.
Like she had always been there, and Lina had only just remembered.
She never spoke.
Not with her mouth.
But her presence rippled, like a book whose pages turned without wind.
The first lesson was silence.
Not the kind that's empty.
But the kind that listens.
Annora walked beside her through a long corridor made of bones—not human, not animal, but memory-shaped.
The walls pulsed faintly.
They stopped at a door made of no wood Lina had ever seen.
Annora laid her palm on it.
The door didn't open.
It spoke.
A slow groan, low and wordless.
Lina listened.
And after a moment, she understood:
The door was not ready to be seen.
She whispered, "Okay."
And the hallway sighed—pleased.
The second lesson was breath.
Annora led her to a staircase with no steps.
Only the suggestion of height.
As they floated, the house breathed around them.
Walls inhaled.
Lights flickered like a heartbeat.
The floor groaned not in protest, but in thought.
Annora placed Lina's hand on the wall.
"Feel," she whispered this time—just once.
And Lina did.
She felt names in the grain.
Stories pressed between layers of paint.
Not in sentences.
In emotions.
Grief that had never been buried.
Love that had nowhere to go.
Fear that had grown roots.
Tears slid down Lina's cheeks, and she didn't know why.
But Annora squeezed her hand gently.
And the wall exhaled.
The third lesson was choosing.
In her final dream that night, Lina stood in a room filled with mirrors.
But none showed her reflection.
Each one showed someone else.
A girl crying behind a closet door.
A boy curled beneath an open window.
A mother screaming into her hands, unheard.
A father staring into the attic, his face blank with forgetting.
Each image flickered like firelight.
Annora's voice came again, inside Lina's head:
"You can listen to them all. But you can only follow one."
Lina pointed to the girl behind the closet door.
"I remember her," she said.
Annora nodded.
And as the mirrors went dark, Lina woke—
the echo of her choice still burning behind her eyes.
From that day on, she stopped leaving notes.
And started answering them instead.
Because now, she could hear what others whispered into the floor.
And the house listened with her.