Elara had been quiet quitting her own life for a year, ever since the sleepwalking started. She performed her job as a rare book restorer with a detached precision, met friends for coffee with a well-rehearsed smile, and returned to an apartment that felt less like a home and more like a waiting room. The only time she felt truly engaged was in the moments after waking, a low-grade panic humming in her blood as she discovered where her dreaming self had taken her.
Sometimes it was the building’s chilly rooftop. Other times, the communal laundry room, her cheek pressed against the cool metal of a defunct washing machine. But for the past three weeks, she woke with dirt under her nails and the ghost of a metallic taste on her tongue, holding a new key.
Each one was different. A small, skeletal key of tarnished brass. A heavy, ornate iron key with atrefoil bow. A delicate silver key filigreed like a snowflake. None of them opened any lock in her world. Her waking hours became a frantic quest, trying the keys on old chests, forgotten doors, and public lockers, a quest that always ended in failure. Her friend Lena, ever the pragmatist, had diagnosed it. “This is a bit delulu, El. Your biggest beige flag used to be alphabetizing your spice rack. Now you’re hunting for a magic door? Maybe see someone.”
But Elara knew it was real. As real as the man she sometimes saw in the periphery of her somnambulistic journeys. He was a shadow in a long coat, his face always obscured, but the pull toward him was undeniable. It was the only part of the dream-haze she remembered with clarity: a dangerous, magnetic draw. A strange, nocturnal situationship with a phantom.
One rain-slicked Tuesday, she found his shop. It was tucked into a sliver of an alley she’d never noticed, the window displaying nothing but a single, perfectly balanced raven’s feather. The bell above the door chimed not with a sound, but with a feeling, a low thrum that vibrated in her teeth. And there he was.
He was leaning against a counter carved from a single piece of dark, gnarled wood. In the waking world, he wasn’t a shadow at all. He was sharp lines and gentle curves, with eyes the color of old ink. The man had an almost supernatural level of rizz, a quiet charisma that immediately silenced the hundred questions rattling in her mind.
“You’ve been busy,” he said, his voice like stones rolling in a deep river. He gestured to the string of keys she now wore around her neck.
“You’re him,” she managed, her hand instinctively tightening on the keys. “From the… walks.”
He smiled, a slow, knowing expression. “I’m Kael. And you’re the first one to find your way here while the sun is up.”
She laid a heavy iron key on the counter. “What are these? Where do they come from?”
Kael picked it up, weighing it in his palm. “They are echoes. Possibilities. Each night, you walk the In-Between. You walk through the city’s subconscious, and you find things that have been lost. Not just things. Hopes. Regrets. Doors that were never opened.” He looked at her, his gaze intense, and for a terrifying second she found herself wondering if he was trying to gaslight her, to make her believe the key was just a trinket, her experience a fantasy.
“My sleepwalking has a purpose?” she asked, a sliver of hope cutting through her doubt.
“Everything has a purpose,” he said softly. “You’re just remembering yours.”
That night, Elara didn’t fight the pull. As the heavy blanket of sleep fell, instead of panicking, she focused. A strange sense of main character energy surged through her, a feeling she hadn’t experienced since childhood. This wasn’t a medical condition; it was a calling. She understood with a bone-deep certainty that finding the final lock, the true lock, was a canon event, an unchangeable fulcrum on which her life was meant to turn.
Her dream-self moved with new confidence. She walked through familiar streets that were subtly wrong—lamp posts weeping light, cobblestones breathing softly under her bare feet. Kael was there, not as a peripheral shadow, but walking beside her. He didn’t speak, but his presence was a steadying anchor.
He led her to an old city fountain, long since dry, its basin filled with fallen leaves. In the center stood a sculpture of a woman pouring water from a stone jug. It was a place Elara had passed a thousand times. But tonight, it was different. The air around it shimmered. The very vibes of the place felt thin, stretched between two worlds.
“This is it,” her own voice whispered, though her lips didn’t move.
On her neck, the collected keys began to glow, a faint, chiming light. They lifted as if weightless, swirled together, and melted into a single, radiant key of pure, liquid moonlight. It pulsed with a soft warmth in her palm. It was the master key. The Somnambulist’s Key.
She approached the statue and saw it for the first time: a keyhole, no bigger than a thumbnail, hidden in the folds of the woman’s stone robe. As she inserted the key of light, there was no click, no grinding of tumblers. There was only a deep, resonant hum, and the world dissolved.
She was standing at the threshold of a vast, circular library. The shelves were woven from twilight, and the books were not paper, but captured moments: a child’s first laugh bound in dawn-light, a soldier’s last letter bound in dusk, a lover’s promise bound in starlight. This was the Noctuary. The archive of the city’s soul.
Kael stood in the center. “Welcome, Restorer.”
“What is this place?” she breathed, awestruck.
“It is the repository of all that is felt but unseen. I am its keeper. Or its prisoner. The line blurs.” He looked weary, a profound exhaustion that no amount of sleep could cure. “The Noctuary needs a tether to the waking world. A Somnambulist. One who can walk both paths and keep the balance. My time is ending. The keys were a test. Your test.”
He was offering her his role. An eternity in this beautiful, lonely place. The ultimate form of quiet quitting on the real world. She could retreat here forever, away from the disappointments, the faded colors of her waking life. She could spend weeks in full goblin mode amongst forgotten dreams and no one would ever know.
But as she looked at him, and at the shimmering memories on the shelves, she realized that wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to trade one waiting room for another, however beautiful.
“No,” she said, her voice firm. She held up her hand, where the key was now just a faint, luminous pattern on her skin. “I won’t replace you. I’ll share the burden.”
Kael stared at her, his ancient eyes wide with a feeling she couldn’t name. It was more than surprise. It was hope.
“That is… not in the rules,” he said slowly.
“Then we’ll restore the rules,” Elara replied, a bookbinder’s confidence in her voice. “We’ll give them a new binding.”
She hadn’t found a door to escape her life. she had found the key to integrating its hidden, magical parts into the whole. She was no longer just Elara the book restorer. She was Elara, the Walker of the In-Between. She was entering her keeper era. And for the first time in a very long time, she was excited to wake up.
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