CAIM

She sent a prayer into the dark. It returned wearing her bones.

After something unspeakable leaves her life divided into before and after, she stitches herself together so tightly she begins to come apart at the seams.

Then one night, something inside her rips open.

In a dream, a woman she almost recognizes places a gift in her hands and whispers one word.

Remember.

By morning, a strange package is waiting at her door.

Inside is a tattered cloak.

She slips it over her shoulders and watches her body vanish beneath its folds.

For the first time, she can move through the world without the world moving upon her. She can walk freely, linger anywhere, stand unnoticed in rooms where she was never invited and beside people who would never dare speak openly if they knew she was there.

There are people she could protect.

There are people she could haunt.

There are people she wants to kill.

And there is a certain seduction in knowing no one will ever see her coming.

By day, the cloak frees her from sight.

By night, it frees her from time.

When she sleeps beneath it, the fabric of time begins to unravel, carrying her into moments long since lived and women long since buried.

She wakes to firelight and woodsmoke, to strange languages and familiar cruelties, close enough to witness what happened but powerless to alter a single moment of it.

To the dead, she is simply there.

Still, she stays.

Because some lives disappear twice: once when they end, and again when no one remembers they were ever here.

And the cloak has a long memory.

Names surface in its weave. Stories cling to its threads.

Each journey draws her farther into old Carolina folklore, forgotten protection prayers, and an inheritance spun through blood and bone, old enough to remember when magic had no need to call itself magic.

Old enough, perhaps, to remember the curse laid at Eve's feet.

She thought the cloak had come to help her disappear.

But its threads keep pulling her somewhere.

Backward through history.

Back through generations.

Back toward the woman in the firelight who told her to remember.

She has spent so long trying to move forward.

Sometimes the only way forward is to go back.

And some threads, followed far enough, do not lead to an end.

They lead around.

CAIM. Sometimes full circle is a spiral.