God's Blessing is a Curse

By the fifth day, the road had begun to blur.

Not just from the cold, or the endless walking—but from something deeper. Something wrong.

I didn't notice it at first. The birdsong repeating itself. The old man at the crossroads giving us the same answer in the same words, twice. The way Rin's shadow paused a second after she did.

Then I looked down at the dirt path and realized we'd passed the same broken stone three times.

"We're not lost," I said aloud, mostly to convince myself.

"No,"

Rin said, eyes scanning the treelike. "But we're not moving forward either."

She knelt and touched the edge of the path. Her hand trembled slightly.

"This place... it's thinning."

"Thinning?"

She didn't look up. "The boundary between now and not-now."