# 📖 STORY I — CHAPTER IX## **Time That Ceases to Exist**

Everything stopped.

Not in the sense of motion—in the sense of time.

The leaves stopped falling, the fog didn't shift, even the air became like glass.

The only thing that moved was the house.

It continued to grow.

Around it, time cracked like ice. One moment, Anna saw herself as a child on the stairs, the next, as an almost adult, standing beside her own grave.

The house didn't just swallow her memories.

It replaced them with new ones.

--

## When Time Breaks

When she looked at Mark, his face was simultaneously young and old.

He was the boy she knew and the old man she hadn't met yet.

"The house doesn't remember time," he said.

"Why would it?"

"Because without time..." Anna whispered, "there's no life."

Marek looked at her as if he didn't understand the words.

"Life is but a shadow. Time doesn't belong to the living."

---

## Voices from the past that aren't the past

A cacophony of voices began inside the house.

They weren't ghosts, they weren't human—they were echoes of what never happened, but could have.

Anna recognized her mother among them, but also a version of the mother she'd never had.

The words overlapped, creating something resembling a song, but a song without melody.

"Anna... go back to the beginning..."

"Anna... don't go anywhere..."

"Anna... time has passed... and it's only just beginning..."

---

## The town disappears from the map

The streets were collapsing like spreading tar.

Houses, shops, buildings—everything vanished, as if someone were erasing them with a pencil.

When Anna looked up at the sky, the stars were gone.

The sky became a uniform, dead blackness.

As if someone had extinguished the entire cosmos.

--

## Spirits speak in her voice

At one point, Anna heard her own voice – not one, but dozens of versions.

—I am home…

—I am time…

—I am nobody…

—I am everything…

Each sentence sounded like a premonition of something yet to come – something that has no name and should never have one.

--

## Anna loses herself

When she looked at her hands, they were no longer hers.

The color seeped in, the shape becoming more ghostly than human.

Her body was beginning to fade.

Not in the sense of dying.

In the sense of transforming.

She was already more shadow than human.

—

And then she realized something terrifying.

The house wasn't trying to devour her.

The house was trying to **use** her.

--

## Body as a passage

The Lady of Clocks stood before her as if before the final piece of a puzzle.

“Every house needs an entrance,” she said.

“Every world needs a passage.”

“You will be the door, Anna.”

Anna tried to scream, but her voice was no longer her own.

It sounded like the echo of something still forming.

--

## Last sentence of the chapter

And then the entire town—earth, sky, memories, and people—bent like a sheet of water, and Anna felt a **door** opening within her that she had never wanted to open.

And something… began to **pass through**.

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## If you want to continue…

CHAPTER X will be even darker:

* "something" will begin to cross over into the world of the living,

* Anna will lose her human consciousness,

* Marek will reveal what he truly is,

* and the house will become the beginning of a new world that belongs neither to the living nor the dead.

Just write: **Continue**.