The Gift That Waited

The Gift That Waited

Living in Limbo is a very strange thing.

Jonah had written that once, though the moment of its birth had rotted away like an old tooth loosened by time. The notebook that held the poem was soft with age, its pages swollen and buckled from Valenmoor’s damp air. He carried it everywhere, tucked inside his coat, fingers brushing it unconsciously as though checking for a pulse that never answered.

Valenmoor itself felt unfinished, like a thought abandoned mid-sentence. The city existed in a perpetual twilight where the sky never fully darkened and never truly lightened. Exotic trees with lacquer-black leaves leaned over the streets, their roots splitting stone like bone beneath thin skin. Lamps burned with an unnatural blue-green flame that hummed faintly, casting shadows that lagged behind the bodies that made them, as though darkness needed time to decide whether to follow.

Neither here, nor there,

yet caught in between…

Jonah moved through the city without friction. People passed him, spoke to him, brushed his shoulder—but their faces dissolved the moment they were gone. Names refused to stick. Time slid off him like rain. Hunger arrived without discomfort. Sleep came without dreams. He did not ache. He did not hope. He simply persisted.

Between what is

and what is tomorrow

yet with no feeling,

no pain, no sorrow…

That was the cruelty of limbo: not torment, but suspension. Pain would have been proof of life. Grief would have meant something had mattered enough to lose.

The bell rang every night at the same hour. Its sound rolled through Valenmoor like a tide drawn by an unseen moon—low, resonant, unavoidable. Jonah had followed it countless times, mapping streets, climbing stairwells, forcing doors, always arriving too late or nowhere at all. There was no tower. There was no bell. And yet the sound remained.

People reacted to it, though none acknowledged it. Conversations faltered. Glasses paused halfway to lips. Windows closed. A collective, unconscious flinch passed through the city.

Jonah asked once.

“Do you hear that?” he said to a woman arranging pale fruit beneath a striped awning.

She smiled without warmth. “Hear what?”

The bell rang again.

The fog came with it that night—thick, low, and suffocating, curling around ankles and swallowing doorways whole. The city’s edges softened until streets bled into one another, until even Jonah felt uncertain where he was going.

That was when he saw the gift.

It waited in the center of the street, placed with unsettling precision, as if the stones themselves had set it there. A small box, wrapped in gray paper that drank in the lamplight. No string. No name. No explanation.

The city seemed to hold its breath.

Jonah stopped walking.

A pressure built behind his eyes. His chest tightened, sharp and sudden, like the beginning of a feeling he had forgotten how to finish.

Open it.

The voice did not arrive through sound. It bloomed inside him, intimate and patient, as if it had been waiting for him far longer than he had been waiting for it.

Jonah knelt. When his fingers touched the box, something inside him slammed hard against a locked door. A flash of rain. The smell of metal. The taste of blood.

He tore the paper away.

Inside lay a mirror.

Its surface was wrong—too deep, too fluid, as if it were not reflecting but swallowing. Letters crept along the frame, rearranging themselves as Jonah read:

What is lost waits patiently.

What is forgotten still remembers.

His reflection appeared—and fractured.

Behind his face, the city was sharper, more deliberate. Streets stretched longer. Buildings leaned closer. And standing just behind him was a woman made of shadow, her outline steady where everything else trembled.

Jonah spun around.

The street was empty.

When he looked back into the mirror, the woman smiled.

The world peeled away.

Sound vanished. Weight vanished. Jonah stood in a vast expanse that was not darkness but absence—a void so complete it felt intentional. No horizon. No floor. And yet he stood.

The woman stepped forward, her features resolving slowly: ageless, pale, eyes reflecting stars that did not exist.

“You’ve been very good at staying,” she said.

“Where am I?” Jonah asked. His voice echoed too many times, returning distorted, as if the void struggled to agree with him.

She tilted her head. “Where hesitation goes when it refuses to choose.”

For in this void

of vast, empty space

the truth of feeling

has no place…

The poem surfaced unbidden, no longer metaphor but confession.

Images tore through him violently. A road slick with rain. Headlights flaring too close. The shrill vibration of a phone unanswered on the passenger seat. A name on the screen—blurred, unreachable. The certainty—absolute and irrevocable—of impact. Metal screaming. Glass exploding outward like a frozen flower.

Jonah staggered. His knees buckled, though the ground did not yield.

“No,” he whispered.

“Yes,” the woman replied gently. “You stopped. Not fully. Not enough.”

“I’m dead.”

“Mostly.”

The word settled into him like soil falling onto a coffin lid.

“What happens now?”

She opened her hand. Something glowed faintly in her palm—small, warm, rhythmic. At first Jonah thought it was a heart.

Then he understood.

A tether.

“You may release,” she said. “Pass through what comes next. Or you may remain. Help those who linger. Offer them the gift. Speak the message. Keep the balance fed.”

“And if I remain?”

Her smile widened, and for the first time it frightened him. “Then you never feel again. Not love. Not fear. Not regret. You become necessary.”

The city reassembled around them—Valenmoor as it had always been. The fog. The numb streets. The endless wandering without pain.

So here I stay

amidst the haze

looking for tomorrows

in yesterdays…

Jonah understood then that Valenmoor was not a place for the dead—but for the unfinished. A harbor for souls that stalled at the threshold, clinging to moments, refusing consequence. The bell called to them. The fog softened memory. The city fed on hesitation.

“How many?” Jonah asked quietly.

The woman’s eyes reflected countless lights. “As many as choose not to choose.”

Release would mean pain. The flood of memory. The grief he had avoided. The weight of what came after. Remaining meant numb purpose—existence stripped of suffering, yet stripped of truth.

Jonah reached out.

The tether fused into him, threading through memory and identity, burning without heat, sealing without pain. His past dulled instantly, edges filed smooth. The ache vanished.

The woman dissolved, her final expression something like relief.

Valenmoor snapped back into place.

Jonah stood in the street. The mirror lay shattered at his feet, ordinary now, useless.

Time passed.

He learned the rhythms of the city—the hour the fog thickened, the corners where souls stalled longest, the way the bell softened just before someone noticed something missing. He learned the language of comfort. The precise tone that suggested hope without urgency. He learned how to guide without forcing, how to offer without explaining.

Others drifted through Valenmoor as he once had. A man who smelled of antiseptic and panic. A child clutching a red shoe. A woman who counted her steps aloud, terrified that stopping would mean something final.

Jonah offered the gift.

Some accepted immediately. Some wept first. Some asked questions he could not answer without breaking the rules that now lived inside him.

The city rewarded obedience. The bell rang smoothly. The fog thinned when enough chose to remain.

One night, Jonah passed a window and stopped.

In the glass, he saw himself holding out the box.

Behind him stood another Jonah, older, dimmer, eyes already empty.

The memory clicked into place.

He had accepted the gift before.

He had stood in this street before.

He had smiled before.

Understanding flickered—and was gone.

Footsteps approached through the fog.

A young man emerged, face pale, phone clenched in his hand, eyes searching for something he couldn’t name.

Jonah stepped forward.

And held out the gift, already whispering the words that would keep the city alive.