The corridor of Haunt General hung heavy with whispers and the soft tremor of distant wheels, a hospital orchestra that seemed to play just for Kim Tate in that moment. The air was thick with tension, but not the kind that comes from danger or crime; this was the pressure of revelation pressing in from all sides. Kim walked with a purpose that had once carved canyons through rivals, her heels tapping a relentless rhythm as she moved toward answers she believed would redraw the map of power in this village. She wanted certainty. She wanted control. Most of all, she wanted to decide what would happen next, and she would not leave without it.

For weeks, Celia Daniels had drifted on the periphery of the village’s radar, a specter with a ledger of disappearances, sudden bursts of violence, and secrets that could topple empires built on fear and precision. Tonight, the hospital lights were mercilessly clear, stripping away the shadows Celia had learned to thrive in. And in the silent exchange between doctor and patient, a truth revealed itself with the grit of winter frost: Celia’s world was unravelling from the inside, faster than anyone could have anticipated.

The consultant’s face wore the gravity of a verdict long in coming. Kim’s breath snagged in her throat as the doctor laid the verdict bare, each syllable a chisel strike against the wall she had spent years chiseling. Celia’s condition was far more advanced than anyone admitted to suspect, the scans screaming a name that sounded unfamiliar and terrifying: a rapidly progressing neurological illness. The word hung between them, foreign and unyielding, a door that could not be opened from the outside.

What kind of illness, Kim demanded inwardly, feeling the room tilt under the weight of possibilities. The doctor did not soften the impact. Untreated early-onset frontotemporal dementia, a diagnosis that arrived like a hammer blow, accelerating with a cold, merciless speed. The phrase felt alien on Kim’s tongue, a vocabulary she had never needed to wield in the battlefield of rivals and empires. Dementia. The word carried a different kind of weapon: it didn’t promise victory; it promised erasure, minutes turning to seconds until a person who once dictated terms could no longer be recognized.

Disbelief crashed into her like a wave. Celia, the architect of calculated moves, a mind that had memorized debts, threats, and names with surgical precision, could be slipping away from herself? The doctor spoke again, patient and clinical, listing the hallmarks of frontotemporal dementia: extreme behavioral shifts, paranoia, aggression, impulsive decisions, and a disturbing erosion of empathy. The description hit Kim with the brutal force of a revelation she hadn’t allowed herself to fear: Celia could become unpredictable, dangerous in ways that no longer resembled the adversary she had studied and outmaneuvered for so long.

The truth settled over Kim’s shoulders like a heavy cloak. Celia wasn’t simply spiraling into mischief or plotting another play for power; she was ill, and illness would rewrite the terms of every feud they had ever fought. If Celia’s mind was fraying, then every victory Kim had claimed, every strategic strike she had landed, might be nothing more than the echo of a mind fraying at the edges, a mind that could forget a debt or misread a threat in the glare of a hospital lamp.

Kim’s legs trembled as she stepped closer to the room’s door, the word “danger” echoing in the hollow of her chest. She pressed a palm to the wall, fighting the dizziness that clung to her like a second skin. Inside, Celia sat upright, a silhouette carved against the pale light, gazing out the window with a gaze that seemed to pierce through glass and into the future she had built and might now forget. The room felt smaller, as if the walls themselves had learned to hold their breath in expectation of the moment Celia would remember or forget who she was.

Celia’s recognition flickered—just a fraction of a second—before dissolving into something hollow, almost frightened. “Do I know you?” she asked, her voice a threadbare echo. Kim, gathering her courage like a blade, whispered the truth that must have seemed ridiculous in the old days: “It’s Kim. Kim Tate.” The face that answered was a stranger’s for a heartbeat—confusion, fear, a flash of anger—and then the fog closed again, swallowing the remnants of memory.

What followed cracked the air with a new kind of tension: Celia’s fury erupted not as a calculated strike against Kim, but as a raw, terrified defense of a mind slipping away. “Why are you in my house?” Celia snapped, a condemnatory edge to a question that suggested someone might be intruding on a life Celia could barely claim as her own at that moment. Kim spoke softly, trying to anchor the moment in reality: “You’re in the hospital. You’ve been unwell.” The shift was instantaneous and brutal. The woman who had always commanded others with the cold curl of a smile now roared in confusion, a trapped creature thrashing against the hospital’s antiseptic calm.

Celia’s fear twisted into a scream of defiance as she fought against the alien truth invading her conscience. The nurse’s quiet intervention barely cut through the room’s rising storm: Celia raged, argued, clawed at the blankets as if she could tear away the encroaching fog with sheer will. Kim’s heart pounded in her chest, not with the triumph of a victory won, but with the chill of an ache that comes when a rival becomes a patient, a foe becomes fragile, and the battlefield shifts from boardroom to