Lore File #002 — The Net

📜 Lore File #002 — The Net 

Status: Classified // Inner Circle Access Only 

Source: Subject: Tara 

They said I was unstable. Too fragile to face the world, too porous to survive without walls. Maybe they were right. I felt too much, always too much. Not just my own grief, but everyone else’s, leaking through me until I could no longer tell where I ended and they began. 

In the institution, I learned to weave my own kind of barrier. Not a wall, but a net. Thin strands of thought and will, strung tight enough to catch what I couldn’t bear. The net dulled the sharpest edges, muffled the endless tide of other people’s pain. It didn’t cure me, but it let me breathe. 

I thought it was a crutch, a coping mechanism. But when the tree called us, when the others appeared at my side, the net changed. It wasn’t only shielding me anymore — it was reaching outward, lacing through the air around us, brushing against the others like recognition. 

Now I see it for what it is. The net isn’t weakness. It’s connection. With it, I can sense when hope flickers, when fear knots, when determination hums like a live wire. It shows me the weave we all belong to — fragile, tangled, beautiful. 

I was never broken. I was tuned.