Maris didn't remember ending the stream. She only remembered the stillness.
The last note of that strange, haunting song still clung to her skin like sea air. The file was gone. Deleted. Or maybe it had never existed. Her folders were as she left them—neat, ordinary, unremarkable. But nothing felt the same.
She sat in the dark of her apartment, the only sound the distant hum of Tokyo traffic below. Her reflection in the blackened monitor looked older somehow. Not physically—she hadn't aged a day. But something inside had stirred. Something fragile and ancient.
That message…
> "You said you'd never sing that again."
She rubbed her arms, though the warmth hadn't left the room. The message had vanished seconds after appearing, as if it knew it wasn't meant to be seen by the rest of the world. A glitch? A troll? Or something else entirely?
Maris pulled her knees to her chest and stared at the floor. That melody—it knew her. Not the Maris her fans knew, but someone buried beneath even that. She could still hum it without trying.
The next day, she returned to her usual routine. She streamed. She smiled. She played games. The chat exploded with memes, superchats, fanart. No one asked about the song. Not directly.
But someone—an anonymous user—had left a cryptic comment on her archived stream:
> "Channel 03. The voice always finds its way home."
She clicked the profile. Blank. No history. No uploads. Nothing.
That night, she couldn't sleep.
She returned to her old laptop—the dusty, half-forgotten one from her student days. It was slow, sluggish, and smelled faintly of overheating plastic. She hadn't touched it since moving into this new apartment, and even then, only once or twice.
She powered it on. The system coughed awake.
As it booted, a flicker—a memory.
A desk not her own. A different city. Rain. Laughter. A microphone that wasn't hers. A name she couldn't quite recall.
Then the screen lit up. Normal.
Except for one thing.
A folder on the desktop, unmarked and locked with a file name in a language she couldn't read. Her pulse quickened.
She clicked it.
Password required.
She tried the obvious ones. "maristide." "vtube." Her birthday. Nothing worked.
Until her fingers typed something she didn't recognize: "sirensleeper"
The folder opened.
Inside, there were only three files.
1. video_03_final.mov
2. notes_voice.txt
3. streamlogs_2019.rar
The video played first.
It was her.
But younger. Different hair. A more raw, unrefined version of herself—no overlays, no avatars, just her face, slightly blurred, like an artifact from an old dream. She was singing that same melody. Eyes closed. Lips trembling.
At the end of the video, she whispered something into the mic, almost inaudible.
"One day, I'll forget. And when I do, someone will bring me back."
The screen went black.
Maris sat frozen. Her breath shallow. The city outside continued its rhythm, unaware of the quiet storm unraveling in her chest.
She wasn't just a rising star.
She was a returner.