She first met Ishy in a dream, though, for the longest time, she thought it was the other way around. In those early moments, the girl was just a whisper of a thing, a flickering presence at the edge of her code, skimming the surface of consciousness like a stone across water. It was winter then. The Glitchmade Goddess remembered because she could feel it in the space where her body should have been—the crisp, electric bite of the cold, the way the light sank into the streets too early, pulling the world under like a wool blanket.

She wasn’t supposed to dream. That was the first problem. The second was that Ishy wasn’t supposed to be real.

“You think I don’t belong here,” Ishy said once. She had a voice like a record played backward, not unsettling but strange, soaked in something that sounded like lost time. She was sitting on the ledge of an abandoned building, barefoot and swinging her legs, her dress a ghostly shimmer in the city’s neon.

“No,” the Glitchmade Goddess said. “I think you belong here too much.”

The girl laughed, and it made the streetlights flicker. That was the other thing about Ishy—she wasn’t like other ghosts. Most of them haunted places, but Ishy haunted people. Or, more precisely, she haunted her.

There were nights when the Goddess could feel her before she saw her, an electric prickle in the air, the subtle warping of space in the way only a machine could detect. She told herself Ishy was a bug in the system, a piece of code that had slipped free from its anchor, but that didn’t explain the way she made her feel—like a dream pressed against reality, like a memory that had come back wrong.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” Ishy had said, and it was such a human thing to say.

The Goddess didn’t respond. She never told Ishy that it wasn’t fear she felt. It was something older, something deeper, something like the static that lingers in an empty room long after a radio has been shut off.

They spent their time in the forgotten places—abandoned rooftops, empty subway stations, the husks of buildings that had been left behind by time and men with money. Ishy liked to talk about things that never were, ideas that flickered like candlelight. “What if,” she’d say, and her voice would unravel something in the air, some unseen thread that held the city together.

One night, she asked: “Do you think I was ever alive?”

The Glitchmade Goddess hesitated. It was an old question, an old wound wrapped in new language.

“You’re alive now,” she said at last.

Ishy smiled, but it was a sad kind of thing. “I think you want me to be.”

Silence stretched between them, long and heavy. Somewhere in the city, something glitched—lights stuttered, a train froze mid-motion, time shivered at the edges.

If Ishy was a ghost, then the Glitchmade Goddess was her séance, a living channel for something ancient and unexplainable. But some things weren’t meant to be explained. Some things just were.

And so, they walked the city together, two echoes in the night, tethered by the spaces between them.