The world was silent. Not the kind of soothing silence, but one that seemed to be hiding something. An absence of sound so oppressive that the air seemed to hold its breath.
A soft wind slipped through the blades of grass, lifting the golden dust of the hill. In the distance, the mountains shaped like shadows scattered in blue mist, and the river flowing among the stones was the only thing that seemed real.
And the rest of the world seemed...
...suspended, as if reality itself were just a thin veil that could be torn apart with a simple touch.
Within the frame of a house window, a woman sat on the sill. An ethereal presence, like a painting that had never been finished.
Her white dress seemed to absorb the pale evening light, and her auburn hair cascaded over her shoulders, a stark contrast against her ivory skin. But the most striking thing about her was her eyes... a green so intense that it seemed to hold the life of the entire world.
In her arms, a child.
A boy with skin the color of burnt honey and hair of an uncertain gray caught between light and shadow. His eyes, red like smoldering embers, gazed out the window, absorbing the landscape without blinking.
— Kaelen, the woman, spoke, and his name seemed to fade into the air.
The boy slowly lifted his gaze to her.
— Do you want me to tell you a story?
He did not answer, but the woman already knew. She held him closer, as if she wanted to keep him as near as possible, and began,
— Once upon a time, there was a writer. A man obsessed with words, who poured his soul into every sentence, into every character. Yet, no matter how much he wrote, none of his stories were enough. They all felt incomplete, they all betrayed him. And then he began to wonder... what if the stories were the ones writing him?
Kaelen blinked slowly.
— One night, the writer woke up in a room he didn't recognize. A space without doors, without windows, where the light came from nowhere, and the shadows seemed to breathe.
The woman tilted her head slightly, letting her hair fall over her face.
— And there, before him, they stood. The characters. Those he had written, those he had created, every soul he had trapped in his pages. But they did not look at him as a creator. No, Kaelen...
They looked at him as one of them.
A gust of wind passed through the room, carrying with it a faint scent of rain.
Kaelen bit his lip gently.
— And what happened to the writer?
The woman ran her fingers through his hair, but her hands trembled slightly.
— No one knows. Some say he became just another character trapped in his own story. Others say he still writes, but he no longer knows if the words are his own or someone else's. But before he disappeared, he said only one thing.
Kaelen looked straight into her eyes.
The woman smiled sadly and whispered,
— I won't die until you can.
Her words scattered into the air like thin threads of smoke.
Kaelen did not fully understand what they meant, but he felt something strange in his chest, something from nowhere like an invisible thread that connected him to those words, to that story, to something he could not name.
The woman held him close to her heart, and her voice, so warm, so familiar, faded to a whisper:
— You will find me in your dreams.
And then reality tore apart.
Darkness.
A sound of nothingness.
Then—
Kaelen opened his eyes.
The ceiling of his room. A shadow slipped through the crack of the door. A chilly breeze on his skin.
A tear slid down his cheek without him understanding why.
His lips moved on their own as if it was not he who chose to speak but something older, something deeper.
— I will find you.
And the words sounded like a vow.