Elara had always believed in things she couldn't see.
Ghosts. Spirits. The glimmer of magic that danced at the edge of her vision. Most called her imagination "too wild," but Elara knew better. Ever since she was a child, her dreams had been windows—pulling her into places that didn't exist, with people who felt too real to be illusions.
And one person in particular.
The boy with silver eyes.
She had never seen his face clearly—just flashes. A profile in moonlight. A hand reaching through mist. Eyes like the sky before a storm. Every night, he called to her. Every night, she woke with tears in her eyes and his name on the tip of her tongue, only for it to vanish with the dawn.
Now, as she stood in front of the crumbling ruins just outside the forest, her heart raced with a strange familiarity. The same stone archway she'd seen in her dreams loomed before her—weathered, forgotten, and pulsing faintly with a heat she couldn't explain.
Elara tightened her grip on her satchel. She hadn't told anyone she'd be here. Her friends would have called her crazy, and honestly, maybe she was. What kind of person follows a dream into the woods?
Someone who knows it's more than a dream.
She stepped beneath the archway. A sudden gust of wind tore through the trees, snuffing out the birdsong. The air thickened, heavy with tension. Then... she felt it. A tremor beneath her feet. The ground whispered. The air sparked.
Something ancient stirred.
And then she heard it—soft, low, and broken.
"Elara..."
She froze.
No one was around.
But the voice wasn't imagined. It was the same voice that haunted her dreams. Her breath caught as the world tilted slightly, the shadows around the ruins lengthening unnaturally. Something—or someone—was waking.
Suddenly, her pendant, a small crystal she'd worn since she was a baby, grew hot against her chest. She yanked it free from under her collar. It glowed.
Bright.
Brighter.
Blinding.
Then—
Darkness.
Silence.
And a whisper against her ear: "You came back to me."