Adam stood at the edge of the stone cliff overlooking the dark valley, where the clouds touched the tips of the rocks, as if searching for a secret buried for centuries. The wind was cold, carrying something he didn't understand… a longing without a source, and a sorrow that resembled the sorrow he used to see in his grandmother's eyes every time she looked at the locked wooden door in her basement.
Zera stood silently behind him, a soft shadow of a memory not yet born.
She said quietly, gazing into the distance:
"It's not just a valley… is it?"
He replied without turning:
"No. I think there's another entrance beneath it... something… alive."
She approached him with slow steps, anxiety painting a shadow of real fear on her features.
"Adam… something in you changed after that dream… your dream about the little girl and the mirror. What did you really see? Don't lie to me."
He remained silent for seconds, then said:
"I saw… something rearranging my memory anew. I saw a hand pulling me from my childhood, placing me on a path I did not choose… I saw a sentence written on the mirror: *You are not who you think you are.*"
Zera gasped softly, as if the words had slapped her.
"That's what your mother wrote in her notebook once… when she was in Nimora for the first time. This impossible thing is happening now, Adam."
He turned to her suddenly:
"My mother? She was there?!"
She looked at him with lost eyes, then whispered:
"Yes… but she wasn't the same after that."
He shook his head slowly, as if reassembling pieces of a memory that wasn't his.
"Everything I've known is cracking from the inside, Zera… I feel like I was created in the middle of a lie, and that my grandmother was trying to protect me from something bigger than Nimora, bigger even than the embodied shadow."
She reached out and touched his hand, then said in a low voice:
"We were both carved from doubt… but now we have the choice to break this inheritance, or repeat it."
Suddenly, the ground shook beneath their feet, and a faint sound, resembling crying, emerged from the depths of the valley—a cry that was not human, but agonizing, as if the earth itself was weeping.
Adam took a step back, his eyes watching the fog that began to thicken over the valley.
He said in a steady voice:
"It's waking up… the beast that created the storms… it's here."
Then Zera suddenly screamed:
"Adam! Look!"
From within the fog, small red eyes appeared, many of them, gleaming like dead stars. Behind them, a dark shape rose, as if a creature created from the shadows of time, its limbs writhing, its voice whispering in forgotten tongues.
It said in an insane, internal voice:
"Return me… to the first sorrow."
Suddenly, Adam moved unconsciously, as if something in his heart was pulling him. His chest was burning, and his grandmother's locket around his neck was glowing.
Zera screamed, grabbing his arm:
"Don't go! This thing isn't looking for you… it's looking for your past!"
But he muttered, as if possessed:
"But it has the answer… about who I am… and about my grandmother… and about why she left me on her doorstep as an infant."
Zera's eyes widened in shock:
"What did you say?"
He looked at her, his eyes trembling from the truth he didn't know he knew.
"I… remembered. My grandmother wasn't my grandmother."
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**Quote of the Part:**
*"The truth is not revealed all at once; it tears the heart into fragments, piece by piece, until it is never the same again."*
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