I never liked goodbyes, and perhaps that's why the city seemed more alive to me on that moonless night. The wet asphalt reflected the headlights like a strange lake, and the song on the radio felt like it had been written for someone I no longer was. I was driving home late from work—again—with the taste of dust and cold coffee clinging to my tongue, collecting regrets like crumpled receipts in my pocket. There are things one only admits to oneself when the streets are empty: that I felt like a failure; that my life, though full of attempts, seemed like an endless sequence of almosts. Almost passed the test. Almost landed that project. Almost asked for forgiveness.
The accident wasn't cinematic, though the sound of metal still echoes in my mind like a memory made of blades. A truck with no brakes, a scream I'm not sure was mine, the world tilting sideways, and for an instant time split apart, as if it had cracks through which light could leak. There was no pain. There was surprise. And then—silence. A silence so complete it felt heavy, as if the void itself had learned to breathe.
I fell. Not like someone plunging into an abyss, but like someone slipping through a vast curtain. There were shadows—and in them, constellations: slow points of light, pulsing like ancient hearts. The darkness smelled of stored books and star dust. I tried to speak, but my voice got stuck somewhere between my chest and forgetting. Still, I was heard.
"You're not finished," said a voice that came neither from outside nor inside. It was neither male nor female—it was like an idea that had learned to whisper. "You've mastered the art of giving up gracefully, but you haven't learned how to finish."
"Who are you?" I asked—or thought I asked.
"An echo from before the name. A trace left on the map when the world was first scribbled. You called me without knowing, when you wished to begin again."
I wanted to deny it, but there was no pride here. There was hunger—for a story that could finally be written without trembling. Then the light grew, and behind it I saw a pattern—circles within circles, lines crossing like secret paths. Only later would I understand that it was a grammar of forces, an alphabet of energy and will that I would one day call Eírhan. In that moment, it was simply too much beauty for a tired gaze.
"And what do you want in return?" I asked, remembering every tale in which ancient voices demand a price.
"The same as always," replied the echo. "Choices. And memory."
I saw a figure—just an outline made of dawn and dusk—extend a hand. On it was a ring of matte stone, cut at angles that refused symmetry. I felt the urge to retreat. Instead, I stepped forward. The hand touched mine, and the touch was like being crossed by a warm river. The feeling was neither pain nor pleasure; it was the certainty that the limits of the body are only a temporary agreement.
"Sleep," said the voice. "When you open your eyes, seek the wind that does not move the leaves and the stone that sings in the water. They will know you."
Then being born was like returning from a deep reading. The world entered all at once: the smell of herbs drying on the ceiling, of old wood, of wet earth. Someone cried—maybe me—and someone else laughed, a short laugh of relief. The light was different, sharper, as if the air was woven with lighter threads. The word that came to me was not Portuguese, nor from any known tongue, but I felt it: Eltharion. It felt like both a name and a promise.
For days—weeks?—I floated between dreams and wakefulness. The time of a newborn is not a clock; it is a tide. And in those tides, something in me perceived the world beyond the skin. There were invisible currents, very subtle variations in density, as if space itself had heartbeats. I saw colors no one else remarked upon, and when I cried, sometimes the shadows on the wall seemed to bow in respect. On certain nights, I heard what I can only describe as a song of stone: long, deep notes rising from the ground, telling me that beneath the house ran a thread of the same river that had touched me before I was born.
My mother—her hands full of the calluses of someone who works without drawing attention to her effort—rocked me and sang in a language that mixed broad vowels with soft consonants. My father spoke little but had the habit of watching the horizon as if reading news written on the wind. To me, they were small household gods, able to make bread and laughter with the same touch.
By the third moon—this was how I began to suspect the calendar of that place, counting how many nights it took for the moon to return to its size—something happened. I cried, as any baby would, and the air in the room trembled. The lamp flames wavered, then grew slightly, stretching shadows like arms. My mother called my father in a whisper that wanted to be a scream. Their fear was not for me, but for what seemed to want to be born alongside me: a different breath, a rhythm that was not human. The flames returned to normal, and they never mentioned it again, but I began to notice my cradle sometimes being turned in another direction, as if they were trying to align me with something invisible.
In dreams, the nameless voice returned rarely—more sensation than sentence—and reminded me of the pact I did not understand. And among the whispers, two clues hammered like a refrain: the wind that does not move the leaves; the stone that sings in the water. When I awoke, I didn't know what to look for. When I slept, I thought I had already found it. Later, I would understand: they were discreet omens of what the world called affinities—the way each person, race, or creature touched the Eírhan and was touched by it. But at the start, it was only poetry, and that was enough.
I grew a little, enough to crawl toward the cracks in the house where sunlight slipped through. On market days, the street outside filled with the sounds of small bells, tanned hides, stalls with spices, herbs hanging like green flags. There I saw, for the first time, other races: a merchant with pointed ears selling silver threads, a blue-skinned artisan with slanted eyes marking symbols on ceramics as if capturing constellations. No one seemed too foreign; Eltharion had the habit of making the strange familiar—if the strange knew how to listen.
There were also stories. There always are. On moonless nights, the elders spoke of the Unbalanced Firstborn, of Pillars that supported more than cities, of relics that sometimes chose people and sometimes devoured them. And among those myths, a certainty that only the superstitious truly believed: that some are born with more than one core—the seed from which Eírhan sprouts within the body. They said a double was enough to make prophets and tyrants. A triple, however, was a word no one pronounced without first making a gesture of protection, something between the sign of the cross and a simplified rune. For all, it was legend. For me, it was a heart beating in three discreet rhythms.
On the last night of the first winter, I heard the song of stone again. My father carried me outside to see the two moons aligned above the thatched roof, and the air, cold enough to cloud our breath, seemed to hold star dust. I closed my eyes and, for an instant, the entire world became a single deep, warm, ancient sound. I belonged to it. And it, in a way I could not yet name, belonged to me.