"They say the eyes are windows to the soul..." The narrator's voice -a little girl's- opens the world, soft and uncertain.
A single eye trembles in the dark.
A child's eye—wide, glistening, fearful—peering through the slits of a modern wooden cupboard. She hides in silence. The shadows around her barely hold back the weight of what she has seen.
The world exhales, gently pulling away. Pulling away far enough to reach somewhere from a totally different era.
And then… a face appears.
A boy dressed in a rough brown exomis–one-shoulder tunic, skin pale, barefoot. Standing alone at the entrance of a corridor of a well-lit space, bustling with movement. A market. He is Facing forward. His expression is blank—not peaceful, not sad—just absent. His eyes hold nothing. No flicker. No fight. Not alive. Not dead. Just empty.
The kind of emptiness that makes you forget he's even there.
Around him, a group of children laugh and dance, their joy ringing through the air like birdsong. They chase each other through the crowd, their movements glowing with life.
And yet the boy stands still—unmoving, untouched, unnoticed.
A ghost among the living.
But one child stumbles before he stops.
Then he turns and looks.
At first, it's just curiosity.
Then something deeper. An instinct, maybe.
From the window frame of the opposite house, the moment unfolds—not like a tragedy, but like a memory someone once tried to forget. Not tragic like a wound. Tragic like silence when it lasts too long.
The child stares at the soul-less boy the way one might study a mirror. A mirror that reflects nothing.
He might have never noticed it but the market was full of them.
It was broad and crowded. Men in flowing chitons-tunics, others draped in heavy himations-cloaks. Yet among them, the majority are men and children similar to that boy, carrying amphorae-two-handled jars- and goods, moving in every direction without expression.
Beyond the child and the boy, opposite to the narrow corridor's entrance, the wind blows its way through the window into the house.
"Through which you can see—truly see—a person.."
Inside the house, a family gathers around a trapeza-a low dining table- for food.
The father sits with arms outstretched, lifting a baby toward the light.
The baby doesn't cry, yet doesn't smile.
She is just silent.
The mother leans over the table, serving food with a gentle smile.
The grandmother sits back, savoring the quiet joy of the moment.
The older son eats as he watches his sister, delight dancing in his eyes.
Light streams through the window, filling the room with warmth.
"...Their past.
Their fears.
Their desires.
Their attachments.
Their secrets.
Their intentions.
Even their health can be judged through their eyes.
But most importantly.."
The soul-less boy's still standing. The other child is still watching, his face looks concerned now. His friends coming towards him. He doesn't hear but they are calling for him.
"...A storm of emotions, impossible to hide behind two thin folds of skin."
The soul-less boy's gaze shifts, and the world twitches with it—color by color, eye by eye:
Violet: cloaked in mystery.
Indigo: sharpened with clarity.
Blue: deep and calm, like still waters.
Green: steady, rooted in balance.
Yellow: radiant with joy.
Orange: reckless with fire.
Red: burning with raw passion.
The red eye blinks.
Darkness overrun.
"Deep within the eyes," the girl whispers,
"you may glimpse truth…"
Silence overwhelms.
"...and trace deception."
A flash. A ringing sound piercing through the ears.
Two silver eyes suddenly emerge from the dark —glittering with unnatural swirls. Beautiful, yet wrong. Cold. Ancient. Seductive. Dangerous. Watching. Approaching. Close. Closer...
///POP-CRACK ... A light bulb breaks..
The vision collapses.
We're back where we began.
The little girl in the cupboard again.
Her eyes are wider now, pupils narrowed, brimming with tears. In them: a reflection. A man.
We fall through her tears, deeper and deeper, until we are no longer looking at her eyes—but his shadow.
"But what was in my father's eyes back then…?"
///FLICK..FLICK ..The other light bulb blinks.
The girl's voice cracks, fading into the void.
And the world pulls away again—into somewhere from the same ancient earlier era, yet stranger.
A dreamlike place, cast in impossible colors, with marble white pillars viewing an altar placed on a cliff. Tens of men dressed in white garments kneeling in submisson by the altar towards someone, out of which a one-eyed man, bald with a heavy beard. The air is stuffed with smoke coming out of the altar and someone sits quietly on the edge of the cliff, swinging their legs.
A girl. Her presence is still. Her face is obscured.
She doesn't look back. She doesn't need to.
Her lips part:
"…But the fifteenth shall break or seal it."
The words echo—ancient and sharp—as if pulled from the roots of time itself.
Then we see her from behind.
A small silhouette against a vast horizon, staring far into the unknown. Before her stood a mountain with a giant glowing crystal atop, yet her gaze stretches forward—travelling far, through the veil of sky and mist, deep in a forest cursed by stillness.
Where The Keres stirred.
And above them, they watched.
Something unnatural pulsed in the heavens.
Lightning.
Thunder.
Terror.
A divine being they would name Sky Terror.