Before maps could mark it, before the world could name it, an island rose from the abyss.
It did not rise quietly. The sea roared, the skies split with storms, and for seven days and nights, thunder fell as if the heavens themselves tried to cast it back beneath the waves. But the island did not sink. It remained, breathing.
Because it was no ordinary land.
Beneath its soil pulsed something ancient, something alive. The villagers who would one day call it home described the ground as warm under their feet, the rivers carrying a faint shimmer like liquid starlight. Stones buried in the cliffs glowed faintly in the dark, and plants swayed as though listening to a melody only they could hear.
The island was singing.
Not with a voice of flesh, but with a song woven into everything—roots, rivers, sky, and stone.
The first families who stepped upon its shores did not know this song. Their memories had been stripped away, their past lives taken. They were given tools, seeds, and nothing more. And though they survived—building homes, tilling fields, raising children—they lived without understanding the true nature of the land beneath them.
But their children… their children began to dream.
Strange dreams, filled with light and storms. Some awoke with their hearts racing to the rhythm of drums no one else could hear. Others felt the air stir around them when their emotions ran wild, or found the soil warming beneath their feet when they pressed their palms against it.
The song had entered their blood.
It waited patiently, generation after generation, humming beneath the surface of every child born upon that island. For most, it remained only a faint echo, a lullaby forgotten upon waking. For others, it sparked unease, a sense that they were meant for something more.
But in the shadows of the forests, where the glowing stones grew thickest, the song whispered more clearly.
"When chains descend, when silence threatens, when the world reaches to claim you—then my heart will awaken within yours."
Some called it a blessing. Others feared it as a curse. Most dismissed it as a fable told by firelight, meant to soothe restless children.
But the island never stopped singing.
And one day, when the outside world returned to claim what it had abandoned, the song would no longer be ignored.