WHEN THE SUNLIGHT FALLS
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Chapter 1: The Dream
The world was bathed in golden light. Not the harsh blaze of midday, but the tender kind that comes just before dusk, when everything softens and glows. In that dream, she was always standing in a field of wildflowers, their colors impossibly vivid, as if painted by a hand too delicate for this world.
Elara reached out, her fingers brushing petals that dissolved like smoke. The air smelled of rain and sunlight together—warm, impossible, comforting. And always, at the far edge of the field, there was someone waiting. A silhouette, tall and still, wrapped in radiance she could never quite touch.
Every time she tried to step closer, the ground shifted beneath her feet. The flowers bent away as though pushed by unseen winds. And the figure—always watching, always waiting—faded before she reached them.
Her heart ached as if she had lost something she could not name.
Then, as the sky darkened into shades of indigo, a voice whispered through the air, low and familiar:
"Find me before the sunlight falls."
Elara woke with a gasp, her sheets damp with sweat, the echo of the voice lingering in her chest like a secret. She pressed a hand to her heart, trembling.
It wasn't the first time she had dreamt of that voice.
And it would not be the last.
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