I fell in love, not in the ordinary sense where glances turn into conversations beneath city lamplight or laughter lingers past midnight, but in the quiet, impossible way one falls into another world.
It was a story that claimed me: Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser. Their love burned through centuries, defying time itself, and I, foolish mortal that I was, envied the very pulse of their fate. I wished, with the ache of an old soul, to be Claire, to touch that wild devotion, to belong to a man like Jamie, fierce as the Highlands and tender as the dawn.
And perhaps fate heard me.
For as I read, the words blurred; the ink seemed to breathe. Somewhere between the lines, I lost myself. A sound stirred, soft at first, like the murmur of distant wind. Then clearer, nearer. A hum. It trembled through the air, calling me not by name, but by essence.
There it was again, low, magnetic, alive. I rose, drawn toward it without reason or fear, my heart matching its rhythm. It was enigmatic, yes… but achingly beautiful. The kind of sound that felt like remembering something you'd never known.
The wind here has its own grammar. It sighs and lilts and folds itself around the hills, speaking in a dialect older than the sky. I came to the Highlands to translate it, so I told myself, but perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps the wind had been calling my name for years and I was only now learning how to listen.
Craigh na Dun looked smaller than I expected. In the photographs, the stones stood monumental and defiant; up close they were simply solemn, their grey hides veined with lichen like the hands of tired gods. The heather hissed against my skirt as I climbed. It was late October, cold enough that breath became mist, but I felt fever-warm, as though I'd stepped too near an unseen fire.
I had come because of her, Claire Randall, the war nurse who vanished one Beltane morning and returned months later with stories no one dared believe. Historians dismissed her as delirious, her journals as romantic fantasy. But there were things in her handwriting, the urgency of certain lines, the trembling where ink pooled, that spoke of truth. I wanted to understand her, this woman who had stepped through time and somehow returned.
The sky lowered itself in pewter layers as I reached the circle. Twelve stones, one taller than the rest, each angled slightly inward, as if eavesdropping on eternity. I took out my notebook, its pages already spotted with rain, and wrote:
Silence isn't the absence of sound. It's the presence of waiting.
That was when the hum began.
At first I thought it was the wind trapped between the stones, a natural resonance. But the sound thickened, vibrating through the air like the opening note of a cathedral organ. I pressed my palm against the tallest stone. It was colder than ice and yet pulsing, faintly, rhythmically, like a heartbeat felt through marble.
"Impossible," I whispered.
I stepped a little forward, slowly, deliberately as if scared to turn a stone or make a sound that will interrupt the humming of the wind. Or, so I thought.
The hum deepened. My fingertips prickled. The scent of iron filled my mouth, metallic and sharp. Images flickered at the edge of my mind: a flash of tartan, a blade catching sunlight, the echo of someone crying a name I didn't know.
And then the world tilted.
No. Folded.
I could no longer tell what was real and what wasn't. All I knew was the wind had swallowed me whole, wild and merciless, making me look like a woman caught in a waking dream, fighting against a force that seemed to draw the very breath out of my soul
The wind that moments ago danced around me now screamed, threading itself through my hair, my bones, my very breath. The earth gave way, not breaking, but bending, like reality itself was soft clay being reshaped by unseen hands. I tried to pull my palm away, but the stone held me fast, as though it had decided: You have been chosen.
The hum was no longer a sound, it was inside me, crawling through veins, reverberating against ribs, a thunder wrapped in silk. My heart tried to match its rhythm and failed. Light cracked through my vision, blinding, liquid, blue-white like the edge of a star.
For one heartbeat, I saw her, Claire. Standing where I stood, her eyes wide, hair lifted by that same invisible current. She reached for me, or I for her, I couldn't tell. Our palms brushed through time itself, separated by centuries and yet united by the same impossible current.
Then came the pull, like being unstitched from my body, every nerve thread yanked toward the center of the circle. I heard the heather whip against the stones, the cry of a distant raven, the low, sorrowful moan of a world rearranging itself.
And under it all, a whisper, faint but deliberate, spoken not into my ears but into my soul:
"Find him."
The words tore through me. Find who? I wanted to ask, but my voice was gone. My notebook slipped from my grasp, pages scattering like startled birds. The stone flared beneath my touch, light bleeding into every crevice until it was no longer stone at all but a mirror, one that showed another world, one that trembled like water in a basin of stars.
Then the ground vanished.
Weightlessness. Silence. The taste of lightning.
I was falling, not downward, but through when. Colors smeared into smoke. My body felt both impossibly heavy and not there at all. I caught glimpses between seconds: a battlefield wreathed in fog, men in tartan shouting oaths to ghosts, a woman's voice singing in Gaelic, a hand, his hand, reaching out through smoke and blood.
The hum built to a roar.
The world around me fractured, then reformed.
Heather again, but darker, thicker, the air heavier with peat and woodsmoke. The sky no longer pewter but bruised violet. I gasped, stumbling forward, knees sinking into cold earth. The stones loomed behind me, same circle, different century. The wind had changed its language.
Yes. The wind had changed its language. It no longer whispered. Tt commanded. It wrapped around me like a living thing, its voice shifting from song to summons, from caress to claim. I tried to stand my ground, but it took me utterly, fiercely, pulling at my hair, my breath, the very weight of my body. The air turned luminous, trembling with unseen power, and in that blinding surge I felt myself unravel, every thought, every heartbeat scattering like petals into the current of time.
Somewhere in the near distance, a horse neighed. Voices shouted, rough, male, urgent. A gunshot cracked the air, shattering whatever dream I thought this was.
And then, darkness took me.