I see without opening my eyes.
Not always—only after a certain age was I forced into it.
I perceive the shape of the world through an unseen web, not through light.
It is everywhere around me: a luminous fabric of silver threads, wrapping every living being with varying density. Thick around some, thin around others—and in the spaces between, it breathes.
This is my TRAITUM, inherited from my father.
He was different. His eyes were normal—he could see as anyone else does. But he also knew how to see as I do. He chose to look at the web. I never had that choice.
And before he taught me anything else, he warned me.
There is a voice. It lives behind my eyes—waiting, always waiting. It whispers, pulls, urges me to draw closer. To open them.
My father spent years teaching me to ignore it.
"It does not care about you," he said. "It never did. All it wants is destruction."
I believed him. I still do.
Despite all of it, I never saw myself as anything more than an ordinary village girl.
The day he left, he held my face in his hands and said:
"You'll receive a message—accept it, my dear Zofia."
Years passed.
Then one morning, an envelope arrived.
An invitation to Atre—the greatest academy on the continent. The dream of every young person who had ever looked toward the capital and wondered. And somehow, impossibly, they were offering me a full scholarship.
I knew. This was the message.
My mother held my hands at the door as though letting go would break something between us forever. Her voice trembled with words she couldn't say. I swallowed the weight in my throat and pulled away in silence—and began my journey toward Entdeckt, the capital of the Neoland Kingdom.
Now, after a long road, I find myself in Jugesp Forest—traveling with a caravan I joined after passing through Little New Viaco town.
The forest suits me. The web here is light and clean: only the slow threads of ancient trees and the faint flickers of small beasts passing somewhere beyond sight.
But then—without reason—it stirred.
The web grew restless, pulling toward something deeper in the trees.
I clenched my fists. Looked away.
I would not listen.
We reached a lake—wide and still, the air above it clean and cold. The caravan scattered to its duties. The three guards—Tamer with his small pointed ears, Anton with his horns, Jon with his beard—moved off to scout.
The web showed me their shapes, moving outward.
Then—
Chaos.
Wolves erupted from the trees. Not ordinary wolves—Bloody Wolves. The web around them pulsed thick and violent, their forms massive, their howls tearing through the air. They moved as one body.
Everyone fought. Little Sofia screamed—I pulled her into my arms, feeling the threads tremble violently around us.
And then it shrieked behind my eyes:
*Look. Open your eyes. Look. Now.*
I ignored it.
I always ignore it.
Six wolves collapsed ahead of me—severed cleanly, heads removed with impossible precision. I couldn't catch the one who had done it.
Then I felt him.
A void moving through the web. Not dim—utterly dark— like the darkness I see when I hold my hand before my closed eyes. And around him, the threads were denser than anything I had ever felt. Denser than anyone.
He landed on a branch.
The world fell silent—and it screamed louder inside me, desperate, clawing.
*Draw closer. Follow him. Now.*
Ignored it.
Ignored it.
Ignored it.
Finally—silence.
I turned my focus toward the void. And there, within all that impossible darkness—
Two silver eyes.
Clear. Pure. Visible.
They found mine for a fraction of a second—and my closed eyes burned.
It said nothing. It had gone quiet.
The battle ended.
He was a boy. Perhaps my age.
He stood there—and smiled. Didn't show to me, yet I felt it. The curve of his lips, somewhere in the dark.
I stood frozen, watching the boy the voice had so desperately wanted me to follow.
His name was Boris.
And I—despite everything I knew— found myself, over time, drawing closer and closer to him.
Step by step. For no reason I could name.
As though the fate between us had already begun in that moment—
Beneath the tree, while it stayed silent.