The first lie they told me was that silence keeps you safe.
Elara used to say it softly, like a prayer pressed into my skin. Her fingers would tighten around my wrist whenever my questions lingered too long, her eyes flicking toward the road as if the truth itself might overhear us.
"Lower your voice, Ariana," she'd murmur.
"Not everything needs to be spoken."
I learned early how to disappear without leaving a trace. How to soften my footsteps. How to swallow the ache of curiosity before it reached my tongue. In a world that rewarded obedience and punished attention, I survived by becoming smaller than my thoughts.
Rowan never said much, but he watched everything. He stood near doorways and at the edges of paths, pretending not to listen while listening to everything. When I caught his gaze, there was always something unreadable there—like he was measuring distances only he understood. I thought it was caution. I didn't know it was vigilance.
They all called it care.
The night the lie broke, the sky burned the color of old bruises—deep violet and black, roiling as if something massive was turning in its sleep. The wind moved with intent, threading through the trees, tugging at my clothes, my hair, my chest. I stood at the edge of the path, heart racing for reasons I couldn't name.
Then the feeling came again.
Not fear.
Recognition.
The air thickened around me, humming low enough to feel rather than hear. My breath caught as the ground beneath my feet vibrated, a pulse answering something inside my chest. I pressed my palm against my sternum, as if I could quiet whatever was waking.
"Not now," I whispered—to Elara, to Rowan, to myself.
The whispers answered anyway.
They weren't voices. They were memories that weren't mine. Fire that curved instead of burned. Shadows that bowed as though alive. And a woman standing unafraid while the earth split at her feet.
She turned.
She looked like me.
Pain lanced through my head and I dropped to my knees, fingers digging into the dirt as though it could anchor me to the life I understood. My pulse thundered in my ears, drowning out the wind, the world, the warnings that had shaped me.
"This isn't real," I breathed. "It can't be."
The ground cracked.
Just a thin fracture at first—barely visible—but it glowed faintly, like a heartbeat beneath the soil. I stared at it, frozen, as understanding settled in my chest with terrifying clarity.
Something inside me had woken up.
The wind howled, trees bending as if in reverence or fear. Far beyond the hills, something ancient stirred—something that had been waiting far longer than I had been alive.
That was the moment the lies unraveled.
Elara hadn't taught me silence to protect me from the world.
Rowan hadn't been watching out of habit.
They had kept me quiet to protect the world from me.
And as the fracture in the earth widened, I understood the truth beneath every warning I had ever been given.
I was never ordinary