Aria stood frozen beside the basin, fingers pressed lightly to the base of her throat.The morning had been like any other, or it should have been. The faint drizzle tapping against the window. The muted clatter from the mill yard as early workers arrived. The soft hum of her landlady downstairs, already stirring porridge.
But then warmth, sharp, sudden, had flared low in her chest.
A pull. A whisper without sound.
Her name, but not spoken aloud.
Aria.
It echoed through her bones, through the thin morning light, through something deeper that had no name at all. Her breath trembled, and she braced her hands on the worn edge of the washstand.
What was that…?
She didn't realize she'd spoken until the words vanished into the quiet room.
A chill chased up her spine, not unpleasant, but unsettlingly familiar, like a memory trying to surface from beneath years of forgetting. She lifted her face, studying her faint reflection in the cloudy glass pane.
She looked the same as always.
But she felt altered. As if a door inside her had opened the smallest crack.
The morning continued as though nothing had happened, though Aria moved through the motions with a strange awareness prickling at her skin. She dressed for work, simple linen shift, dark skirt, bodice laced neatly. She pulled her hair into a knot, her fingers trembling more than she liked.
Downstairs, the hearth crackled. Her landlady glanced up with a frown.
You look pale, she said. Dreams again?
No, Aria replied too quickly. Heat rose in her face. Just tired.
A lie.She didn't understand the truth well enough to speak it.
Her landlady pursed her lips but didn't pry. Aria was grateful. Any explanation would sound ridiculous even to her own ears, but the feeling didn't fade. If anything, it grew like an invisible thread had been tied between her ribs and something else. Something out there.
Someone.
She stepped outside into the pale morning. Hawthorne stirred slowly awake; smoke rising from chimneys, cart wheels creaking, a dog barking somewhere near the green. The air smelled of wet grass and coming sunlight.
Aria tightened her shawl and began the walk toward the mill road.
She had barely taken five steps when the world shifted.
A sharp, impossible warmth flared against her palm.
She gasped and looked down.
Her hand empty felt as though something had been pressed into it. Something solid. Something warm.
The sensation was gone in an instant but its echo pulsed through her fingers. She curled them reflexively, her heart hammering.
What is happening to me?
There was no answer.
Only the distant sound of the river. Only the feeling of being called.
************************************************************
Kaelan's world had narrowed to the small carved charm resting in his palm.
The faint morning light filtered through the mist, touching the token with a soft glow. The flame shaped carving was worn with age, smoothed by countless hands, hands that did not belong to him.
Hands that belonged to someone who knew her.
Someone who should not know him.
The old man's words replayed in his mind:
You have begun to remember.
Kaelan's chest tightened as he closed his hand around the charm.A tremor, not of fear, but of something hauntingly close to recognition moved through him. He took a step back into the room, closing the door behind him. The latch clicked like a whispered warning.
The room felt smaller now, too quiet.
He unwrapped the damp cloth again, studying the fragile stitching along its edge. The threads were old, frayed, almost brittle. It hadn't been crafted recently.
Which meant the man who delivered it-- someone she sent, had been keeping it for years.
Decades, maybe.
Kaelan swallowed.
Who was she?
Not Aria. He knew that instinctively.The message was from another she.
Someone who claimed he was beginning to remember.
Remember what?
He sank onto the edge of the table, the token cupped in both hands. A heaviness pressed behind his ribs, an ache familiar in a way he could not explain.
The carved flame seemed to pulse with faint warmth, seeping up through his skin, threading into his blood.
He whispered her name.
Aria…
The token warmed further and something inside him, something old and unspoken, shifted.
Not violently.
Softly. Like the beginning of recognition.Like the first breath after near drowning.
He exhaled shakily and stood.
He needed answers. He needed to know what was happening to him. He needed...
His thought broke sharply, he needed to see her.
Kaelan turned toward the door. His pulse spiked, closed his hand around the token, swallowing the sudden dryness in his throat and stepped out.