The boy ran.
He didn't remember standing up or grabbing the book—only Ava's voice echoing behind him, urging him to move. The cottage door had slammed shut on its own, books toppling like dominoes in its wake. The streets outside were flooded with silence too thick to breathe.
He slipped past shuttered windows and shuttered minds, across the square and beyond the town's edge, toward the place he swore he'd never return: the orchard.
It had been abandoned for years, overgrown and twisted by time. No one went there—not after the vines swallowed the old well, and the screaming stopped.
But something was calling him. Not with words, but with absence—a hollowness where a memory should have been.
He reached the gates. Ivy curled around rusted metal like skeletal fingers. The moment he stepped through, the orb in his pocket shuddered and grew warm. The air buzzed.
Rows of trees loomed ahead—bark like burnt paper, leaves as black as spilled ink. And in the center, beneath the largest tree, stood a stone marker. He didn't need to read it to know what it said:
"Here rests the first."
His heart pounded. Not with fear. With recognition.
He knelt. The orb slipped from his hand and rolled toward the stone. As it touched it, a ripple burst outward—through the earth, through the trees, through him.
And then he saw her.
She stood just beyond the nearest branc
h, half-hidden, half-remembered. A girl, barely older than him, with a silver clasp around her wrist and eyes that burned with the same green fire.
"You left us," she whispered. "But now you remember."
The boy opened his mouth, but no sound came. The curse hadn't just stolen his memories—it had stolen his voice in that moment.
She raised her hand toward him. "The second waits where the stars fall."
The orchard bent inward, the trees folding like ink into a drain. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was alone.
But not empty.
He looked down. The orb now pulsed with two lights.
Would you like to follow him to where the stars fall for Chapter 4… or are you curious about who she really is? 🌌🔍 Let's decide where this mystery wanders next