Morning sunlight sifted through the cottage window, scattering across wooden floors where dust motes drifted like slow, remembering spirits.The air smelled faintly of pine resin and dried sage the scent of healing, and of old things trying to stay alive.
Sana was already awake, humming a tune without melody, her small hands busy among bundles of herbs that hung from the rafters like pale, drying wings. Outside, the forest whispered leaves trembling in a wind that smelled of wet earth and river stone.
Rin watched her in silence.
She noticed his gaze and puffed her cheeks."You're staring again."
He blinked, caught, then lowered his eyes. "S…sor…ree."
Sana giggled a sound too bright for the dimness of morning. "You don't have to be sorry! Just help me tie these, okay?"
He nodded. His fingers moved with deliberate precision too careful, too measured looping the cord around stems with flawless symmetry.Not the motions of a child, but of someone long used to delicate things.
"Like this?" he asked, holding out the knot.
Sana tilted her head. "That's… really good. Papa takes forever to make them that neat."
Elden looked up from his workbench, where mortar and pestle glimmered faintly in the beam of sunlight. Dried petals, crushed roots, and tincture bottles lay in quiet rows a map of healing drawn in glass and dust."Steady hands," he murmured. "A healer's hands, perhaps."
The boy froze. Something stirred an echo rippling through the hollow spaces of his mind.He pressed a palm to his chest. A faint pulse trembled beneath his skin not quite a heartbeat, not quite his own.
"I… know this," Rin whispered. "Healer."
The word left him like a secret remembered too soon.
Silence followed, soft but taut. Then Sana laughed again, bright and unburdened."Then you can be Papa's apprentice!"
Elden smiled faintly. "Let's not rush Heaven's plans, little one. Words first, wounds later."
The morning drifted by, sunlight shifting in long golden bars across the floor. Beyond the window, the hills breathed under a rising haze a world waking slow and green. Yet every now and then, Elden caught Rin tracing invisible lines on his wrist, as if trying to recall something written there long ago.
That night, the rain returned.It began softly a whispering against the thatch then gathered into rhythm, drumming like a distant heartbeat.The smell of wet soil filled the air, mingling with the faint sweetness of the herbs above his bed.
Rin lay awake, staring at the ceiling. The candle beside him guttered in the draft. Beneath the rain, he heard another sound faint, rhythmic, pulsing. It matched his heartbeat, then slipped out of sync.Faster. Louder.
He sat up. The cottage glowed silver with moonlight leaking through the windowpane. The world felt too still the kind of stillness before something remembers it's alive.
He raised his hands.
Under his skin, markings stirred pale constellations flickering to life, threading up his arms like veins of liquid starlight. They pulsed once… twice… and vanished, leaving behind only the tremor of something unseen.
"Why?" he breathed. The word came easily now. No answer followed.
Thena whisper, faint but piercing, bloomed inside his skull.
"Phase… four… incomplete…""Subject Rin""Stabilization failing…"
He gasped, clutching his head as visions flooded him: white walls humming with light, shadows of masked faces, a voice calling his name not with fear, but command.Then darkness slammed shut around him.
The door burst open. Elden entered, candlelight flaring gold and frantic."Rin! What happened?"
The boy sat rigid, trembling. The glow was gone, but sweat slicked his skin.
"I saw… light," he whispered. "People. Hurt."
Elden knelt, checking his pulse too fast, too hot. The warmth beneath Rin's skin felt wrong: not fever, but energy.He masked his unease with a healer's calm. "Dreams," he said softly. "Nothing more."
But as he drew his hand back, a faint shimmer clung to his fingertips like dust made of stars.
Days passed, blurred by rain and the slow rhythm of valley life.
The forest had grown thick with mist, dew beading on fern tips, the paths soft with moss. Sana laughed as she darted through the underbrush, gathering herbs. Rin followed quietly, his eyes always on the horizon as if something there might call him back.
Sometimes, when the wind stirred through the trees, he stopped his gaze distant, body still, listening.The sound that reached him wasn't birdsong or river flow. It was mechanical, hollow, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once.
"Protocol… breach…""Traveler… anomaly…""Liam…"
Each word left a cold ache behind his ribs.
That evening, the sky bled red over the meadows. Elden found Rin sitting by the fence, watching light die over the wet fields.
"You've been quiet," the healer said. "Too quiet."
Rin hesitated. "There's… noise. Inside."
Elden frowned. "Noise?"
Rin tapped his temple. "Voices. But no faces."
The healer studied him, the wind carrying the metallic tang of the river nearby."Sometimes the mind remembers what the heart can't," Elden said gently. "Dreams are doors, Rin. Don't open them too fast."
Rin looked down. "Then… who was I?"
Elden smiled faintly, though sorrow dimmed it. "Who you were doesn't matter now. You're here. That's enough."
Rin wanted to believe him. But the silence between his heartbeats whispered otherwise.
That night, the valley slept beneath fog. The forest gleamed wet beneath the moon, every leaf silvered, every breath of wind sounding like a secret.
Rin dreamed again.
A void of shifting symbols.Voices overlapping mechanical, human, broken.
"Consciousness transfer complete.""Traveler integrity stable.""Initiate phase four—"
Then, a woman's voice softer, closer.
"…Rin… live…"
Light flared, blinding. He reached for it and felt something drag him back.
He woke with a jolt, tears on his cheeks, lungs burning as if he had surfaced from deep water.The candle had long since died, leaving only the pale wash of moonlight.
Outside, even the rain had stopped.
He looked at his hands. The markings were gone, but warmth pulsed beneath the skin — slow, steady, waiting.
He turned toward the window. Beyond the glass, mist curled over the crater in the distance, its edges faintly luminous, as though remembering him.
He whispered the words that haunted him still:"Phase… four."
The echo that answered was not his own.
"Phase… five…"
Rin froze.
Then the night went utterly still.
And by dawn, when sunlight once again filtered through the cottage window, it no longer felt gentle.It felt watchful.