By the time I turned nine, I'd learned that every village has its own rhythm, and every silence its own shape. Tirna's silences came in three kinds: the hush before dawn, the lull after rain, and the one no one talked about—the quiet that settled whenever someone mentioned the eastern hills.
Children weren't supposed to go there. The elders said the air grew strange past the third mile. Compasses spun. Lanterns dimmed. Stories said the hills were the resting place of the "First Ones," ancient caretakers who'd shaped the land before people learned their own names. Adults told it like a warning. Children told it like a dare.
I pretended not to care. But the truth was, something in those hills called to me.
It started with a book.
Master Havel kept a small shelf of records in the schoolhouse—journals, ledgers, faded maps. I was tidying one afternoon when I found a weathered notebook bound in soft leather. Inside were sketches of ruins and symbols that looked like they'd been drawn by someone with shaking hands. Most pages were water-stained, but a few lines were legible:
"The Elders were not gods. They were echoes. The world itself remembering."
I didn't understand the meaning, but I copied the symbols into my own notebook. They resembled the ones I'd seen carved into that mossy stone months ago—spirals within spirals, each line flowing into the next like rivers meeting at a single sea.
That night, I dreamed of someone standing beneath a sky with two moons. The figure turned, silver hair glinting, and though I couldn't see her face clearly, I knew it was me.
I woke with my hand reaching for a scythe that wasn't there.
The next week, a caravan passed through Tirna. Traders from the north, their wagons heavy with cloth and spice. Among them was an old woman wrapped in violet shawls. When she saw me at the market, she stopped mid-sentence, her eyes widening.
"You…" she murmured, stepping closer. "Child, who taught you to wear that face?"
I blinked. "What do you mean?"
She stared a moment longer, then smiled—soft, sad. "Ah. Then you don't know yet." She reached into her satchel and pulled out a pendant—small, circular, etched with those same spirals. "For you," she said, pressing it into my palm.
Before I could ask, she turned and vanished into the crowd.
The pendant was warm. Too warm.
When I showed it to my mother, she frowned. "Probably just a trinket," she said, though her voice was uncertain. "Keep it if you like."
I wore it under my clothes that night, and dreamed of stone towers and broken sky.
When I woke, I could still hear the echo of the old woman's voice: You don't know yet.
Weeks passed. I began helping my father in his workshop after school—sanding boards, sorting nails, learning the patience of craft. I liked the rhythm of it: measure, cut, smooth, repeat. But every so often, when I traced the grain of the wood, I'd feel that same tug—the sense that something deeper lay beneath the surface.
Once, while sanding a plank of oak, I saw faint symbols glimmer across it, just for an instant—the same spirals, etched by light instead of hand.
I dropped the tool. When I blinked, they were gone.
My father didn't notice, but my heart didn't calm for hours.
Not long after, the hills called again.
Mira and I were walking home when we saw a procession—three robed figures descending from the east path, their faces hidden by veils of black silk. They carried lanterns that glowed pale blue, even though the sun was still high. The villagers stepped aside to let them pass, whispering blessings.
"Who are they?" Mira whispered.
"Keepers," said the baker's wife. "Priests of the Elder shrines. They travel when the cycle turns."
Cycle. The word lodged itself in my mind like a key waiting for a lock.
That night, while Mira slept in her own home and the stars stared down unblinking, I sat by my window and whispered to the pendant around my neck.
"What are you?"
For the first time, it pulsed with light—soft, rhythmic, like a heartbeat answering mine.
I was nine years old, and the world I thought I understood had begun to shift again.
The adults looked at the hills and saw superstition.The priests saw faith.I saw patterns.
Somewhere beyond that fog, something waited—something ancient and familiar. Something that felt like a memory trying to be born.
I didn't yet know it, but this was the first whisper of the Children of the Elders, and the faintest tremor of destiny moving beneath the surface of our quiet little world.
And on the edge of the night, far beyond the clouds, I could almost hear it again—the low, distant hum of rails cutting across the stars.