Chapter 1: The Weight of Silence
The rooftop gravel dug into Kael's palms as he leaned against the low wall, but he welcomed the bite. It was a feeling, something solid and real to anchor him against the hollow ache that had taken up permanent residence in his chest. Below, the city was a tapestry of indifferent lights—cars blurring into red streaks, neon signs humming their false cheer, a world moving on while his had stopped turning.
It had been eleven months, two weeks, and four days. The silence in the house behind him was a physical presence, thick and heavy. It wasn't just an absence of sound; it was the absence of his father's off-key humming from the kitchen, the absence of his mother's laughter that used to fill up every corner. Now, there was only the hum of the refrigerator and the relentless tick of the clock on the wall, a sound that had become the drumbeat of his solitude.
At school, they called him distant, a ghost. What they didn't understand was that he wasn't ignoring them; he was just… elsewhere. Trapped in the before. A memory flickered, unbidden: his dad, teaching him how to throw a punch in this very spot, his large, warm hands correcting Kael's stance. "Protect what matters, Kael. No matter what."
The memory was a shard of glass in his heart. He had failed. He hadn't been able to protect them from the drunk driver, from the late-night phone call that shattered his world.
A cold wind whipped across the rooftop, cutting through his thin jacket. He shivered, closing his eyes. He wasn't looking for anything in the sky tonight. He was just trying to breathe, to outrun the silence for a few precious minutes.
And then the air changed.
It wasn't the wind. It was a… thickening. A current that made the fine hairs on his arms stand up. The indifferent city noises seemed to mute, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the world.
His eyes snapped open.
The sky directly above him was… rippling. Not with clouds, but like the surface of a pond into which a stone had been dropped. The stars themselves twisted, bending into a silent, impossible whirlpool of light.
His breath caught in his throat, a cold knot of fear tightening in his gut. This wasn't grief. This wasn't a hallucination. This was something else entirely.
A voice, ancient and impossibly gentle, yet carrying the weight of galaxies, echoed not in his ears, but in the very core of his being.
"Kael."
He staggered back, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. "Who's there?" he whispered, the sound swallowed by the unnatural stillness.
"You are Chosen."
Before the protest could form on his lips, before logic could reassert itself, the light from the swirling stars descended. It didn't just shine; it consumed. The rooftop, the city, the world—it all dissolved into a brilliance that was both terrifying and beautiful.
He was falling, not down, but inwards, into a place where concepts like up and down had no meaning. The crushing weight of his grief, the oppressive silence of his house—it all vanished, replaced by a sensation of pure, terrifying velocity.
When the light finally faded, the world that reassembled around him was one spun from dreams and starlight. He stood in a field of silver grass that whispered secrets under a sky painted with living auroras.
He was utterly, completely alone.
And then, a voice—a real, human voice—cut through the silence behind him.
"You too?"