*The Enchanted Soul*The first time Elias heard the river sing, he was twelve and convinced he was going mad.It was late autumn in the valley of Mirewood, the kind of dusk that turns the world to tarnished copper. Frost had started to claim the edges of the Rill, that narrow, stubborn river that cut through the valley like a scar that never healed. Elias had been sent to fetch water for the evening stew, his hands already numb from the cold and the splintered wood of the pail. The village was quiet behind him, the sound of his mother’s coughing carried on the wind in thin, ragged bursts.He knelt at the bank, and as he lowered the pail, the water didn’t splash. It hummed.Not a word. Not a melody you could hum back. More like the memory of a song you’d forgotten in a dream, vibrating up through the wood of the pail and into the bones of his arms. The surface of the Rill shivered without wind, and for three heartbeats the stars above seemed closer, sharper, like someone had wiped the smudge off the sky.Then it stopped. Elias sat back on his heels, heart hammering against his ribs. He looked left, then right. No one. Just the skeletal willows and the mist rolling off the water. “Stupid,” he muttered. “Tired, that’s all.”He went home and said nothing. His mother was too sick to notice, and his father had died in the slate quarry two winters ago, so there was no one to tell anyway. But that night, he lay awake and listened. The river didn’t sing again for three years.---*Chapter 1: The Debt of Stone*Mirewood existed because of the slate. The quarry above the village had fed the city of Varn for two centuries, sending down slabs of blue-gray stone that became roofs, floors, and tombstones. In return, Varn sent down coin, rotgut liquor, and the occasional tax collector with a face like a closed fist.Elias, at fifteen, worked the lower benches of the quarry. It was backbreaking work, splitting stone with iron wedges and a sledgehammer until his shoulders felt like they’d been reshaped by the mountain itself. The foreman, a man named Brokk who had one eye and no patience, said Elias had “the hands for it.” Elias wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a curse.“Your shift’s done,” Brokk said on the day of the Choosing. “Go. Don’t come back covered in blood unless it’s yours.”The Choosing happened every seven years. Varn’s magistrates would come down from the city with a cart, a ledger, and a priest of the Old Concord. They would take ten children from Mirewood between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. Apprentices, they called them. The village called it the Tithe.Elias didn’t want to be chosen. Not because he was afraid of Varn—he’d never seen it—but because leaving meant leaving his mother. Her cough had turned into something wet and rattling, and the village healer said it was “the mountain sickness,” the same thing that had taken his father. Without Elias, who would split wood? Who would carry water? Who would sit with her at night and lie about how the color was coming back to her cheeks?The village square was packed. Mothers clutched children, fathers stared at the ground. The magistrates sat on the cart like judges of the dead. The priest, a young woman with a shaved head and a brand of interlocking rings on her forehead, stepped forward.“The Concord remembers,” she said, her voice carrying without shouting. “As the stone gives, so must the soul. Come forward when your name is called.”Elias stood with the other children, his hands raw from the quarry, his mother’s shawl wrapped around his neck. When they called “Elias Thorne,” he didn’t move. Not at first.“Elias Thorne.” Louder.He stepped forward because not moving would mean a beating, and his mother couldn’t afford the fine. The priest looked at him, really looked, and her eyes narrowed slightly. “You hear things, don’t you?”The question hit him like a physical blow. He opened his mouth, closed it. “No, priest.”“A lie.” She didn’t sound angry. She sounded tired. “The Concord marks the marked. We’ll see you in Varn, Elias Thorne. Don’t run. The river remembers those who run.”They took ten children. They left twenty crying parents. Elias went home and found his mother awake, sitting upright for the first time in weeks.“You’re going,” she said. It wasn’t a question.“I’ll come back,” he said.She reached out and took his face in her hands. Her fingers were cold. “Listen to it, Elias. Whatever it is you hear. Don’t be afraid of it like your father was. That’s how it kills you.”She died three days before the cart left for Varn.---*Chapter 2: The City of Echoes*Varn was not what Elias expected. He’d imagined stone and smoke, like the quarry but bigger. Instead, Varn was glass and sound.The city was built in a bowl in the mountains, and the wind moved through it like an instrument. Towers of mirrored glass caught the light and threw it back in dizzying shards. Anticipate for the next chapter. thank uu

Chapter1: The missing soul Anny was walking down the street looking hopeless. She felt like this not because of anything but because she had lost her last dignity to an unknown stranger.* flashback to a day before Anny was this cheerful girl in a teens waiting for her twentieth birthday party with great anticipation but didn't know it was going to be her worst nightmare ever. Her parents were her best pals and the only people she trusted they lost their lives that night. The news hit any hard that she looked completely pale when she heard her parents were gone forever.Her only best male Jefferson left her when she was young and since then she had had no one.Plot twist: Her uncle threw a grand party on her birthday to ease her pain away not knowing the worst was yet to come. Knowing very well your parents had great wealth but your uncle had sabotage them all in the name of you are not experienced that was what Anny was going through.Anny was having fun ironically when her uncle gave her wine since that was her favorite. She gladly accepted it not knowing the wine was impure.She took a sip and immediately fell dizzy. It was too late when she came to her senses she had lost the most precious thing in her life (virginity) to a stranger. She found herself abandoned on the street with her soul completely shattered.Hi pearries, let me know if you love the introduction of the story and give me your honest review for a better update on my next chapter love y'all