Chapter 3
1103 Words
Calla's breath stuttered as her boots crunched over the dead leaves of the forest floor. The thrum of ancient magic pulsed in the air, so thick she could taste it—coppery and electric, like a storm had buried itself beneath the soil. Trees leaned in like spectators, their bark veined with glowing sigils that flickered when Ares passed.
He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to.
Every step she took, she could feel his pull.
“Where are we going?” she whispered, unsure why she bothered with quiet. This forest didn’t feel like it obeyed sound.
“To the edge,” he said without pause, voice deep and dry like a funeral bell.
“The edge of what?”
“The Vale of Silence.”
The name fell heavy between them. It sounded like a place that had swallowed entire stories without blinking. But Calla followed, compelled—not just by curiosity now, but by the invisible tether that wrapped around her bones like ivy.
“You’ve crossed before?” she asked.
“I was born there.”
She stopped walking.
Ares slowed but didn’t turn. “Keep going.”
Calla stood rooted to the ground, heart pounding. “You said it’s cursed.”
His shoulders rose and fell with a breath. “I did.”
“You brought me to a place that cursed you?”
Ares finally turned, and the way his silver eyes met hers silenced every argument she was about to make. “You came because part of you already remembers.”
The wind stirred around them, lifting her hair as if unseen hands moved through the strands. She felt it again—that strange dissonance in her mind, like she had once known the rhythm of this place, had danced in it, maybe died in it.
But how could that be?
“How old are you, Ares?” she asked, more daring than she felt.
His expression didn’t change, but the woods did. The light dimmed. Birds stopped calling. Somewhere far off, the sound of a distant scream echoed like it had been caught in a loop.
“Old enough to remember your name before you were ever born,” he said.
Her skin prickled.
He continued walking, and this time she followed without question.
They passed through the thickening mist and came upon a break in the forest where the ground turned to cold white stone—circular, engraved with runes, glowing faint blue. A crescent-shaped gate stood at the far end, made of bone and obsidian. It pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat.
Calla stumbled, nausea curling in her stomach. “What is this place?”
Ares turned to her, and for the first time, she saw something vulnerable beneath the violence of his gaze.
“This is where the Devlin curse began,” he said. “Where time fractured. And where I watched you die.”
Calla froze.
The words struck her like a slap. Her mouth opened, but no sound came.
“You’re insane,” she breathed.
“Am I?”
“I’m alive. You didn’t watch anything.”
“You are alive,” he agreed. “But not from here. Not yet. Not in this timeline.”
Calla backed away. “You’re talking like you know how time works—like it’s a game you can cheat.”
Ares’s face darkened. “It isn’t a game. It’s a prison. And we’re both inmates.”
Something shifted in the air. The trees behind them groaned, bending unnaturally as if bowing to something ancient.
Then the Vale opened.
Not with a door, but a tear. Reality split like glass, and the shimmer of a world not meant for human eyes bled through. Colors that shouldn’t exist. Voices that hummed with no mouths. And a presence—a thing—watching them from beyond the rift.
Calla's knees buckled.
Ares caught her before she hit the stone, his grip iron around her waist. “Don’t look at it too long. It remembers you.”
“What is that?”
He didn’t answer, only pulled her into his arms and walked them toward the gate.
The runes beneath their feet lit up in succession, a ripple of blue-white flame. As they crossed the bone threshold, the air changed. Sound died. Her breath vanished from her ears. Her heartbeat became the only thing she could hear, loud and panicked.
Then—silence.
Real silence.
The kind that didn’t just mute sound but stole it from existence.
The Vale of Silence.
It was a land of twilight, locked in permanent dusk. The sky was painted in faded rose and bruised violet, and the air smelled of petrichor and ash. Black rivers ran between cliffs carved with symbols, and trees stood dead but unrotted, frozen in time.
Calla clung to Ares’s arm, no longer questioning the impossibility of what she saw.
“I need you to remember something,” he said as they moved through the twilight. “This place will test you. It knows your soul. It will whisper truths you buried. And it will lie with the same tongue.”
“Why bring me here?”
“Because it’s the only place you can unlock what you once were.”
The ground trembled beneath them.
Something stirred in the distance. A shape. Lurking. Crawling.
Calla flinched. “What was that?”
“Hollowed.”
The word was a curse in his mouth.
“They’re what’s left of the first Devlins. My ancestors who tried to alter fate and lost their forms. Their minds. Now they patrol the veil between times. Hungry. Lost.”
Calla could barely keep her footing, but Ares pressed a hand to her spine.
“We’re almost there.”
They reached a monolith at the heart of the vale, obsidian and crimson, shaped like a giant hourglass sunk into the earth. It pulsed with the same heartbeat as her own.
“This is the memory stone,” he said. “Touch it. If your soul remembers, it’ll show you who you were. And what you lost.”
Calla hesitated.
“I don’t want to see.”
“You already have,” he whispered. “Every night you dream. You just forget before you wake.”
Tears blurred her vision. She didn’t understand why she was shaking so hard.
Ares reached out and took her hand.
“I’ll hold you through it.”
She believed him.
Together, their fingers met the stone.
And the world shattered.
Calla fell into light—blinding, hot, agonizing.
And then—
She was in another body.
Another time.
- Writer
