Echoes Of What Has Not Happened
598 Words
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CHAPTER THREE — Echoes of What Has Not Happened
Aylina did not sleep.
Every time she closed her eyes, the light returned—silver, blinding, alive. It pressed against her thoughts like a tide that refused to recede. When she lay still, she felt it beneath her skin, moving slowly, deliberately, as though learning the shape of her body.
She had not told Aunt Serene what truly happened on the stairs.
She said she slipped.
She said the necklace broke when she fell.
She said nothing about the light. Nothing about the visions. Nothing about the way the world now felt… closer.
Morning arrived heavy and gray. Windreach seemed unchanged, yet Aylina sensed something different beneath the surface of it. Sounds were sharper. Movements lingered longer in her awareness. She caught herself staring at people seconds before they spoke, already knowing what they would say.
It frightened her.
She sat at the table, staring at her hands, half-expecting them to glow. They did not. They were the same hands she had always known—scarred slightly from work, steady but trembling now.
“You should rest today,” Aunt Serene said gently. “That fall was not small.”
Aylina nodded. “I will.”
But even as she agreed, a strange pressure built behind her eyes.
The vision came without warning.
She saw the marketplace.
A basket tipping over.
Apples spilling across stone.
A boy shouting in alarm.
Aylina gasped and gripped the edge of the table. The images vanished, leaving her breathless.
“What is it?” Serene asked sharply.
“Nothing,” Aylina said quickly. Too quickly. “Just a headache.”
Later that morning, she walked into the village square.
The basket fell.
Apples scattered across the ground.
The boy shouted.
Aylina froze.
Her heart pounded violently as the realization struck her with chilling clarity. This was no coincidence. She had not imagined it. She had seen it—before it happened.
She stumbled backward, nearly colliding with a passerby. Her breath came shallow, her chest tight with rising panic.
All day, it continued.
A dropped knife.
A sudden argument.
A cart wheel snapping loose.
Each vision arrived moments—or hours—before the event itself. Each one unfolded exactly as she had seen it.
By evening, fear coiled tightly around her ribs.
She locked herself in her room, pacing. Her thoughts raced, colliding with one another.
I am not sick.
I am not dreaming.
This is real.
She lifted the broken necklace from her bedside. The fractured stone no longer glowed, yet the moment her fingers touched it, heat surged through her palm, rushing up her arm and into her chest.
The room seemed to breathe.
Shadows stretched unnaturally long along the walls. The air thickened, humming faintly, like a distant chorus of voices she could not understand.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Please.”
The pressure eased—but did not disappear.
That night, she dreamed again.
This time, she did not fall.
She stood in a vast, empty hall, its ceiling lost to darkness. Moonlight poured through unseen windows, illuminating a figure in the distance—a woman cloaked in silver, her face hidden.
Aylina tried to move toward her.
She could not.
The woman raised her hand—not in greeting, but in warning.
“Not yet,” a voice echoed, layered and distant.
Aylina woke with tears on her face.
By dawn, she knew one thing with terrifying certainty:
Something inside her had awakened too soon.
And whatever it was, it was only beginning to speak.
- Writer
