The night was suffocatingly quiet. The kind of quiet that presses in on your lungs, suffocates your breath, makes your thoughts feel too loud. But it wasn’t the silence that kept me awake. It was the pull. That hum beneath my skin—the one I had tried to ignore all day. The one that burned like fire, that buzzed in my bones, that reminded me of things I couldn’t grasp, things I wasn’t ready to face.
The power was there, always, and the more I fought it, the more it pressed in on me, like a storm gathering just beyond the horizon. The Mark. The surge. The whispers of something ancient.
I closed my eyes, but the restlessness in my body wouldn’t let me sleep.
Instead, I drifted, caught somewhere between wakefulness and something else. Something deeper. I could hear the wind outside the tent
