Shadows of begining

It was the time when sun was running down tides are getting higher and higher birds are traceing back their path to nest ,and the cool breez of air is getting cooler and cooler a girl with broken heart is sitting on the shore enjoying the peace of lonliness with company of nature with a smile of achivement but her eyes was full of pain searching the answer for her loss in life ,thinking about her life she enters to the past world in her memory of imagination which was the time when she used to be happy girl who used to play with birds and butterflies , it was a normal day she opened her eyes from the dreams she starts calling her uncle Mike but it was for the first time when she didn't got any response from her uncle ,but she takes her bag and runs towards her frends in a thought that she can enjoy the day for fullest ,as she thought she enjoys the day ,but when she came back to home she couldn't find her uncle ,poor girl what could she do she starts looking towards the door in a thought that uncle may come, while waiting for him she fell asleep but he didn't came, even the next day also went the same it was Day three when she decides to search for her uncle ,first she goes to the castle where her uncle use to work but unfortunately she got to know that he didn't entered the castle . Tides of Memory It was the time when the sun was sinking into the sea, when the tides were rising higher and higher, when the birds were tracing their way back to their nests, and the cool evening breeze was growing cooler with every passing minute. A girl with a broken heart sat alone on the shore, enjoying the strange peace of loneliness in the company of nature, a faint smile of quiet achievement on her lips — though her eyes were full of pain, searching for an answer to a loss that had followed her through most of her life. Her name was Maya, and she was twenty-six years old now. The wind lifted strands of her hair as she drew her knees to her chest and watched the water pull back from the sand, again and again, like something trying to remember how to breathe. Thinking about her life, she drifted into the past — into a memory folded so deep inside her that it felt more like a dream than something that had truly happened. It was the memory of the summer she turned nine. The summer she was still a happy girl who spent her mornings chasing butterflies through the meadow behind her house and her afternoons feeding crumbs to sparrows that had learned to trust her small, open palms. Back then, the world had no shadows in it. Back then, she had an uncle named Mike. Part One: The Girl Who Trusted the Morning Uncle Mike was not really her uncle by blood — he was her father's closest friend, a man who had appeared in her life so early and so completely that she had never known a version of her childhood without him in it. He worked at the old castle on the cliff above the village, a grand stone building that had once belonged to a noble family and now served as a records hall, a library, and — as the village children liked to whisper — a place with more secrets than any of the dusty books shelved inside it. Every morning, without fail, Maya would run to the old telephone in the hallway of her house and call him. It was their ritual. He always answered on the second ring, always with the same warm, teasing voice. "Is this the young lady who is going to save every butterfly in the meadow today?" And she would laugh, and he would laugh, and then he would tell her to go outside and enjoy the sun before it got too hot, and she would go. That particular morning, she woke early, the way children do when summer stretches ahead of them like an endless golden ribbon. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, padded down the hallway in her bare feet, and dialed his number the way she had a hundred times before. The phone rang. And rang. And rang. She frowned at it the way children frown at things they do not yet understand — not with fear, but with mild, easily forgotten confusion. She tried again. Still nothing. He must be busy, she told herself. Grown-ups get busy sometimes. She did not think much more of it. She grabbed her small canvas bag, packed with a slice of bread and a ribbon for tying flower crowns, and ran out to meet her friends by the meadow, thinking only of how she would enjoy this day to its fullest, the way uncle Mike always told her to. And she did. She chased dragonflies with Priya and Tomas. She waded ankle-deep into the stream behind the old mill. She lay on her back in the tall grass and named the shapes of clouds until her voice grew hoarse from laughing. It was, by every measure a nine-year-old could use, a perfect day. But when she returned home as the sky turned orange, and asked her mother if Uncle Mike had called, her mother's face did something strange — a small tightening around the eyes that Maya was too young to name as worry, but old enough to feel like a held breath in the room. "Not today, sweetheart," her mother said. "I'm sure he's just caught up with work." Maya nodded, though something in her chest did not feel as settled as her mother's voice. She sat by the front door that evening, watching it the way one watches a kettle they are certain is about to whistle. She told herself he would come. He always came. He brought her seashells from the shore and stories about the castle's oldest books, stories about knights and forgotten queens and doors that led nowhere. She fell asleep on the small bench by the door, her cheek pressed against the wood, waiting. He did not come. Part Two: Three Days of Silence The next day passed the same way. Maya woke, called, heard nothing but the hollow ringing of a phone no one answered. She told herself, again, that grown-ups got busy. She played with her friends, though with less abandon than the day before, her eyes occasionally drifting toward the road that led toward the castle, half expecting to see his familiar shape walking down it, waving his hat the way he always did when he spotted her from a distance. He did not come that day either. By the third morning, the small, easily dismissed worry in Maya's chest had grown into something she could no longer ignore. She did not run to play with her friends. Instead, she pulled on her shoes, tied her hair back the way her mother did when she meant business, and told her mother she was going to find Uncle Mike. Her mother tried to stop her — told her to wait, that the grown-ups were already asking around, that a nine-year-old girl had no business walking to the castle alone. But there was something in Maya's small, stubborn face that morning that no mother could easily argue with, and in the end, her mother relented, on the condition that Maya's older cousin, Daniel, would walk with her.