Blood of the Solaris

Chapter Five

Clara's pov

I sat on the absolute edge of my mattress, staring down at the small, fragile bracelet resting flat against my open palm.

It was old, thin, and slightly tarnished by the relentless humidity, the metal faded to a dull, uncharacteristic gray. I couldn’t remember the last time I had looked at it with clear eyes, but a quiet, foundational truth had been drilled into my head since childhood: it had belonged to my mother. Or at least, that was the singular, sparse fragment of information I had been permitted to keep.

The house was extraordinarily quiet tonight. It wasn't the volatile, suffocating silence that usually rolled through these corridors after one of my uncle's mood shifts. This quiet felt softer, heavier, almost distant. It was as if the chaotic world outside had paused just long enough to force me to look inward.

From somewhere far away in the neighborhood, across the dirt roads and concrete walls, faint laughter drifted through my open window. It was a family sharing a meal, their voices rising and falling in an easy, effortless rhythm, completely unburdened by the fear that dictated my life. I watched the window of the house across the street. Their television flickered faintly through sheer curtains, casting warm, shifting patterns of light onto the pavement. I could see the silhouettes of people moving inside—together, close, profoundly connected.

I tightened my fingers around the bracelet, pulling my knees tight against my chest as I looked away.

My room felt smaller in comparison. Quieter. Darker. It was a loneliness that ran so deep it physically ached behind my ribs, a hollow space that no amount of silence could fill. I lowered my gaze back to the cold metal in my fist.

My mother’s bracelet.

That was the line they gave me whenever I was brave enough to ask. But no one ever volunteered anything else. Over the years, my questions were met with a wall of generic, practiced deflections.

“Don’t worry about things that don't concern you, Clara.”

“You are too young to understand.”

“It is better left in the past.”

I exhaled a long, shaky breath, tracing the worn edges of the metal. I wondered what she had actually been like. Not the sanitized, ghost-like version my family refused to speak of, but the good person. Did she laugh like the mothers in those other houses? Did she look at me before she left?

The wind shifted outside, making the small room feel suddenly freezing. Unable to sit still under the weight of my own thoughts, I stood up and walked to the window, pressing my forehead against the cool glass. On the street below, a man walked past under the dim glow of a streetlight, holding a little girl’s hand. The child laughed at a private joke, tugging playfully at her father's sleeve. He smiled down at her, his posture relaxed, safe.

A sharp, familiar pang of grief struck my heart. I didn’t just want answers anymore. I wanted to belong. I wanted to know whose blood ran through my veins, and why my existence in this house felt less like family and more like a life sentence.

Thirsty and desperate to clear the fog in my mind, I quietly slipped out of my room and crept down the dim hallway toward the kitchen to get a cup of water. My bare feet made no sound against the worn floorboards.

But as I approached the corner near the back pantry, the low murmur of voices stopped me in my tracks.

My aunt and grandmother were standing near the back door, their profiles silhouetted by the pale light of the courtyard. Their voices were hushed, carrying that sharp, anxious edge they always adopted when they thought I was out of earshot.

“…she’s starting to ask again,” my aunt whispered, her hands fidgeting with a kitchen towel.

A heavy pause followed. Then, my grandmother replied, her voice dropping into a deeper, grim register. “She always does when she gets like this. When the changes begin.”

I froze behind the partition, my grip tightening around my empty plastic cup.

“It’s because she’s growing,” my aunt countered, her voice laced with an underlying panic. “She’s starting to notice things, Mama. The way the air moves around her. The table today... it’s happening.”

Another dense silence stretched between them. Then, my grandmother spoke the name. My mother's name.

“She looks more like her mother every single day,” my grandmother murmured, shaking her head. “The eyes. The way she stands.”

My aunt lowered her voice so much I had to lean forward, my heart hammering against my sternum. “That is exactly what I am afraid of. If she inherits that woman's curse, what are we supposed to do?”

“We agreed never to bring her up,” my grandmother cut in, her tone snapping like a dry twig. “We buried that name for a reason.”

“I know!” my aunt hissed back. “But you saw her at dinner. The way she reacted. The glass... the shadows. Mama, if she finds out what really happened to her mother’s disappearance—”

Disappearance.

The word hit me like a physical blow to the chest, driving the air completely from my lungs. Disappearance? They had always told me she was dead. They told me she had passed away quietly from sickness when I was too young to remember.

In my shock, my foot shifted. A floorboard beneath my weight groaned loudly in the silent corridor.

The conversation in the kitchen stopped instantly.

Silence hit the hallway like an iron wall. I stood paralyzed, unable to even draw a breath.

“Someone’s out there,” my aunt whispered sharply.

Before I could turn and run, the kitchen door swung open, throwing a long, bright sliver of light across the corridor. My grandmother appeared first, her sharp, discerning eyes scanning the darkness until they locked directly onto me. There was no surprise on her face. Just a profound, cold resignation.

“I… I just came for water,” I stammered, my voice sounding incredibly weak, like a child caught stealing.

My aunt stepped into view behind her, her face completely pale. But she wasn't looking at my eyes. She was staring downward, her gaze fixed entirely on my left hand.

I looked down too. In my panic, I had pulled the faded bracelet from my pocket, and it was clutched tightly in my fingers. My aunt’s expression shifted instantly, a visible flicker of pure, unadulterated terror crossing her features as she recognized the heirloom.

My grandmother stepped forward, deliberately blocking the warmth of the kitchen from me, casting me back into the shadows of the hall.

“Go back to your room, Clara,” she commanded flatly. No warmth. No explanation. Just an unyielding wall.

“But I heard you say.”

“Go,” she repeated, her voice turning firmer, colder.

I stepped backward slowly, the darkness of the corridor swallowing me up. The moment I retreated, the kitchen door was closed. Not slammed, but shut with a slow, deliberate click. A secret being locked back into its vault.

The next afternoon, the unresolved question burned so fiercely in my throat that I couldn’t contain it any longer. My uncle was standing near the front veranda, adjusting his sleeves as he prepared to leave for the day. He looked powerful, calm, and entirely in control of his domain.

I approached him slowly, my heart thumping against my ribs. “Uncle… what were my parents really like?”

For a single fraction of a second, his hands froze over his cuffs. There was a tiny, almost imperceptible hitch in his movement, but I saw it. Then, he smoothed his shirt down, continuing as if I hadn't spoken at all.

“They were good, simple people,” he said casually, his voice smooth and untroubled. “I have told you this before, Clara.”

“That's all?” I pressed, stepping closer, my voice gaining a desperate edge. “No stories? No details? Aunt said last night that my mother didn't die. She said she disappeared. Why did she say that?”

My uncle turned slowly to face me. The surrounding air seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant. He didn't look angry; he looked entirely empty, his eyes turning into two black pools that completely refused to let me in.

“I have given you all the answers you require,” he said, his voice dangerously low, vibrating with an unspoken threat. He took a single step toward me, towering over my smaller frame. “Listen to me very carefully, girl. Some truths destroy the people who seek them. Don't dig into the past.”

He walked right past me, his shoulder brushing mine, leaving me standing completely frozen in the hallway.

That night, the rain tapped softly against my bedroom window, creating a steady, rhythmic hush that isolated me further from the world. I lay awake staring at the ceiling for hours, my mind spinning out of control. Good people. Don't dig into the past. Disappearance.

Nothing matched. Every piece of information they gave me contradicted the last.

I pulled the bracelet from under my pillow, holding it up to the weak moonlight filtering through the curtains. I began to turn it over, my fingers exploring every scratch and groove until I felt something unfamiliar. Along the smooth, inner band of the metal, there was a tiny, hidden engraving.

I held it inches from my face, squinting in the dark.

It was a symbol. A perfectly etched circle, and inside it, a shape that looked like a sun split brutally down the middle. My chest tightened. I had seen this symbol before, not in a book, and not in this town. It lived in the blurry, distorted nightmares that had plagued my sleep for as long as I could remember.

Suddenly, a soft, chilling creak echoed from the empty corner of my dark bedroom, right beside the wardrobe.

I scrambled backward against my headboard, my pulse skyrocketing into pure panic. The room was entirely pitch black, the shadows stretching unnaturally against the walls. I held my breath, waiting for a figure to emerge from the gloom.

No one was there. The room was completely empty.

But then, out of the dead, suffocating silence, a voice drifted through the darkness, brushing directly against the back of my neck. It was a soft, airy whisper, entirely separate from my own thoughts.

“Keep looking.”

The voice vanished into the ambient sound of the rain before I could even scream, leaving me shivering violently beneath my bedsheets. I pressed the cold metal symbol of the bracelet against my chest, tears of sheer confusion and terror finally spilling down my cheeks.

My past was not a safe, tragic story of dead parents. It was a labyrinth of lies, guarded by a family that feared what I was becoming. And as I lay there in the dark, I realized something that terrified me more than my uncle's warnings.

The truth was out there, hidden in the shadows of this

house. And whatever it was... it was already looking for me.