The shimmer in Anara's palm faded over days, replaced by something stranger: silence. Not the absence of sound, but a presence—like the air around her was listening.
Back in the settlement of Glaith, life trudged on in gray tones. Her neighbors still traded wiltroot and smoked moss. Children still chalked suns on cracked walls. But Anara saw things differently now—light bending oddly through glass, shadows curling with unfamiliar hesitation.
And then the dreams began.
They came wrapped in smoke and stars. In one, she stood at the edge of a great ravine where fireflies moved like script across the dark. In another, an obsidian tower rose from a silver ocean, and a voice whispered a name she couldn't recall upon waking. But always, always, there was the sound: whispers—not of danger, but of beckoning.
When she confided in her grandmother, Iverna—once a Keeper of Lore before the libraries crumbled—the old woman grew still.
"They've chosen you," Iverna said. "The light remembers itself. And it remembers you."
She opened a small iron case kept beneath the floorboards. Inside lay a page of glimmerleaf, thin and iridescent. Upon its surface, words shimmered only when Anara looked at it: a moving script made of glows and flickers. A map—but not of roads or places. A map of echoes, of calls across time.
These are the First Coordinates," Iverna said, tracing a glowing arc. "To find the next shard, you'll need more than feet. You'll need faith. And someone to watch your back."
At that, the door creaked.
A boy stepped in, his coat stitched from banners of the old cities, his eyes like stormlight.
"Name's Cael," he said with a nod. "I heard you're chasing stars."
Anara looked at the map, then at him.
She didn't say yes.
She didn't need to.
Should we follow their journey to the first coordinate, or maybe learn more about Cael's mysterious past? There's light unraveling ahead… 🌠