Arya Singh woke with her breath caught in her throat.
The dream didn't fade this time. It clung to her senses as if she had walked through it, touched its air, breathed its light. She sat upright slowly, letting the darkness of her room settle around her.
It was quiet.
Too quiet.
The kind of silence that feels like someone is listening.
She rubbed her palms on her bedsheet, trying to steady the tremor in her fingers. "Not again," she whispered, though she already knew the truth: the dream was becoming stronger.
Outside her window, dawn had barely begun. A faint, bluish glow stretched across the sky, and the air hummed with a low resonance that didn't belong to the waking world. Arya moved toward the window anyway, drawn by instinct.
The horizon felt different.
Alive.
Expectant.
Almost watching her.
And as she stood there, the dream replayed itself in fragments:
A garden with no sun yet filled with light.
A river that whispered like living water.
A tree rising so tall it pierced the sky—its leaves shimmering with golden fire.
She always woke before she reached it.
Her hand found the pendant at her neck: a small, smooth stone on a thin silver chain. Her mother had never explained its origin. Arya had worn it all her life without question… until now.
Heat met her fingertips.
She froze.
The stone was warm—gently pulsing, as if responding to something deep within her. She pulled her hand back as a quiet fear curled in her stomach.
"What are you?" she breathed.
The room offered no answer.
But the world outside changed.
The air thickened. The windowpane shivered. Light flickered across the far sky like heat shimmering above desert sand. No storm. No clouds. Just a subtle disturbance, as if the sky itself were drawing a breath.
Then everything happened at once.
A sharp ringing filled her ears.
The floor vibrated beneath her feet.
Her vision blurred—once, twice—and then shattered into white-gold brilliance.
The world vanished.
Arya stumbled backward as light engulfed her. She didn't feel her body fall. She didn't feel the ground at all. She was somewhere else entirely, suspended in a place that felt like memory and prophecy woven together.
She saw Eden.
Not the earthly idea but the true one—ancient, vast, radiant with the breath of creation. Light seeped from its soil. Rivers moved like streams of living glass. And at its center stood the Tree, impossibly tall, its leaves burning yet never consumed.
She stepped forward, or thought she did.
The space pulsed around her, alive with truth.
A voice rose—soft, layered, echoing through her bones. Not male. Not female. More like the echo of a flame.
"Daughter of Eden… awaken."
Arya's breath caught as the vision shifted.
She saw the Veils—seven shimmering layers separating the realms. She saw cracks spiderwebbing across them, thin at first, then widening. Through the fractures, a darkness stirred beneath Mount Hermon, ancient and hungry.
A pressure built behind her ribs, like something vast was trying to speak through her. She pressed a hand to her chest, but the voice spoke again before she found words.
"You are not ready…
yet creation has no more time."
The brilliance fractured.
The world snapped back.
Arya hit the floor, palms burning as she braced herself. The light vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a silence so heavy it felt unnatural.
Her chest rose and fell in quick, uneven breaths.
"What is happening to me?"
Her pendant cooled instantly, as if nothing had happened at all.
She pushed her hair back from her face, trying to steady her breath. The morning light slowly filled her room, gentle and ordinary, as if the universe hadn't just peeled back a corner of its secrets.
But somewhere beyond the walls of her small home—
beyond her city, beyond her country—
two strangers felt the same shift in reality.
One in the warmth of Nigeria.
One in the frozen hush of the distant north.
They didn't know her name.
They didn't know the prophecy.
But they felt her awakening.
And the darkness felt it too.
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