The morning sky over Devonshire carried a gray stillness, heavy with the breath of rain. Salt and wind mingled as the waves clawed gently at the coast. Meredydd Thorne stood barefoot on the stones, her hands cupped tightly around a silver pendant that had not warmed since the day it fused to her skin. Twenty-four years had passed since the lightning marked her, yet its echo still hummed in her veins like a second heartbeat.
She had tried to outrun it once. Moved across towns, hid in cloisters, pretended to be a healer, a priestess, a madwoman. Nothing could silence the visions.
It began that September night in 1596, when the heavens cracked open and hurled light upon her, leaving her scarred and blinking through the downpour. The village had declared her dead. The healer called it a miracle when she woke. But her family knew better. The girl who returned from that field was not the same.
She remembered the exact moment it happened. Her mother's cries. Her brother's face, frozen in time as he tried to pull her away from the clearing. The smell of ozone. Then, silence. Then, visions.
They started simple: knowing who would knock at the door, when crops would rot, or when wolves would come to the sheepfold. But over the years, her sight deepened. She began to dream of others—people like her—fragments of lives far across lands she had never seen, and yet they felt close, as if touching her soul.
She saw a girl with pitch-black hair and wide, frightened eyes in a hospital bed, crying in a language Meredydd did not know. Kayoko, she would later whisper upon waking.
She saw a woman named Lara Choi, draped in a torn military coat, surrounded by mirrors that refused to show her reflection. The glass trembled when Lara raised her hand.
These visions came in flashes, sometimes with pain, sometimes with overwhelming warmth. Some left her shaking. Others filled her with a strange peace.
She did not understand them fully. But she knew one thing: she was not alone.
And now, on the cusp of another September, 1620, she was certain she had to leave.
"Are you afraid?" whispered Adira, stepping beside her.
Meredydd turned to the girl, a former servant, now one of her closest companions. Adira's own visions were less refined, but she trusted Meredydd without question. That was enough.
"Not afraid," Meredydd replied. "Wary. This place no longer fits the shape of the future. We were meant to cross the waters. The signs have been clear."
Behind them, the docks bustled. Two ships were being prepared—small vessels, sturdy but nowhere near capable of hosting the hundred she had envisioned. Yet people came anyway. Outcasts. Runaways. Scholars, herbalists, believers, and broken men. All drawn by whispers of a woman who saw beyond time.
Meredydd had not planned to lead them. She was not born to command. But the storm had chosen her, and the world had begun to listen.
"Have you told them what they will face?" Adira asked.
"Only what they need," she said. "The truth would shatter some before the sea could."
She glanced at the journal in her hand. Pages full of predictions, drawings of distant cities, monsters of the mind, and patterns of lightning striking across generations. The same date. September 16. Again and again. She believed the next storm would come not to her, but to those who followed.
"We are not the first," she whispered, tracing the edge of the pendant. "But perhaps we are the first to accept it."
As the sun broke through the fog, she stepped back from the edge. The children were awake now, gathering the last of the roots and dried herbs. The twins from Aragon carried firewood to the galley. Osric the scribe stood hunched over the supply list. All of them followed her because of what they had seen—some in dreams, some in flashes of memory. Others had no gift, only faith.
Meredydd never asked for it. She once pleaded with God to take it away. But the lightning never left. It had reshaped her, burned away the girl, and revealed a path.
Yet that path was not clear. Not even to her.
She dreamed of the voyage constantly, but the destination never revealed itself. No maps ever matched the shorelines in her mind. No stars aligned quite right. She only saw shadowy lands beyond a veil, places where other gifted souls might dwell—waiting, lost, or perhaps already awakened. She questioned if she was walking toward truth or illusion.
Some nights, she feared it was madness. A trick of the storm inside her.
That afternoon, they loaded the last of their belongings into the holds. Two ships, Caligo and Veritas. The names had come to Meredydd in a dream, Latin for "mist" and "truth." Fitting companions for a journey into the unknown.
By evening, the wind turned cold. The villagers who once called her witch now watched from behind shutters. Some spat. Others crossed themselves.
A young boy ran forward with a loaf of bread.
"For your travels," he said, then ran before anyone could thank him.
Adira placed the bread beside the compass. Meredydd smiled faintly. The boy would dream of fire tonight. He was touched too, though he did not know it.
"Captain says we leave by moonrise," said Osric, appearing at her side. "Stormclouds are building. If we wait longer…"
"We won't," Meredydd said. "This voyage is not to be delayed."
She did not say aloud what the storm told her.
That if they did not leave tonight, some force would stop them. The sea was opening—for a time. A narrow window. She trusted it.
Night fell, and with it came the stars. Clear and cold. The ships swayed gently in the harbor as the passengers filed aboard. Meredydd stood at the bow of Veritas, her fingers tight on the rail, the wind pulling at her long, graying hair.
"Tell me something," Adira said behind her. "What do you see now?"
Meredydd closed her eyes.
"I see fire rising from the west," she murmured. "I see a child with silver eyes. I see a city buried in sand. I see birds speaking in riddles. And I see another lightning."
She opened her eyes.
"But not for us. We are the beginning. The spark."
The bell rang. The anchor was lifted. The sails caught wind. Cheers erupted from the crew. They pulled from the dock with more hope than certainty.
Meredydd felt the surge in her bones. It wasn't just departure. It was alignment. The storm inside her stilled, as though the world had finally turned in the right direction.
As the land shrank behind them, she turned to the dark sea ahead.
"Guide us," she whispered.
That night, as she slept in the captain's quarters, she dreamed of the year 1986.
A woman stood under another lightning storm, shielding a child. Around her, glass shattered and clocks stopped.
Meredydd reached for her, trying to speak across time. The woman turned. Eyes like hers.
Then everything went white.