It began with a hum beneath her bed.
Not a sound—not quite—but a tremor, like roots remembering the shape of a forgotten sky. It sang not to the ears, but to the nerves, vibrating gently through stone, straw, and skin.
The girl—unnamed, unclaimed, unbirthed by myth—woke slowly, blinking into the half-light of her thatch-roofed dwelling. The walls around her breathed, faintly. The dirt floor exhaled.
Something was alive beneath her.
She did not scream. She never did. Her world did not teach the vocabulary of alarm. Only listening.
And so she listened.
She lay still, head tilted, cheek resting against the warm soil. It whispered. Not in words, but in longing. Something beneath the ground was aching to speak. But it did not yet know the shape of its mouth.
The villagers called her "the soft-quiet." Never by name. Names invited belonging. She had none. No mother. No sigil. No Codex fragment tucked into the folds of her memory like the other children.
