The yellowed paper with her father's shaky handwriting fell from Lysandra's hands, floating like a dead leaf to the carpeted floor. The small, heartbreaking note, the lock of child's hair, were testaments to a wound so deep that its very existence seemed sacrilegious.
A lost child. A brother or sister who had existed only as a fleeting dream, a broken promise.
Lysandra froze, the air trapped in her lungs. She understood, with a clarity that was both intellectual and viscerally painful, the magnitude of that kind of loss. Losing a father, a mother, left you orphaned, a word the world recognized, a pain that, though immense, had a name, a place in the lexicon of human suffering. But losing a child… for that there was no word. No description could encompass the abyss of that agony, the amputation of a part of your very being, the cruel inversion of life's natural order. It was a pain that marked you forever, an invisible scar that continued to hurt with every change of season, with every child's laughter heard in the distance.
And her parents, Julian and Elara, had experienced it. They had carried it in silence, hiding it from her, their only living child.
She couldn't believe it. The revelation was a dull blow, a blow that took her breath away, more shocking even than her mother's cancer diagnosis. That had been a battle against the disease, a fight for survival. But this... this was perpetual mourning, a shadow that must have colored every subsequent joy, every moment of apparent normalcy.
Instinctively, without her being able to control them, tears began to flow from her violet eyes. At first, they were silent, warm, tracing burning furrows on her pale skin. But as the enormity of her parents' grief washed over her—a grief she now felt with the force of her gift, as if the echo of their ancestral cry were piercing her—a sob choked in her throat.
She covered her mouth with a hand, trying to stifle the sound, but it was useless. The cry shook her with a violence that surprised her. It was a deep, heartbreaking cry, coming from a place she hadn't known existed within her. She wept for that little being she had never known, for the empty cradle her father had mentioned, for the broken hope. She wept for her mother, imagining her young body battling a deadly illness while her heart tore at the loss of a child. She wept for her father, for the strength it must have taken to hold Elara, to write those words of love and hope while his own soul was in pieces.
The echoes of her grief mingled with theirs in an unbearable cacophony. She could feel the coldness of the sheets in a hospital room, the smell of antiseptic and dried tears, the oppressive silence of a house where there had once been the promise of a new life. She saw her mother, not as the radiant woman of her memories, but shrunken, broken, and her father at her side, his face a mask of strength that barely concealed his own devastation.
So many years! So many years they had carried that pain, alone, without sharing it, building a life on the foundations of that secret sorrow. And she, Lysandra, had lived oblivious to it all, protected from that truth, believing in a simpler, cleaner family history. Had it been to protect her? Or because the pain was too sacred, too intimate to be named?
Sobs choked her, spasms that shook her entire body. She huddled in on the floor of her parents' bedroom, surrounded by the fragments of her past lives, the letters, the photographs, the secrets. The jaguar energy, that ancestral force she had felt before, seemed to recede, or perhaps it simply fell silent, allowing her humanity, her vulnerability, to manifest in all its rawness.
There was no strength in that moment, only the prison of a shared pain across time, a pain that connected her to her parents in a new and profoundly sad way. The collected stillness of her life had shattered into a thousand pieces, and in its place remained only the echo of a cry that had taken decades to find its voice through her.