It began with accidents that protected her. Then came the blood accidents. Then came dreams. Then came sounds. And now, there were hums. Beautiful sounds of a woman. Humming.
Then one day, she heard words in the hums.
Come find me.
The voice floated into Aeryn's nights like smoke. Sweet, soft, feminine. Calling not from the world around her, but from somewhere deep...beneath stone, beneath memory, beneath blood.
She tried to follow the voice. Night after night, her feet silent on marble floors, her breath held in suspense. She moved like a ghost through the palace, barefoot and dazed, slipping from her sheets in the velvet hours just before dawn. But she couldn't ever reach where it came from.
It was haunting her. The hum wasn't always in the same place, but it always sounded near. Sometimes in the eastern wing. Sometimes in the cellar halls. Once, in the corridor outside the high court...echoing through golden pillars like a song trapped in bone.
At one point she started thinking that maybe she really was getting insane and that it was her mind playing tricks on her. But the more she tried to ignore, the clearer they became. Not just sound, but pulse. A vibration, like something breathing just beneath the marble floors.
She was getting used to walking around the palace in disheveled form, her silk gown trailing like smoke behind her, her hair undone, eyes unfocused. Taking the courts with absent mind. Roaming the corridors here and there.
The others whispered about her...how the queen was slowly slipping into madness. But she didn't mind. If they had seen what she'd seen, they might have gone mad, too. Only if they had heard the hums, the names, the murmurs in the walls that begged to be found.
The hum grew stronger. More constant. And then, one night, the heartbeat returned. It pulsed through the walls. Familiar, like a second drum beneath her ribs.
She followed it again as usual taking it as a stroll going aimlessly here and there, but this time, It led her through the oldest halls of the keep...places long abandoned, layered in dust and memory; eventually, guiding her to a door. One she hadn't touched in twelve years.
Her parents' chamber.
She hadn't stepped inside since the night they died...since the fire, since the screams, since the black magic devoured their eyes and silenced their breath.
The door creaked as she pushed it open.
Nothing remained. No furniture. No silks. No memory. The Council had ordered it all burnt, claiming every item might be cursed...tainted by whatever dark power had murdered her parents. Aeryn stepped inside, slow, every breath catching in her throat.
Only the walls remained now, bare stone, smooth and veined with sigils she could not read but could feel deep in her body. They hummed as she stepped closer, vibrating with that same low, otherworldly frequency that had haunted her nights.
With hazing gaze and trembling hand, Her fingers hovered, drawn to the heat...heat in stone that should be cold. She touched it. The surface trembled beneath her palm.
Aeryn gasped, staggering back as a seam. A thin, silent seam opened down the middle, revealing a passage hidden behind the stone. Aeryn took a step back. Her heart thudded once, hard.
Her tired eyes looked inside with scare.
There was a circular chamber within, small and cloaked in a strange, silver light that had no source. Green leafy veils lined the walls, spiraling like vines through time. The air shimmered as she stepped inside. At the center stood a bone-white pedestal. Upon it sat a thick book...bound in cracked red leather, sealed with a clasp shaped like a human ribcage. Her hand hovered over it for a second, then she reached it.
The ribcage clasp creaked open on its own.
She opened the book. There were names, thousands of them, and among them, drawings...portraits of forgotten souls, figures sketched in maddening detail, their eyes watching her from the parchment.
She flipped the pages slowly.
Then she saw her.
An old woman with deep lines carved into her face. Dark eyes, smiling awkwardly. There was a heaviness in the sketch, like the woman carried oceans behind her stare.
Underneath it was a name.
Hama.
Etched into the page so hard, the parchment had nearly torn.
Aeryn passed her hand on the name. Her fingers trembled. She whispered it out loud.
H A M A.
Her fingers trembled on the page, the parchment rough against her skin, the letters still glowing faintly where Hama's name had burned into the paper. She sat frozen on the bone-white pedestal, knees drawn close to her chest, eyes locked on the ink as if the truth might bite. The chamber around her was silent except for the beating of her own heart, louder now, as if it too was remembering.
As she read, the book did not offer her gentle fiction. It offered memories. Memories carved into skin and marrow, not ink.
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