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Chapter 2 — The Woman Who Shouldn't Exist
Silas spent the next few days trying to convince himself that the night he shared with Alice was nothing more than an illusion.
This cruel world did that to people—warped memories, twisted perceptions, bent reality until you weren't sure what was real anymore. Maybe he had been exhausted. Maybe the seas had played tricks on him again.
But illusions didn't leave driftwood messages etched with playful handwriting.
Illusions didn't smell faintly of strange flowers.
Illusions didn't know your name without you ever telling them.
And the more he tried to forget her, the more her voice echoed at the edges of his thoughts.
"I was looking for somewhere interesting… and I found you."
Silas couldn't shake the feeling that her appearance hadn't been random. Travelers didn't simply appear out of thin air—not even in . So he followed the only lead he had: the place where she had first appeared.
The quiet pier at Etris.
The waves were choppy that evening, the sky bruised with storm-blue clouds. Silas sat on the edge of the pier, elbows on his knees, staring into the water as the tide churned.
"Looking for ghosts now?" a familiar voice grumbled behind him.
Silas didn't need to turn around to recognize Elliot, a fellow adventurer and occasional drinking partner. The man's armor clinked as he walked up to the pier.
"You haven't shown your face in the tavern for days," Elliot said. "People thought you got eaten by a shark again."
Silas didn't look away from the sea. "Do I look eaten?"
"You look worse," Elliot replied bluntly. "You look… distracted."
Silas exhaled slowly. He had no intention of telling anyone about her—it felt too unreal and too personal—but Elliot wasn't the type to drop a topic once he latched onto it.
So Silas offered a half-truth.
"I met someone."
Elliot's eyebrows shot up. "A woman?"
Silas nodded once.
"Well, that explains the brooding," Elliot muttered. "She left you?"
Another slow nod.
Elliot grinned. "That's what you get for falling in love with trouble."
Silas's hand tightened around the driftwood in his coat pocket.
Love? No, he refused to call it that.
But whatever it was, it had changed something inside him.
"She wasn't from here," Silas finally said.
He chose every word carefully.
"She came… from somewhere else."
Elliot scoffed. "What, from across the sea? Everyone here comes from across the—"
"No," Silas interrupted. "Not across the sea. From somewhere we can't reach."
That made Elliot pause.
For the first time, his expression turned serious.
"Silas… that sounds like the kind of thing that kills people."
"I know," Silas replied quietly.
Because impossibilities didn't happen in Deepwoken without consequences.
Things from outside their world were either monsters… or warnings.
And Alice had been neither.
Elliot clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Look. If she was real, she'll show up again. If she wasn't… then you're chasing after a ghost. Just don't get yourself killed trying to find someone who might not even exist."
Silas gave a hollow laugh.
"She exists."
He didn't know how he knew.
He just did.
As the storm rolled in, a sudden gust of wind swept across the pier, and Silas felt a faint shimmer in the air—an energy he recognized immediately.
Her energy.
And on the wooden planks beside him, something small and crystalline blinked into existence for just a moment before fading like a dying ember.
A fragment of a world he had never seen.
A world she came from.
Silas stood abruptly, heart pounding.
She hadn't forgotten him.
This wasn't over.
If worlds could cross once… they could cross again.
And Silas Veylor would be ready when it happened.
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