The Letter from Nowhere
On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Maya Thompson found a letter slipped beneath her bedroom door. There was no stamp, no address—just her name written in silver ink.
Inside, a single sentence shimmered across the page:
"Your story does not begin where you think it does."
Maya frowned. She lived in a quiet coastal town where nothing mysterious ever happened. Her biggest worry had been passing her history exam and deciding whether to leave town for college.
But as she turned the page over, a small, hand-drawn symbol caught her eye—a crescent moon crossed by a key.
She had seen that symbol before.
On a necklace her late grandmother used to wear.
And suddenly, her ordinary birthday didn't feel ordinary at all.