The fire had already burned low, the embers pulsing like a dying star, but no one was ready to move, the story tellers words still lingered in the air, heavy as smoke, settling deep into the bones of those who listened.
Outside the wind howled, rattling the wooden shutters. it was a very unnatural sound, hollow and far away, yet impossibly close—as if it came not from the wind at all, but from something hidden within it.
The old man sat unmoving, his face carved from the weight of memory. His tale was now finished. but the silence that followed after he was done felt like an unfinished sentence, which was waiting to be completed.
then a voice—quiet, uncertain.
"You said the omens have returned," a young man murmured. His name was Jain, the blacksmith's son, broad shouldered but wary eyes. "How do you know?"
The storyteller's gaze flicked to him, unreadable. Then, slowly, he raised a hand and pointed toward the door.
The room got tensed. The fire crackled, spitting embers into the dark. No one moved.
Jain swallowed heavily and stood. The others watched as he hesitated, then strode to the door unbolting it with shaking hands. The wind pressed against the wood as if it, too, wanted to come inside. He opened the door.
And the world beyond was wrong.
The village was silent. Not the silence of sleep, nor the peaceful hush of a late hour. This was an absence. No insects hummed. No distant hoot of an owl. No rustling of leaves. The air was utterly still.
Then, the ground whispered.
A soundless voice, a vibration in the earth beneath his feet, it slithered up his spine, curling into his skull like fingers pressing into his min. He stumbled back, almost about to fall, his eyes wide with something deeper than fear.
The storyteller nodded. "You felt it."
Jain clutched the doorframe. "What... Was that?"
"The first crack."
The old man turned to the others. His voice low but unshaken. "The seal weakens. And the things that stir beneath it... they are already reaching for us."
A girl near the fire made the cross sign for protection over her chest. Another whispered a prayer under his breath.
"Then what do we do?" a man in the back asked, his voice sharp with unease.
the storyteller looked at them, all of them, his gazed heavily weighted.
"you must find the gifted."
the world carried a strange power, like an echo of something ancient. Jain frowned. "Gifted?"
The old man nodded. "Only those born with the power to sever the possessed from their master can stop what is coming. You cannot cut them. you cannot burn them. Neither can you outrun them. Only a gift not of this world can kill them."
A murmur spread through the room.
"But the gifted are gone," someone whispered.
"Not gone." The old man's eyes darkened. "Just hidden. Lost. Or worse... Unaware of what they are, some woke with a searing pain at the base of their spine, a pain gone in a blink as it came. Others never noticed at all, only feeling a strange pinch in the night. And some.. Some saw the mark through a mirror, but never knew what it meant. A birthmark, a scar—nothing more in their eyes. It looked like a star shape, but was unique to nothing we've ever seen."
He exhaled, gaze heavy with knowing.
"A mark, inked in something older than time, hidden beneath their skin. A sign that they were different. Gifted"
"But knowing meant nothing. Many who saw it in the mirror shrugged it off, a birthmark, a scar. They did not remember the war their blood had once fought. They did not know the power buried within them, not yet."
The words sent a shiver through them. A terrible realization settled into the room like cold ash. if the gifted still existed, they did not know who they were. They were ordinary men and women, oblivious to the power sleeping within them.
And if the possessed rose before they could be found...
The wind howled again, carrying something beneath it. A sound like laughter, stretched thin, warped and distant.
A sound that did not belong to any living thing.
someone bolted the door.
the fire flickered violently, as if disturbed by an unseen breath.
The old man exhaled, long and slow. "The war buried is walking. The question is..."His eyes met each of theirs in turn . the weight of centuries pressing into them. "Will you wake with it?"