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Chapter 1 — The Day Everything Changed
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Chapter 2 — The Intercept
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Then come back here for Chapter 3 — The First Touch.
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Chapter 3. The First Touch
I lay in the open capsule and looked at him.
He didn’t rush me. Didn’t lean closer, didn’t press me with questions, didn’t ask me to get up right away. He simply stood there, calm, still, as if holding a kind of space around me where I could come back to myself.
And still I felt his presence too sharply.
As if some part of me already knew exactly who was standing there.
That frightened me almost as much as everything else.
I already knew his name. Aelion.
Before I could ask him anything, I reached for my mother the only way I knew how, quietly, inside, the way I might have reached for a hand in the dark.
Nothing answered back.
The second question mattered more.
“Where’s my mother?”
My voice came out hoarse.
He didn’t answer right away. A hesitation, barely there, but enough to make everything inside me draw tight.
“Get up,” he said gently. “I’ll explain.”
Not later. Not calm down.
I held on to that like a handhold.
I tried to sit up. My body barely obeyed, not from pain, more from a kind of lingering weakness, like waking too fast. The capsule’s smooth surface slid beneath my palms.
Aelion held out his hand.
My mind said: careful. I was on an unfamiliar ship, among unfamiliar people. The last thing I remembered was black ships over Velara, blue beams, my mother’s hand.
But alongside that was something else. Something thin and insistent. As if refusing this hand meant losing something I’d been moving toward for longer than I could remember.
I put my hand in his.
The contact hit harder than it should have. Not pain, not a spark, more like two lines that had run apart for a long time suddenly remembering they’d once been one.
The warmth didn’t come from his fingers. It came from somewhere inside me.
For a fraction of a second, I thought I could see something: white light on stone steps, wind, the smell of unfamiliar flowers, a feeling so strong I nearly lost my balance.
Then it was gone. Only his hand remained. And his eyes.
He’d felt it too. I saw his jaw tighten, just for a moment.
I sat up, put my feet on the floor, stood. He let go of my hand the instant he saw I could stand on my own.
The room was large and bright, something like a medical bay, two rows of capsules lining it. The walls were white, pulsing faintly with soft light. Where I stood closest, the pulse seemed to slow, settling into something, my breathing, maybe.
“What happened? How did I get here?”
“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.”
We walked toward the far doors together.
“Three Draco ships appeared over Velara this morning,” he said. “We intercepted one. Yours.”
“And my mother?”
He looked at me, and that was when I understood. My chest tightened before he said a word.
“She was on the other ship,” I said.
“Yes. Two ships went through a portal before we could stop them.”
I waited to cry. I didn’t. Maybe my body hadn’t caught up yet. Or maybe, somewhere beneath all of it, I knew something that couldn’t be knowledge: she was alive. Not near, not here, but alive.
“But you’ll look for her?”
“Yes.”
One word. But it carried more than a fleet order. Something personal in it, though I didn’t ask why.
We passed through an archway into a wide corridor, and the light here was warmer. I stopped without meaning to and pressed my palm to the wall.
The wall shifted color under my hand and began to glow, faintly.
“It’s alive,” I said. Not quite a question either.
“Partly,” he said. “You’ll meet him properly soon.”
Him. I noted that.
“Why are they hunting us?” I asked, walking beside him again. “The women you’re looking for.”
“Carriers of a rare bloodline. A rare soul-line. An ancient one.” He looked straight ahead. “To them, it’s a resource. To us, it’s a crime.”
Cold moved down my spine.
“How long was I unconscious?”
“About six hours. The paralysis beam shuts down consciousness, not the body. The capsule handled the rest. You were born in the third dimension. This ship operates in the fourth. It eased the transition.”
“Eased it into what, exactly?”
“You’ll notice this soon,” he said. “You already understand every word I’m saying. Six hours ago, you wouldn’t have.”
I stopped.
He was right. I hadn’t noticed until he said it. The words had simply been arriving, already translated, as if I’d always known this language and only just remembered it.
“That’s not possible.”
“It is here,” he said. “Lyrian blood reads new systems faster than most. Yours especially.”
“Lyrian blood,” I repeated. My mother’s blood. The blood that let her feel things before they happened. The blood she’d passed to me, along with my name.
“Did it change me?”
“Not you,” he said. “Your field. The way you perceive. Your body is still yours.”
“And you? Were you born like this? Already in the fourth?”
“All of us are,” he said. “It’s not something we grow into. We’re just born that way.” A pause, weighing how much to hand me. “It’s also why we’re born already carrying the memory of past lives.”
I thought about that as we walked, about how my mother had stopped on the terrace, looked at the sky before anyone else noticed the ships. And wondered if she’d carried this in her all her life, quietly, and never told me what shape it took.
“What’s your name?” he asked suddenly.
I nearly smiled. We’d already covered war, abduction, portals, a language I was apparently already speaking. And only now, my name.
“Lyra.”
Something changed in his face, not sharply, just enough that I noticed.
“Lyra,” he repeated quietly.
“What?”
“That name means a great deal to my people,” he said. “I’ll tell you someday. Not now.”
Someday. I wonder when, I thought.
We reached a wide set of doors, and they opened toward us.
Thank you for reading.
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With Love, Lianna Wale.
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