Chapter 1 - The Day Everything Changed
We were walking along the upper terrace when my mother stopped.
No reason for it. She simply stopped and looked up. I took another step before I noticed, then turned back. She stood still, watching the sky, worry tensing her face. I raised my eyes to the sky.
The sky was ordinary.
For now.
Velara’s upper terrace was the most beautiful place in the city, or so everyone said, and I loved being here, until that day. Wide ledges of light stone stepped down toward the central square, where trees with silvery leaves grew. They sang, quietly, whenever the wind touched their crowns. A memory of Lyra, people said. Of worlds destroyed before I was born.
We’d left early that morning: my mother wanted to reach the market before noon, before the hot wind rose off the plains. I walked beside her, holding her hand, a habit from childhood I’d never outgrown. Velara went about its usual life around us. Merchants setting out their goods, children playing on the lower steps, the air smelling of herbs and spices.
Everything was as it always was.
Until the moment my mother stopped.
I looked where she was looking.
Nothing, at first. Then I saw them.
Three black ships hung in the sky — too low, too still, as if someone had cut them out of another reality and set them into ours without asking.
People around us began to stop walking.
We all knew about the Orion wars. Everyone had heard that somewhere out past our system, something had been happening for a long time. But here on Velara, the last few decades had been quiet, quiet enough that we’d let ourselves believe quiet was simply how things were.
“Let’s go,” my mother said.
Quietly. Almost calm.
But her hand closed around mine, hard, hard enough to hurt. I understood then. She already knew what was coming. She always knew, before anything happened.
Lyrian blood, my father used to say, when he thought I couldn’t hear. They feel what hasn’t happened yet.
We ran.
One of the ships shifted, and a beam dropped from its underside. Blue, cold, dark at its source and nearly white where it touched the ground. Two more ships followed the first, sweeping their beams across the square, over the crowd, over the stalls, over the children on the steps.
They were searching for something. Or someone.
“Run!” my mother screamed.
Not said. Screamed. For the first time that day, the first time in my memory, her voice broke.
I didn’t make it.
The beam caught me, and the whole world cut off in a single wrench. Laughter, voices, the wind moving through the silver leaves, all of it gone at once, like a door slammed shut between me and the world. My body stopped answering to me, as if it had stopped being mine.
I managed to turn my head.
My mother was there, half a step away, and in that second, a beam from another ship reached her too. Her face was turned toward mine, and there was no fear in it. Something else was there instead, something I’d rarely seen in her and never had a name for. As if she’d known this moment would come. As if all that was left to do was be beside me when it did.
That was the last thing I remembered.
Then everything dissolved.
I didn’t know how much time had passed. Didn’t know where I was.
Only darkness, and a silence that wasn’t silence at all.
Then something changed. Gradually, the way the sky changes before dawn. Light first, distant. Then a sound, quiet, almost musical, as if something vast and alive had taken a breath. Then a surface beneath me, smooth, faintly warm, not stone, not wood, something I had no word for.
I tried to open my eyes. It didn’t happen right away.
Above me, a curved ceiling, pale, half-transparent, threaded with lines that pulsed with a faint light. Slow. Even. Like breathing.
I was lying inside something enclosed. Something like a capsule.
Memory returned all at once, whole, in a single blow: the terrace, the black ships, the blue beam, my mother’s hand.
A shadow appeared outside.
Someone approached. I could see a tall shape through the capsule’s translucent lid, standing still. Just standing there.
I didn’t know who it was. Didn’t know where I was. The last thing I remembered was black ships in the sky, and the light that had taken us both.
The lid began to open, slowly, with a quiet sound, smooth, as if deliberately gentle, so as not to frighten me. Cool air touched my face.
I saw him.
Tall, in a white uniform. Hair fair, almost white, a few strands falling along his face. Strong, clear features. Blue eyes.
Our eyes met.
And something happened.
Not a flash. Not a blow. Quieter than that — like a string inside me trembling, a string I hadn’t known was there.
For one impossible moment, I thought I had seen those eyes before. Not here. Not now. Under a different sky, in a different world.
The feeling vanished as quickly as it came, leaving behind only confusion and a kind of emptiness, as if I’d forgotten something that mattered.
I didn’t know this man. Couldn’t have known him.
And still, some part of me refused to believe that.
I wanted to ask where my mother was. Wanted to ask where I was. Wanted to ask why they’d brought me here.
But a different question came out first.
“Who are you?”
He didn’t answer right away. For a few seconds he only looked at me.
There was something almost painful in his eyes, as if this meeting meant more to him than it did to me.
“Aelion,” he said finally.
And something in the sound of his voice, the way he said it, echoed in me with a strange ache for something long since lost.
As if I’d heard it before.
A very long time ago.
In another life.
Thank you for reading!
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With Love, Lianna Wale.
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