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Some beings are born from desire.
Others, from necessity.
Ae'lyra was born from the universe's mistake...
And the world didn't know what to do with her.
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Two years had passed since she was abandoned
In that time, the trees had stopped whispering her presence, and the moss had resigned itself to her wandering. Thêkariel no longer sheltered her as a secret to be buried but as a memory unsure how to fade.
Ae'lyra, still a child, still unnamed by any mouth but her own silence, walked as one who had stopped asking why.
And then, on a windless, shadowless day, the forest ended.
There was no border—only a loss of root.
Where once the soil pulsed with memory, now it lay dry, rigid, foreign.
The air grew heavier—not with heat, but with presence.
Because outside the forest, there were no stories.
Only life that never remembers... because it never needed to.
The world beyond Thêkariel was brutal, raw, immense.
There was no hierarchy but strength.
No language but the roar.
No law but immediate survival.
Ae'lyra didn't understand these rules.
She didn't need to.
She didn't hunt.
She didn't hide.
She only walked.
The dinosaurs didn't comprehend her.
Some ignored her.
Some paused.
A few... stepped back.
The great herbivores—colossal beings with necks like towers and skin like stone—felt no threat.
Predators, however, didn't know what to make of her.
Too small to be a threat.
Too... wrong to be prey.
Ae'lyra survived because the world rejected her.
The beasts smelled her... and didn't understand.
They approached, only for the air around her to bend strangely.
Meanwhile, she adapted.
She ate fruits that didn't burn at her touch.
Drank from pools where no larvae swam.
Slept beneath rocks avoided by birds without knowing why.
Her body wasn't strong.
Her muscles didn't grow.
But her senses...
saw everything.
The blindfold still covered her eyes.
It wasn't cloth.
It was will.
Fear.
Protection.
Ae'lyra knew that if she removed it, she would see more than her mind could endure.
And though she didn't see with her eyes, she still saw.
She saw carnivore paths hours before they arrived.
She felt the tremble of earth like echoes of ancient screams.
She saw the scar in the sky left by flightless birds of the cretaceous.
Each vision drained her.
Each moment she used them to avoid death, she lost another piece of childhood.
Ae'lyra no longer cried.
She'd forgotten how tears felt.
When a pterosaur collapsed dead before her—poisoned by a plant that only bloomed during eclipses—she didn't flinch.
She simply watched.
And she saw every time that creature had flown over her without striking.
She saw the day its offspring would have been born... had it survived.
To see everything...
Is to feel the pain of what never was.
One night, as mist crept from mountains without names, a creature circled her.
Not large.
But violent.
A young raptor, trembling, hungry.
Ae'lyra stood still.
She didn't run.
She didn't scream.
She waited.
The raptor leapt.
And just before it touched her...
she saw.
She removed the blindfold.
For just a moment.
And the world fractured.
It wasn't an eye that opened.
It was a window.
A rift.
In that instant, Ae'lyra didn't just see the raptor.
She saw every step that led it there.
Its mother.
Its birth.
Its first kill.
And she saw every version of it that had never existed.
She saw the raptor that never learned to hunt.
The one that fell at birth.
The one never conceived.
The raptor looked at her...
And recoiled.
It shrieked.
Ran.
And slammed into a rock.
It died untouched.
Ae'lyra fell to her knees.
Not from fear.
But because she had just felt everything.
She didn't move for three days.
Didn't eat.
Didn't drink.
The world passed by, but kept its distance.
Inside her mind, the timelines kept screaming.
Possibilities wouldn't stop unraveling.
Death after death echoed inside her.
And in the middle of it all...
a child.
Who just wanted to sleep without seeing.
It wasn't real.
Not from outside.
Just a whisper, echoing inside her vision.
—Stop looking.
—Stop seeing.
—Stop being.
But Ae'lyra couldn't.
Because even if she closed her eyes,
Even if she died,
She would still see.
That night, something within her broke.
Not her body.
Her concept of time.
She began seeing things before they happened.
Then forgetting them.
Then seeing them again.
The spiral on her forehead burned.
Not like fire.
Like memory.
And though she put the blindfold back on, nothing was hidden anymore.
Because the eye that sees all...
cannot be closed.
Ae'lyra kept walking.
But not like before.
She no longer avoided death.
She recognized it.
Named it without sound.
Accompanied it.
Animals no longer fled.
They circled her.
Watched.
Didn't understand.
Because she was no longer a child.
Not in her mind.
Not in her vision.
Not in her weight.
And somewhere, beyond fossil mountains,
beyond inverted skies,
something else was watching her too.
Not with hunger.
Not with judgment.
But with patience.
Because Ae'lyra had seen something that was not meant to be seen.
And now...
the universe feared her...
the universe feared her.
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Silence no longer protected her.
Sight could no longer be hidden.
And the path, once soil...
was now a crack over the abyss of all that is...
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