The first sign was the silence.

Not the peaceful kind that settles over a village after dusk, but a heavy, unnatural stillness that pressed against the windows of Alderwick like a held breath. Even the crickets had gone quiet. Even the river, usually chattering over its stones, seemed to hesitate.

Lira Thorn felt it before she heard it — a faint vibration in her bones, like the world humming a note too low for human ears. She froze halfway up the hill, her lantern swinging at her side.

“Not again,” she whispered.

The last time she’d felt something like this, she was eight years old, and the old oak behind her house had split clean down the middle without a storm, without wind, without reason. Her mother had called it coincidence. Her father had called it bad luck.

Lira had known better.

Tonight, the humming grew stronger.

She reached the crest of the hill just as the sky tore open.

A jagged line of white fire ripped across the clouds — not lightning, not anything she’d ever seen — a crack, as if the heavens were made of glass and someone had struck them with a hammer. The light poured through in a blinding spill, illuminating the valley in stark, impossible brilliance.

Then came the sound.

A deep, resonant boom that didn’t echo so much as unravel through the air, shaking the earth beneath her boots. Lira staggered, dropping her lantern. It rolled down the hill, flame sputtering.

When she looked up again, the crack was widening.

And something was falling through it.

A dark shape, tumbling end over end, trailing sparks of silver. It plummeted toward the forest beyond the river, vanishing into the treetops with a distant crash that sent birds screaming into the night.

Lira’s heart hammered. Every instinct told her to run home, bolt the door, pretend she’d seen nothing.

But the humming in her bones didn’t fade. It intensified, pulling her attention toward the forest like a magnet.

Whatever had fallen… it was calling to her.

She swallowed hard, gripping the strap of her satchel. “Just look,” she told herself. “Just see what it is. Then go home.”

But even as she said it, she knew she wouldn’t be going home anytime soon.

She took a breath, squared her shoulders, and started down the hill toward the river — toward the place where the sky had cracked open.

Toward the beginning of everything she’d been running from.