The Voice in the Dark

The air was thick with dust as Ophelia moved through the palace corridors, her fingers gripping the stolen book as if it might disappear from her hands at any moment.

Her pulse still thundered in her ears, a relentless rhythm that refused to slow. The whispers of the Forgotten still clung to her skin, lingering like the ghost of a hand at her throat.

She forced herself to keep walking, her steps quick and quiet against the marble floor. She needed to return to the observatory. She needed to be alone.

Whatever secrets this book held, they had tried to bury it.

And now, she had unearthed it.

⸻

By the time she reached the observatory, her hands were shaking.

She slammed the door shut behind her, bolting it before pressing her forehead against the cold wood. Her breath came out in shudders.

Safe.

For now.

Slowly, she turned, her gaze falling to the book she had risked everything to steal.

It sat upon her desk, untouched, yet pulsing with an unseen weight.

Ophelia swallowed. The room felt too quiet. The wind outside had died, leaving only an eerie stillness pressing against the walls.

She approached the book cautiously, her fingertips brushing the ancient leather cover.

Still warm.

She inhaled deeply, then opened it.

⸻

The pages were yellowed with age, brittle under her touch.

Unlike the previous texts she had studied, this one was not written in celestial script. The letters were unfamiliar, twisting, shifting as if alive.

A language lost to time.

But at the very top of the first page, a single word had been burned into the parchment—

Zoriel.

Her breath hitched.

She turned the page.

And the moment her eyes touched the ink, the candlelight in the room flickered violently.

A shadow passed across the walls.

Ophelia froze.

Then—

The whisper returned.

"You should not have taken it."

The voice did not come from the room.

It came from the book.

Ophelia's breath caught, but she didn't close it.

Something inside her refused to be afraid.

She forced herself to turn the page again.

⸻

The text began to shift, its symbols twisting into words she could suddenly understand.

"The prince fell, but the stars did not forget. He was buried, but the heavens would not let him rest. The name was burned away, the kingdom swallowed whole, and yet—"

The ink smudged violently, the words erasing themselves before she could read more.

"No—"

She reached for the book, desperate, but the moment her fingers touched the words,

A cold breath curled against her ear.

"You were warned."

A force slammed into her chest.

Ophelia staggered backward, the book flying from her grasp as a gust of unseen wind ripped through the observatory.

The candles snuffed out.

The temperature dropped sharply.

And then, slowly, something began to form in the darkness.

A figure.

Not the shifting shadows of the Forgotten.

Not the ghosts of memory.

But something else.

Someone.

A presence she had felt before.

A presence she had dreamed of.

A voice that had called to her, across the stars, across time—

"Ophelia."

She whipped around, her pulse hammering.

And there—standing in the dim glow of the dying embers—

A man.