NETHANIA ARC 1 (1ST AWAKENING)
VOLUME 3: END OF CHILDHOOD
Chapter 28: FIRST ACT
The morning should have felt ordinary.
The scent of fresh, yeasty bread drifted from open kitchen windows. Flocks of brown chickens wandered aimlessly through the muddy lanes, pecking at loose pebbles. Somewhere near the riverbank, two local fishermen were already loudly arguing over whose net had caught fewer fish.
Life continued.
Or at least, it tried its best to.
The fundamental problem was that nobody in Elderglen seemed entirely certain which version of life they were supposed to be continuing.
MORTAL REALM — ELDERGLEN VILLAGE
A woman stood outside the village bakery, frowning deeply at her husband.
"You've always hated honey bread, Robert."
The man blinked, looking down at the loaf in his hands as if it were a foreign object. "What are you talking about? I've loved honey bread since I was a boy."
"No, you haven't."
"Yes, I have."
"You said it tasted like wet pine bark."
"I never said that in my life."
"You absolutely did, right here on this porch last autumn."
Three nearby villagers immediately dropped their own business to join the debate. Unfortunately, none of them could agree on who was telling the truth. By the time the bewildered baker finally intervened, six grown people were locked in a fierce argument over a memory nobody could verify.
Across the village, similar bizarre incidents unfolded.
Children passionately remembered playing schoolyard games that had never actually existed. Farmers swore entire wooden fences had once stood in open fields where no fence had ever been built. An old shepherd insisted there used to be a steep grassy hill just north of Elderglen.
There wasn't. There never had been.
At least... most people thought so.
The village felt increasingly like a familiar song that had suddenly forgotten its own lyrics. It was recognizable, recognizable yet entirely wrong.
Kael watched everything unfold from his usual spot beneath the great oak tree overlooking the lower square.
His thick leather notebook rested on his lap. A cool morning breeze stirred the heavy paper pages. For a moment, he simply sat and listened to the sounds of the valley: the metallic creak of wagon wheels, the distant barking of farm dogs, and the low, tense murmur of confused conversations echoing between the houses.
Ordinary sounds. Yet each one carried a strange, brittle tension, as if reality itself was struggling to remember the next line of a script.
Kael lowered his gaze to his lap. Several new pages had appeared overnight. He knew he hadn't written them while awake, and that realization no longer surprised him—it only exhausted him down to his bones.
Slowly, he turned the notebook toward himself. Neat, elegant handwriting covered the page. It was his handwriting, yet the memory of forming the letters remained entirely absent.
The city beneath memory dreams of sunlight.
His stomach tightened into a knot. Another line waited directly beneath it:
The road awakens when enough people remember what they were forbidden to know.
Kael closed the notebook immediately, the leather cover slapping shut harder than he intended.
For several moments, he stared toward the distant northern forest. The Star Vault remained hidden deep behind countless layers of pine and oak trees, yet lately, it felt much closer—as though physical distance no longer mattered, and something beyond the tree line had begun noticing him in return.
I don't want to keep seeing these things, the thought came uninvited, raw, honest, and painfully childish.
For all the impossible cosmic weight surrounding him, Kael was still only five years old. He still wanted peaceful, uneventful mornings. He still wanted his parents. He still wanted the world to make logical sense.
"Thinking yourself into an early grave again?"
Rowan's warm, raspy voice interrupted his spiraling thoughts.
Kael looked up to see his father carrying a heavy wooden bucket beneath one arm. The bucket appeared slightly dented—again.
"What happened to this one?" Kael asked, deadpan.
Rowan looked deeply offended. "The bucket attacked me."
Kael stared at him. "..."
"It knows what it did, Kael."
A small smile tugged at the corners of Kael's mouth despite himself. Rowan pointed an accusing finger at the wooden stave. "We've had professional disagreements before."
"You argue with furniture."
"The furniture started it."
Kael's laugh escaped before he could stop it—warm, bright, and completely genuine. For a few precious seconds, the strange, suffocating pressure inside his chest loosened.
Rowan noticed the change immediately. His smile softened, then vanished just as quickly, because he saw the dark rings beneath Kael's eyes and the heavy look of age where a child's wonder should have been.
Fathers noticed things, even when they desperately wished they didn't.
Later that afternoon, Luna found Kael trying to help a group of younger children near the center of the village square.
Or at least, he was attempting to keep the peace. The local children had become fascinated by the memory distortions, which created predictable daily chaos.
"No," Kael said patiently, pinching the bridge of his nose. "There wasn't a giant silver rabbit living in the well."
"There was!" a boy insisted.
"There wasn't."
"There was, and it wore a crown!"
Kael let out a slow breath. "It definitely didn't wear a crown."
A small girl crossed her arms stubbornly. "My grandmother remembers seeing it hop down the lane."
"Your grandmother also remembers wrestling wild dragons in her youth."
"Exactly!"
The children erupted into bright, ringing laughter. Luna covered her mouth with her hand, while Kael looked utterly betrayed by his own logic.
The sight nearly broke her heart. Beneath the humor, he looked tired—far too tired, carrying a weight no child should ever have to bear.
Her hand settled briefly atop his dark hair, a simple gesture of grounding comfort. One she found herself repeating more and more frequently lately, as if to physically confirm he was still here, still hers, and still a little boy. Not a cosmic anomaly. Not an ancient heir. Just Kael.
MORTAL REALM — MIRA'S COTTAGE
Inside the healer's cottage, the air was thick with the rich scent of dried sage and lavender. Ancient books occupied every flat surface.
Mira sat alone at her heavy wooden desk, a silver protection charm resting beside her hand. Its surface glowed with a faint, persistent warmth—too warm. She disliked that very much.
Carefully, she unfolded a brittle, ancient manuscript. The parchment threatened to crumble beneath her fingertips like dry autumn leaves. The text inscribed upon it was older than Elderglen, older than most known regional kingdoms.
What it contained made her stomach drop into an abyss.
"The danger is not forgetting," she read aloud, her voice barely rising above a whisper. "The danger is remembering."
Silence followed her words. Outside, a sudden gust of wind rattled the wooden shutters against the stone walls.
Mira's gaze drifted toward the dark northern forest, toward the hidden Star Vault, and toward Kael. For years, she had treated old legends as useful stories—interesting folklore, but stories nonetheless.
Now? Folklore was turning into hard evidence, and evidence was rapidly becoming prophecy. A terrible progression, and one she wished with all her soul she could stop.
A sharp knock interrupted her thoughts. Three crisp, deliberate raps against the oak door.
Mira opened it—and immediately wished she hadn't.
Three strangers stood on her porch. Travelers. One wore dark scholar's robes embroidered with foreign symbols, another carried a heavy iron-hilted sword at his hip, and the third possessed the rigid, confident posture of someone accustomed to commanding armies.
Their eyes swept across Elderglen—studying, evaluating, and searching.
The scholar smiled politely, though his eyes remained cold. "We heard rumors."
Mira's expression remained completely unreadable. "Rumors about what?"
The scholar hesitated for a fraction of a second, then answered clearly:
"The city called Aureth."
Silence filled the doorway. Mira's grip tightened around the hidden charm in her sleeve, and the silver talisman flared with sudden, scorching heat.
HEAVANIA REALM — HALL OF ORIGIN
In the divine realm, chaos reigned. Not a battle of blades, but something far more insidious: absolute confusion.
Ancient scrolls and glowing records floated haphazardly through the massive, vaulted chamber. Thousands upon thousands of years of accumulated cosmic knowledge were shifting.
Names vanished from divine ledgers. Dates drifted out of alignment. Entire historical epochs rewrote themselves minute by minute.
Valtor stood rigidly before a grand document he had personally authored six thousand years ago. The terrifying problem was that he no longer remembered writing half of it.
"Impossible," Valtor murmured, genuine frustration cracking his calm facade.
Across the chamber, Ilyra the Goddess of Time looked equally disturbed. She held three distinct historical versions of the exact same divine war, yet all three claimed absolute authenticity and all three brutally contradicted one another.
"I don't know which timeline is real anymore," she confessed.
The confession silenced the divine hall. If the governor of time itself could no longer distinguish truth from revision, the cosmic situation was far worse than anyone dared imagine.
Mordrak attempted a cynical smile, but it faltered and died. "Well..." he folded his massive arms, "on the positive side..."
Nobody responded.
"...I was going to make a clever joke."
Still, absolute silence.
Mordrak sighed heavily. "That's usually a very bad sign."
Caelum stepped forward, celestial stars swirling wildly within his deep eyes. "The spatial fractures continue expanding outward."
A grand projection materialized in the center of the hall—not of Elderglen, nor of the Mortal Realm, but of reality's fundamental lattice. Hairline cracks spread like spiderwebs through glass. They were invisible to mortals, but terrifying to immortals.
Every single fracture connected somewhere. Every single crack pointed toward a single destination: toward something buried, something remembered, and something returning.
UNKNOWN SPACE
The endless darkness stretched infinitely. Yet "darkness" was no longer an accurate description for the void.
The space had begun changing. Faint, ghostly echoes drifted through the expanse—whispers, heavy footsteps, and distant sounds from forgotten eras.
The two ancient presences watched from the edge of reality, waiting and observing.
"The first act has begun," the first entity noted.
The second presence remained silent for a long moment. "The child suffers."
"All doors demand a price."
The void rippled violently. Far away, impossible stars flickered out of sequence.
"Will he endure?"
A pause. Then: "That question was answered long before he was even born."
Silence returned—not an empty silence, but an expectant one. The heavy kind that arrives right before history changes its direction forever.
MORTAL REALM — ELDERGLEN VILLAGE
Night arrived quietly over the valley.
Lanterns illuminated the dusty dirt roads, families gathered indoors behind locked wooden doors, and conversations softened into anxious whispers. The village attempted sleep, attempted normality, and attempted peace.
Kael sat alone outside his home, his notebook resting closed beside him.
The Silver Star shone overhead, burning far brighter than usual. Or perhaps that was only his imagination—he wasn't certain of anything anymore, and that uncertainty terrified him above all else.
The leather notebook suddenly trembled. Once. Twice. Then stopped.
Kael slowly reached out and opened it.
Fresh writing appeared across a blank page right before his eyes—words forming in real time. It was his own handwriting, moving without his hand touching the paper, without his permission, and without his understanding.
The road remembers.
More words followed in a desperate rush:
Aureth remembers.
The trembling of the book intensified. Kael swallowed hard, his throat dry.
Then came the final line—the single sentence that made his heart skip a beat and freeze in his chest:
The world has started looking back.
Above him, the Silver Star pulsed once with a cold, blinding flash of light. A chilling wind swept across Elderglen.
And somewhere far beyond mortal memory...
Something opened its eyes.
>-----END OF CHAPTER 28-----<
Next Chapter: Outsiders will begin asking dangerous questions. Kael's notebook will reveal fragments of Aureth that no living person should know. Keep an eye on the travelers, because not everyone who comes to Elderglen is searching for the truth.