Chapter 2: The Girl I Have Always Been

Aylin’s POV

My name is Aylin.

That is all I have ever been certain of.

I was born in a small village that barely exists on most maps, where people measure life by seasons and survival, not destiny. My mother used to say I was an ordinary child—quiet, stubborn, always staring too long at the sky. She said I cried less than other babies, as if I were listening instead.

I don’t remember my father. He died before I could form memories strong enough to keep him. After that, it was just the two of us, living close to the forest everyone warned us about.

The elders called it cursed.

I called it familiar.

Even as a child, I felt something there—something watching, not with malice, but with patience. I would sit at the edge of the trees for hours, tracing patterns in the dirt, feeling as though I was waiting for something I couldn’t name. Whenever I asked my mother why my chest hurt when I looked too long at the forest, she would press her hand to my heart and tell me some questions didn’t need answers.

As I grew older, the feeling didn’t fade.

It deepened.

I had dreams—always the same ones. Silver light through branches. A path that appeared only when I stopped searching for it. A voice just beyond hearing, calling me forward without ever saying my name. I woke from those dreams with my pulse racing and a sense of loss so sharp it stayed with me all day.

Still, I lived an ordinary life.

I helped mend nets, carried water, learned how to survive winters that bit hard and fast. I laughed with people who knew me only as the quiet girl by the forest’s edge. No one ever suspected anything strange about me.

Neither did I.

Until the night the pull became impossible to ignore.

I woke before dawn, heart pounding, my body already moving before my mind could argue. I didn’t pack. I didn’t leave a note. I only followed the ache in my chest, the certainty that if I didn’t go now, something precious would be lost forever.

The Veil shimmered where the forest grew too still.

I knew the stories. Humans who crossed never returned. I knew fear should have stopped me—but it didn’t. Standing there, I felt calm. Certain. Like I had finally reached the last page of a story I’d been reading my whole life without understanding.

When I stepped through, the air changed.

Heavier. Warmer. Alive.

I should have died.

Instead, I felt like I had come home to a place

I didn’t remember leaving.

And then I saw him.

A man carved from shadow and moonlight, pain written into the very lines of his body. Silver light cracked across his skin like something breaking free from beneath it. His eyes—dark, sharp, endlessly tired—found mine, and something inside me shifted.

Fear came then.

Not of him.

Of the way my heart recognized him.

I don’t know why I’m here.

I don’t know why the forest let me in.

All I know is this:

I am human.

I have always been human.

And yet, standing in this cursed land, beneath a moon that feels too close, I can’t escape the terrifying thought that my life—ordinary as it has been—was only ever the beginning of something else.

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