(Novel-style, no chapters, flowing narrative)
She remembered the orphanage as a place of soft lullabies and cold tile floors. It smelled of boiled rice and lemon cleaner, and the windows let in more wind than sunlight. Arin was always the quiet one. The tiny one with dark eyes that seemed too heavy for her small face. She barely spoke, but when she did, it was in whispers, as if her voice wasn't meant to exist in a world so loud.
The others called her "Mouse." Not cruelly, just curiously. She never corrected them.
She was six when the woman came.
Tall. Elegant. Dressed in black with gloves that she never took off. She had sharp blue eyes, a soft voice, and a strange perfume—something between roses and burnt paper. The caretakers were charmed. She asked for Arin by name.
"Such a pretty girl," the woman said. "She's special, I can feel it."
No one questioned her.
That night, Arin left with a new coat and a small bag of belongings. She didn't cry. She didn't smile. She just held the woman's gloved hand and stepped into the waiting car.
The house was far from the city, nestled at the edge of a dark forest. It creaked even when no one moved. Inside, it was filled with things that didn't belong to any ordinary home: mirrors that never reflected light properly, books written in letters that shimmered and shifted, and jars filled with shadows instead of substances.
The woman gave Arin a soft bed and warm food. She combed her hair and called her "my moon-born." At first, Arin thought this was love.
Until the first night the whispers came.
They slithered through the walls like smoke, curling around her ears as she slept. Words she didn't understand. Words that tasted like ash. She opened her eyes—and the woman was sitting beside her bed, surrounded by a circle of salt, whispering in a tongue not meant for children.
A bowl of red liquid steamed in her lap.
Arin's breath hitched.
"Don't be afraid, little dove," the woman murmured without turning. "Sleep now. Your voice must rest."
And just like that, Arin stopped speaking.
Days passed. Then weeks. The woman smiled whenever Arin was silent, pleased by her obedience.
"Good girl," she'd say, pressing a finger to Arin's lips. "Your silence makes you stronger."
But something else was growing. Inside her. A pressure, like something trapped behind her ribs. Something that twisted when the woman chanted, when the lights flickered, when the house groaned under moonlight.
Arin learned not to cry. Tears only made the woman angry.
"You don't understand yet," she would whisper, stroking Arin's cheek. "But you will. You were never meant to be ordinary."
The rituals became more frequent. Candles, chalk symbols, mirrors covered in veils. Arin watched. Silently. She wrote her thoughts in a notebook she kept under the floorboard, her only defiance.
And then one night, the woman brought out a second robe.
"For you," she said. "The stars have chosen their hour."
That night, Arin spoke for the first time in weeks.
"I don't want to."
Her voice came out soft and raw, like it had forgotten how to exist.
The woman froze. Her face darkened—not with anger, but something worse.
Disappointment.
"You weren't supposed to speak yet," she said coldly. "Now everything must begin... sooner."
What followed was fire.
Arin never remembered starting it. She only remembered heat, smoke, and the sound of the woman's voice—screaming, not from pain, but fury.
She remembered running barefoot through the woods.
She remembered collapsing in the road as sirens approached.
And then…
Blankness.
The days inside the house blended into one long stretch of twilight. No clocks ticked. No calendars marked the walls. Outside, the forest stood like a silent sentinel, its trees swaying even when the air was still. Inside, time obeyed the woman's rules.
Her name was never spoken. Arin only heard others whisper of her—rare visitors with tired eyes and crooked hands who came at dusk and left before dawn. They never looked at Arin. They were there for something else. Something deeper.
The woman called her "little dove" or "moon-born," never by her real name. That name, she said, belonged to the ordinary world. It was time to shed it.
"Names have power," she said, one night while burning a strip of linen that once belonged to Arin's orphanage. "And yours is old, older than you know."
Arin didn't understand. She just sat cross-legged on the floor, her hands cold and her lips pressed shut.
That night, the woman began a ritual unlike any Arin had seen.
She painted a symbol across the wooden floor—spirals inside spirals, lines that twisted like serpents. It pulsed with a light that didn't come from candles. The woman's voice deepened as she chanted, no longer sounding like a person at all, but like something mimicking speech.
Arin sat in the center of the circle. The woman told her not to move.
And then… the voices came. But not from the woman. From the floor.
She hears us.
Her blood is waking.
The seal is breaking.
Arin's breath turned icy. The whispers filled her head like smoke, swirling, endless, ancient. She tried to cover her ears, but the voices came from inside.
The woman touched her forehead with blackened fingers. "Silence is your gift," she said. "The louder the world becomes, the more powerful your silence will be. Do not waste it."
The rituals continued every week. Salt circles, mirrors that fogged from the inside, birds that flew into windows and died with wide, terrified eyes. Arin began seeing shadows that no one else acknowledged. She saw flickers of herself in mirrors—blinking out of sync, smiling when she wasn't.
And she started writing.
In the middle of the night, her hands would move on their own, filling notebooks with symbols, lines, names. She didn't know what they meant. But when the woman found them, she would smile.
"You're remembering," she'd say softly. "Your old self is coming through."
But Arin didn't feel like herself. She didn't feel like anyone at all.
Once, she woke to find a circle of ash around her bed and feathers stuck to her palms. Once, she opened her mouth to scream—and her voice came out in a whisper that made the lamps flicker and the house groan.
The woman grew more careful after that. More excited.
"She's ready," Arin overheard her say one night to a visitor. "We only need the final phase."
But something in Arin was shifting too. She wasn't just scared anymore.
She was waiting.
Waiting for the moment when the whispers inside her and the silence she carried would collide.
Waiting for the day when she would finally speak again—
—and something would break.