Her voice, delicate and clear, carried through the valley like birdsong. It was the one thing that never failed her, even when her legs trembled and her hands fumbled. While her parents toiled under the morning sun, Aurelia wandered to the edge of the fields, singing to the wind, to the soil, to the silence.
But today, the silence sang back.
“Before wheat, before wind, before the breath that forms a word, I AM.”
Aurelia froze. Her heart pounded, panic rising like a tide. She spun around, nothing. No one. Only the wheat, the sky, and that impossible voice, deeper than thought, gentler than breath, older than time.
She ran. Not out of rebellion or courage, but pure fear. She was a scaredy-cat, and she knew it. Spooked by owls, flustered by thunderstorms, and now, hearing voices?
By the time she reached her home, cheeks flushed and hair tangled with straw, her mother was rinsing vegetables and her father mending a rake.
“Did something frighten you, sweet?” her mother asked, brushing her cheek.
Aurelia only nodded, unable to speak of what she’d heard. The voice didn’t belong in their world, not in this village of cracked boots and dirt floors.
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But it stayed in her mind.
“Existence itself is an illusion beneath Me.”
That night, as she curled beneath thin blankets, Aurelia dreamed of stars, but not as she’d known them. They whispered of kingdoms unseen, of truths too vast for thought.
She stood on a sea of glass that wasn’t water, before a Presence too great to look upon. Her breath stopped, her knees failed, but she did not fall.
“You are chosen, Aurelia. Not for your strength. Not for your wisdom. But because you sing, even when you are afraid.”
“I AM THAT I AM. I do not become. I do not need. I do not begin. I do not end.”
“And I have set My mark upon you.”
When she awoke, her throat was dry and her pillow damp with tears. But the voice had felt more real than anything she’d ever touched.
The following days were strange.
She found herself speaking words she didn’t understand. Old men in the village paused when she passed, eyes wide as if seeing something that wasn’t there. Animals quieted when she sang. A sick calf, close to death, rose after a whispered tune.
She told no one. Who would believe her? She barely believed it herself.
At night, she prayed, not like the village priest taught, but from the heart, raw and unsure.
“Are You real?”
“Am I losing my mind?”
“Please... don’t leave me.”
The answer came not in words, but in Presence.
Then came the storm.
Lightning cracked the skies without rain, and the earth trembled as if it remembered something it had long buried.
Everyone fled indoors. Everyone except Aurelia.
She stood in the open, dress soaked in wind and starlight, as the Voice returned.
“I am not a god among gods. I am not subject to law, form, or fate.”
“I AM the reason they exist at all.”
“And I have chosen you to sing of Me.”
“Not with armies. Not with blades. But with voice, with trembling, with song.”
Aurelia fell to her knees. Not because she was brave. But because there was nowhere left to run.