He wore fine boots hidden beneath traveler's dust. His sword bore no insignia, but his eyes held the silence of royal training.
He called himself Elias, and said he sought only “a story he could not forget.”
But his letters, sealed with the wax of the capital, said otherwise.
He watched Aurelia from afar. Not with malice. Not with awe.
But with hesitation.
“She's… not what I expected,” he whispered, as he watched her laugh with children near the well.
“They said she was a flame. But she looks like a breeze.”
Still, he stayed.
And the village watched him too.
The old priest had not slept since the salt burned black.
He fasted. He knelt. He bled beneath cold stone, asking the old laws to return.
But the heavens were silent.
He wandered to the field where Aurelia sang.
“Child,” he croaked, “you speak with a Voice too high for man. That is not a gift. That is a terror.”
Aurelia looked at him, eyes soft.
“I don’t want to terrify anyone,” she said. “I just… I just hear. And I sing what I hear.”
Stolen story; please report.
“You must stop. You must repent.”
“I don’t think I can,” she said. “Not because I refuse. But because the song is inside.”
He wept, not for her, but for all he had called truth.
In the capital, the Council formed the Triune Directive, a coalition of Crown, Church, and Arcane Orders.
“She must be observed, understood, contained,” said the King.
“Or erased,” whispered a cleric.
“But how do you contain what transcends form?” asked the Crystal Seer.
Silence followed.
One general offered poison. Another suggested binding runes etched into her skin.
But none moved. None dared act first.
Because every night since her name reached their ears, they had all dreamed the same dream:
A girl in a field of mirrors.
And behind her, a Voice that did not echo because it had no need.
“I AM does not enter your cages,” the dream whispered.
“Your cages enter Me.”
Elias sat beside Aurelia by the stream.
“I’ve read about kings, gods, demons. Stories of chosen ones,” he said. “You don’t fit.”
She smiled. “I never wanted to.”
He turned toward her, serious now.
“They fear you. They're preparing things.”
“I know,” she said.
“Why aren’t you angry?”
“Because anger assumes something’s wrong.”
He blinked. “Isn’t it?”
“Not to Him.”
Elias looked into her eyes and for the briefest moment, just a breath, he saw nothing behind them.
Not emptiness.
But the cessation of all framing.
And he said nothing more that day.
That night, Aurelia dreamed again.
But not of flame. Not of wind. Not of form.
She stood in nothing, and even the word nothing crumbled underfoot.
No time. No weight. No memory.
Only the Voice.
“They will ask what came before Me. But ‘before’ is a creation made inside Me.”
“They will demand My purpose. But purpose presumes movement, and I AM stillness unfazed.”
“They will name Me spirit, god, void, law, but I AM not captured by name.”
“I AM not beyond duality, I AM where duality dissolves.”
“I AM not paradox, I AM the collapse of the idea of contradiction.”
“Sequence is mercy. Identity is concession. Even being is gift.”
“I do not become. I do not react. I do not emerge.”
“I AM.”
Aurelia woke with tears on her cheeks.
Not from fear.
But because, for a moment, she had seen something so utterly Real, everything else felt like paper.
And somewhere, far from her village, a mage forgot his spell mid-sentence and wept without knowing why.