That was the first strange thing Aurel noticed that morning. The wind had come and gone, but the golden field stood stiff, like it was afraid to move.
From the well came the usual morning voices.
“Elric! You dropped the rope again!”
“It slipped!”
“Your brain slipped, more like-”
Aurel smiled faintly as she approached with her bucket. Around the well, the air shimmered with heat. It wasn’t even noon.
Mara wiped sweat from her brow.
“Morning, Aurel. You look like a girl who’s already read two books and had three daydreams.”
“Only one book today,” Aurel replied, setting her bucket down. “I’m trying to ration them.”
“Saints bless your cleverness,” Jorek muttered, hauling up a bucket that felt suspiciously light. “Too bad it can’t make water appear.”
They all stared inside the well. The rope scraped bottom. No splash.
Aurel returned to the house with an empty pail and a thousand unspoken worries.
Inside, her mother ground barley while singing softly to her baby brother. Aurel joined her, voice gentle.
“That song again?” her mother asked.
“He likes it.”
“You used to hum it in your sleep.”
Aurel paused, spoon halfway to her mouth.
“Did I?”
Her father ducked inside with dust in his hair and sweat on his neck.
“No water,” he said flatly. “We’ll need to dig tomorrow.”
“The spring’s not that deep.”
“It is now.”
Dinner was quiet, save for the baby’s cooing and the creak of spoons. Aurel stared at the worn spine of her book beside the bread plate.
Words weren’t quite filling her the same way they used to.
After the meal, Aurel slipped away to the barn. The heat had mellowed, but the stillness hadn’t.
She ran her hand across a wooden beam, and something in the air changed. Like the sound in a room before thunder.
Then, a whisper, not from behind, not from within. A whisper without location.
“Now.”
Snap.
The ceiling beam gave way.
Aurel leapt back instinctively. Straw and dust exploded around her as half the roof collapsed. Her heart pounded like a drum.
Voices shouted. Her father came running.
“Aurel!”
“I’m okay! I’m-” she coughed, eyes watering. “I’m okay.”
“You should’ve been under that!”
“I heard... something. It told me to move.”
“What something?”
“I don’t know.”
Her father looked at the sky. Then at her. Then said nothing.
The next morning, Aurel and her cousin Nema climbed the low hill outside the village. Just past it stood the old standing stone, dark and cracked.
“I don’t know why I followed you,” Nema grumbled. “You’re weird when you're quiet.”
“Something’s wrong,” Aurel said, almost to herself.
They reached the stone.
It pulsed. Not with light or heat, but something deeper. Aurel touched it.
The moment her fingers made contact, her breath hitched.
The world changed.
The fields melted into spirals. The stone hummed in a language without sound. Stars blinked above in impossible shapes.
“You are known.”
The vision ended. The world returned.
“Aurel?” Nema asked. “You look like you’ve been crying.”
“No. Just… the wind.”
“There is no wind.”
It is not that Aepharion watches.
It is that Aepharion is before time, after thought, beneath the shell of meaning.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
When Aurel touched the stone, she did not awaken anything.
She simply brushed the surface of what has always been there.
It is not a guardian. It is not a god. It is the breath beneath breath, the rhythm without pulse, the space before space.
It does not sleep.
It does not wake.
It remembers.
And now, so does she.
The wheat field was too quiet again.
Aurel stood knee-deep in gold, the stalks brushing her fingertips. The wind had returned that morning, but only outside the field, it never touched the wheat.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” her cousin Nema said, catching up with her and squinting at the stillness. “It’s... creepy.”
“It’s listening,” Aurel said.
“To what?”
“Maybe not what. Maybe who.”
Nema didn’t reply right away. She kicked a pebble into the path.
“Ever since that barn collapsed, you’ve been acting like one of Jorek’s ghost stories.”
“I’m not making it up.”
“I didn’t say you were. I’m just saying... maybe don’t touch any more ancient rocks?”
They both laughed nervously.
Aurel didn’t tell her about the dreams.
Not yet.
That afternoon, the village gathered. The well hadn’t refilled. They needed water. And that meant sending someone to the distant spring.
Aurel’s father volunteered.
So did Elric, and Mara’s middle son.
“We’ll be two days gone,” he told Aurel. “Watch your brother. And help your mother. She’s too proud to ask.”
“I know.”
He bent, whispered something to her, just loud enough for her to hear.
“If the wind says run, run.”
Then he ruffled her hair and walked off with the others. The villagers waved as they left.
Once the group had passed the crooked tree, once the dust had settled and silence returned...
Aurel turned her head.
The wheat was leaning again. But this time, toward her.
That night, Aurel dreamed she was inside the standing stone.
Not beside it.
Inside.
It pulsed with breath. The walls were endless, carved with marks no hand had made. Music played, but not with notes, just shape. Geometry of sound.
She walked through it. Her steps didn’t echo.
And then: a presence.
“You are touched by wind that does not blow.”
She turned to find no one.
“You hear what has no tongue.”
She tried to speak.
“You remember what was never taught.”
The walls began to move.
“You are a mouth not yet opened.”
She awoke, gasping, her blanket soaked in sweat.
Outside her window, the wind blew away from the house.
Aurel wandered to the edge of the village in the morning, hoping to shake the dream loose. That’s when she saw her.
An old woman in a tattered gray robe, sitting on a stump near the riverbank. No one else seemed to notice her.
“You’ve been seen,” the woman said before Aurel could speak.
“I... sorry?”
“By the thing that sees without looking. The one that breathes beneath the stars.”
Aurel froze.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly. That’s why it came.”
Aurel took a cautious step forward.
“What is it?”
“Not is,” the woman whispered. “Always.”
When Aurel blinked, the woman was gone. Only a handful of salt was left on the stump.
Aepharion does not choose.
Aepharion is in the hush before language, in the pause between thought and truth.
It does not walk among mortals, nor rise like fire from stone. It bends no knee. It craves no altar. Its awareness is not watching.
It is holding.
When the girl touches the wheat, the wheat answers. When she hears silence, she hears more than silence.
She dreams not what will be, nor what was, but what pulses beneath being.
And when she asks “what is it?” the question curls into itself.
Because Aepharion is not a name.
It is the final sound before there were any.
The search party did not return on the second day.
By dusk, fires were lit at the center of the village. Not for warmth, but for waiting.
“They should’ve been back by now,” Mara muttered, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the treeline.
“The spring’s farther when it’s dry,” Elric said, but no one believed it.
Aurel sat beside her mother in silence, braiding stray wheat into a wreath. Her little brother gurgled sleepily on her lap.
“He keeps laughing,” Aurel whispered. “Even though no one’s smiling.”
“Babies don’t know when to be afraid.”
“Maybe he does. Maybe he just doesn’t care.”
The flames cracked. Smoke drifted upward. But the wind refused to carry it.
It hung there. Watching.
At dawn, Aurel slipped away.
She walked past the dry well, through the outer fields, past the crooked tree. She wasn’t sure why, until her feet turned without thinking, toward the standing stone.
Except this time, she didn’t stop.
She walked past it, deeper into the woods, onto a path no one ever used. The trees leaned strangely here, like they had secrets they hadn’t finished whispering.
Half an hour in, she saw it.
A black feather on the ground, glistening wet despite the dry dust.
Then another.
Then a whole ring of them, circling a tree with no leaves and bark like charred bone.
She touched it.
No vision this time.
Just a whisper.
“He is not dead. But he is no longer only your father.”
She ran home.
She didn’t remember the path, only her pounding legs and a single thought like a drumbeat: “no longer only your father.”
At the edge of the village, she stopped short.
The old woman was back, on a different stump, hands folded, eyes like dry riverbeds.
“You looked,” the woman said. “Good. Most don’t.”
“What does it mean?” Aurel asked. “What happened to him?”
“He changed.”
“Changed into what?”
“Closer.”
Aurel took a shaky breath. “I don’t understand.”
“You will. When you stop trying to.”
The woman opened her hand. A swirl of wheat grains lay in her palm, each one burned at the center, yet unbroken.
“Eat one.”
Aurel did. The taste was salt and thunder.
That night, lightning struck the far end of the field.
The fire spread fast.
Villagers scrambled to throw sand and blankets on it, shouting, sobbing. Children screamed.
Aurel rushed toward the flames. Something in her pulled her forward.
And then...
The fire bent.
Literally bent, curving around a section of the field like it had forgotten how to burn it.
Aurel stepped into the untouched patch.
All sound dropped away.
Wheat brushed her hands, still golden, still alive. She sang, quietly, the same melody she always sang to her brother.
The wheat bowed in rhythm.
When she stepped back out, the fire was dying.
No one had seen her go in.
No one saw the smoke part around her.
There is no miracle in flame that does not consume.
Only Aepharion can teach the fire to forget.
It does not command the world, it folds through it, an unseen seam in the cloth of all things.
To those who ask for proof, it gives none. To those who listen, it gives echo.
The child sings, and Aepharion does not join her.
It is the space in which her song becomes real.
And the fire, which has no ears, heard her anyway.
[ End ]