CHAPTER 1: RECURRING DREAMS
OPENING POEM: “Whispers from the Depths”
Beneath the ever-roaring waves,
At the bottom of the ocean that holds the secrets of time,
Lies a city of crystal that once shone brightly,
Lemuria, a sunken civilization of light.
Three moons once illuminated its skies,
Seven towers pierced the clouds,
Sacred souls guarded the balance of the universe,
Until betrayal drowned everything.
But true love never dies,
Across thousands of years, across birth and death,
Two souls bound by an unbreakable spiral,
Seeking, calling, waiting for union.
And on the emerald islands of the equator,
On the blessed land of Nusantara,
Seven hidden crystals of power are scattered,
Waiting for the guardian to rise again.
Hear the whispers from the depths,
Feel the crystals vibrate in your blood,
For you who read this may also remember,
A past life that awaits your completion.
Lemuria is not lost,
Only sleeping in another dimension,
And true love will awaken it,
Uniting heaven and earth, east and west, past and present.
This is their story,
Which may also be your story,
About a soul seeking another soul,
About light overcoming darkness,
About love transcending time itself.
Enter, O seeker of truth,
Into the endless spiral of light,
And witness how the seven crystals unite,
How Lemuria and Nusantara become one,
How love changes the destiny of the universe.
🌿 From the Ancient Inscription, translated from the Language of Light
Heavy rain poured down on Jakarta as Auraléa Merenai woke up gasping for breath for the third time that night. Sweat drenched her forehead even though the air conditioner in her apartment in Menteng was running at full blast. Her right hand clenched the white sheets so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
It was that dream again. Always the same dream.
But tonight was different. Tonight it was clearer, more real, as if she wasn’t just observing but was actually there, feeling the salty sea breeze, hearing the crystal song resonating at a frequency that made her bones tremble, smelling the scent of flowers that didn’t exist on this earth.
In the dream, she stood on the edge of a city that seemed impossible in any reality. A city made entirely of transparent crystal in various shades of blue, from light blue like the daytime sky to dark blue like the deep ocean.
Mountain-high towers rose into the sky, connected by bridges of light that pulsed with living energy. Vehicles shaped like condensed water droplets glided silently through the air, carrying the city’s inhabitants dressed in shining robes.
What fascinated and frightened Auraléa the most was the sky above the city. Not one moon shone in the darkness of the night, but three, three moons of different sizes, shining together in a horizon filled with unfamiliar constellations she had never seen in the skies of Jakarta or anywhere else on earth. The largest was silvery white, the second was blue like ice, and the smallest emitted a soft red light.
But it wasn’t the surreal beauty of the city that woke her up with a pounding heart and tears on her cheeks. It was the feeling, the feeling of loss so deep, so total, as if the most essential part of his soul had been torn away and left behind in that sinking crystal city. A longing that transcended ordinary longing, something rooted deeper than conscious memory, something that felt like... home.
And always, in every dream, at the edge of vision before consciousness pulled her back to the real world, she saw that figure. A tall man with a posture reminiscent of the ancient Greek statues of gods in museums, standing at the top of the highest tower with his hands raised as if trying to stop something that could not be stopped.
His eyes were amber, the color of honey lit by the sun, and on his forehead shone a symbol: a double spiral spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time, emitting a golden light that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Every time those amber eyes gazed into his in his dreams, a voice, her voice, he somehow knew it was hers even though he had never heard it in his waking life, whispered a name that sounded like music and prayer at the same time: “Auraléa... find me. Remember us. Finish what we started.”
Auraléa reached for her phone on the nightstand with trembling hands. It was 3:47 a.m. The red digital numbers glowed in the darkness of the room. It was too early to consider waking up and starting the day, too late to hope to fall back asleep comfortably.
She opened her notes app, a document that already contained dozens of entries about the same dream, starting exactly three months ago, on August 2. Every night since then, without exception, the dream had come. And every night, the details became sharper, more complete, as if the fog covering ancient memories was slowly lifting.
With fingers still slightly trembling, she began typing a new entry:
“November 2, 3:47 a.m. The dream again, but more intense. This time I could feel the texture of crystals beneath my feet, warm and trembling like something alive. I heard voices... a language I didn’t know but somehow understood. They were panicking. Something was wrong. The water was rising. An earthquake. And that man... he was trying to save something.
Saving ME. He shouted my name in that foreign language, but I understood: ‘Auraléa! Hold my hand! We have to get to the portal before... ’ And then I woke up.”
Auraléa stopped typing and stared at the screen, her eyes beginning to sting. This didn’t make sense. It made no sense at all.
She was a scientist. An archaeologist with a master’s degree from UI and a summer course at the University of Oxford. Her entire career was built on the foundations of empiricism and evidence-based methodology. Radiocarbon dating, stratigraphic analysis, comparative mythology studies, those were her tools. Not mystical dreams about civilizations that may never have existed.
Lemuria. Atlantis. Mu. Hyperborea. Lost continents mentioned in various mythologies and pseudoscientific texts. He had read a lot about them during his undergraduate studies, mostly to understand how myths and legends could be formed from misinterpretations of natural disasters or distorted collective memories.
But never, not even once, did she believe they actually existed.
And now? Now she was dreaming about one of them in detail that should have been impossible for the imagination to create without a reference point.
Her phone vibrated, causing Auraléa to almost drop it. It was a WhatsApp message from Professor Hartono, her thesis advisor in the UI doctoral program.
“Auraléa, I know it’s early in the morning, but I just received some urgent information and immediately thought of you. There has been an extraordinary discovery in East Java, a hidden temple found by farmers on the slopes of Mount Arjuno. Preliminary surveys show that the architecture does not match any of the temples in our database.
And the inscriptions... inscriptions with symbols that are completely unidentified. Not Pallava, not Kawi, not Sanskrit. A small team will head to the site tomorrow morning. Are you interested? This could be a breakthrough for your dissertation.”
Auraléa stared at the message, her heart beginning to beat faster with that familiar anticipation, the excitement of discovery that had always been her main motivation since she first fell in love with Indiana Jones as a child and then with real archaeology in college.
“Yes, Professor. Of course. What time do we leave?”
“6 a.m. from campus. Bring standard equipment. And Lea, there’s a documentary photographer from NatGeo who’ll be joining us. Not bad, free professional documentation.”
Auraléa smiled in the darkness. This was what she needed, real field research, real archaeological mysteries to solve, something to distract her mind from those increasingly disturbing dreams.
She couldn’t sleep anymore, so she got up and made coffee, spending a few hours before sunrise reviewing notes on East Javanese period temples and refreshing her knowledge of the unsolved script.
He had no idea that the discovery awaiting him on the slopes of Mount Arjuno would change everything he thought he knew about history, reality, and himself.
On the other side of Jakarta, in a minimalist studio apartment in the Kemang area with walls covered in stunning photos from across the archipelago, Kaelan Reza also couldn’t sleep.
However, unlike Auraléa, who had just awakened from her dream, Kaelan deliberately avoided sleep. For two days, he had survived on brief naps of no more than twenty minutes, afraid that if he fell into a deep sleep, the dream would return.
The dream about the crystal city under three moons.
The dream about the woman with emerald green eyes and hair that shone like moonlight.
A dream about a life he could never live, but felt more real than his current life.
He sat in front of his three-monitor setup, the high-end computer he needed to edit his high-resolution photos. But tonight, his screens did not display Lightroom or Photoshop. Instead, the screens were filled with browser tabs, articles about Lemuria, Atlantis, ancient civilizations, the collective unconscious, reincarnation theory, and genetic memory.
And in the open Moleskine sketchbook on the side table, drawn with obsessive detail, was the face that had haunted his dreams for three consecutive months.
The woman.
Every detail of her face was etched into Kaelan’s memory with an impossible clarity, the curve of her cheekbones, the precise shape of her almond-shaped eyes, the way her hair seemed to catch and reflect light like fiber optic cables. And most distinctive of all: the symbol on her forehead, identical to the one he saw on his own forehead in those dreams.
A glowing double spiral that somehow he knew the name of in a language that did not exist on earth: Sigillum Animarum. The Seal of Souls.
“Who are you?” Kaelan whispered to the sketch for the thousandth time. “And why do I feel like I’m missing half of myself without you?”
In those dreams, he was never Kaelan Reza, a twenty-eight-year-old photographer from Jakarta. He was someone else, someone older, someone powerful, someone with a name that rolled off his tongue with familiarity even though it was completely foreign: Altheron Luminaris, Guardian of the Crystal Tower, Protector of the Gate Between Worlds.
And the woman... her name was music. Auraléa.
She was Auraléa.
An email notification made Kaelan blink and refocus. A new assignment from NatGeo Indonesia, a newly discovered temple in East Java, needed to be documented as soon as possible, an archaeology team from UI would be surveying tomorrow, interested?
Kaelan’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. He had two other pending assignments, but there was something about this one, something in his chest that felt tight with an irrational recognition, telling him he had to go.
Without thinking twice, he typed a reply: “Yes. Send me the details. I’ll be there.”
He didn’t know why, but in his bones, in the place where dreams came from, he somehow knew: whatever awaited him on the slopes of Mount Arjuno would change everything.
And he was right.
Morning arrived. Both Auraléa and Kaelan prepared for what they thought would be just another ordinary archaeological survey.
Neither of them realized that when they met at the ancient temple hidden on the mist-shrouded slopes of the mountain, a chain of events that had been dormant for thousands of years would finally, inevitably, begin.
The wheel of fate began to turn once more.
And this time, the stakes were not just one lost civilization.
This time, the very structure of reality itself hung in the balance.
