Prologue - The Day No One Remembered
Kiara
I've always believed in the unimaginable.
Seeing something rise from the ground—twisting, shifting, attacking—that changes a person. And watching it vanish as though it had never existed? That unsettles you in ways nothing else can.
The worst part was that no one else saw it. They were all there, standing beside me, but when I screamed, when I panicked, they looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Like I was just a child with an overactive imagination.
From that moment on, words like strange and delusional followed me everywhere.
My foster family wanted me to forget. To move on. At twelve, people humored the odd girl with her impossible stories. But by sixteen? By twenty-one? That's when the amusement faded. When the concern crept in.
And I'll admit—part of me was afraid. Afraid they were right. That maybe something inside me had fractured that day, leaving me clinging to a fantasy just to make sense of it all. Because no matter how hard I searched, I never found a trace of it again.
But another part—the part that never quieted, never dulled—kept burning. With conviction. With curiosity. With the unshakable certainty that I wasn't broken.
Years passed, but that fire never let go. Because letting go would have meant surrendering. Admitting they were right. That I had imagined everything.
But all the searching, all the questioning, all the relentless wondering—none of it prepared me for what came next.
