Adea, 1997 – The Fall of the Old World
The house shook when the shots began.
Adea didn't flinch.
She was used to it — the stutter of bullets through broken glass, the hiss of gas leaking from cracked pipes, the sirens that never stopped. It was 1997 in Albania, and the country was breaking apart like a rotted hull splitting under the weight of lies.
The banks had collapsed. The government, gone. The streets belonged to gang lords with gold chains and blood on their boots. Families sold their daughters for bread. Children disappeared like smoke.
It wasn't war.
It was something worse: the kind of chaos that made people forget they were human.
Her mother tried to keep order inside the house. She swept the same broken tiles every morning. Lit candles even when there was no power. Prayed over cold beans and silence.
Her father?
Gone for days at a time.
Sometimes came back drunk. Sometimes didn't come back at all.
Adea didn't ask where he went.
Only that when he returned, there was always something in his eyes that wasn't there before — something heavy, something broken, something that didn't belong to the man who used to tuck her into bed with bedtime stories and lullabies.
Once, she overheard him whisper to her mother:
"There's no future here. Only graves."
But Adea — seventeen years old, barefoot in red shoes she found in a trash pile — refused to believe that.
Because something ancient pulsed in her chest.
And it was still alive.
She didn't know where the dreams came from.
They came in flashes, fragments.
A sword drawn in the dark.
A veil soaked in blood.
A girl in the snow, holding a rifle like it was part of her body.
She'd wake up gasping, heart racing.
Sometimes she'd wake up crying.
Sometimes… smiling.
"You've been here before," the dreams whispered.
"You didn't bow then. Don't bow now."
She kept a journal under her mattress — filled with stories she didn't remember writing.
Names: Ajkuna. Elira. Lume.
Tales of rebellion, of escape, of girls who were told to kneel and chose instead to burn. Her hands shook when she wrote, but her heart — her heart beat like a war drum.
She didn't understand it.
Only that it felt more real than anything outside.
Outside was silence.
Rage.
Men with guns.
Girls who vanished.