Nathan La Gracious stood by the window of his second-story bedroom, arms crossed over the windowsill as he watched raindrops chase one another down the glass.
It had been raining all morning, a slow, steady fall that turned the world into a soft blur of grey and green.
To most six-year-olds, this would be a gloomy day—no recess, no backyard games, just the tapping of water and the silence of being stuck indoors.
But Nathan didn't mind the rain. The rain was quiet. It muted the noise.
Not the noise outside, but the noise in his mind.
He didn't know when it had truly started—maybe on his fifth birthday, maybe before—but he remembered the moment he became aware of it. Thoughts. Not his own. Voices without mouths. Words spoken without sound. He had tried to explain it once to his mother, but she just smiled and tousled his hair.
"You've got a big imagination, sweet boy," she said.
He hadn't brought it up again.
Now, a year later, Nathan knew better. He had learned how to tell which thoughts were his, and which belonged to others. He had learned that people often thought very differently from what they said. He had learned that adults rarely spoke their full truth, and that children—like him—often said the opposite of what they meant without even realizing it.
It was like living in a world made of glass: everything transparent, exposed, and yet no one seemed to notice but him.
He turned away from the window and sat on the floor beside his bed, pulling a small notebook from underneath. In shaky letters, he had written: "Rules for the Voices."
Below it were notes only he could make sense of.
Don't answer them out loud.
People lie with words, not thoughts.
Sometimes thoughts come from *nowhere*.
That last one still scared him.
He hadn't told anyone, not even in the notebook, that sometimes he heard thoughts when no one was around. Not human thoughts, at least. Thoughts that felt... old. Heavy. Distant, like an echo through a tunnel that had never been built. Thoughts that whispered his name before he even knew what they meant.
He closed the notebook and tucked it away again.
School that day was uneventful on the outside. The teacher droned on about vowels and spelling tests. Nathan sat quietly, listening more to the thoughts in the room than the lesson on the board.
A boy named Mikey was worried about losing his soccer game. A girl named Emma kept thinking about her mom being late for pickup again. The teacher, Ms. Cartwright, was thinking about a man named James and whether she should have texted him back.
Nathan sat still, eyes forward, but his mind was alive. Buzzing. It always was.
At recess, the rain had let up just enough for the kids to be let outside. Nathan drifted to the edge of the yard, where the old oak tree stood—gnarled and thick-rooted, its branches like ancient arms stretched toward the sky.
He liked this tree. It didn't have thoughts.
He sat beneath it, closing his eyes, trying to quiet his mind, when something strange happened.
"I see you."
The voice wasn't loud, but it wasn't imagined either. It was clear. Clean. Almost… still.
Nathan's eyes snapped open. He scanned the playground. Children were shouting, running, laughing. A girl nearby was singing a rhyme to herself. No one was looking at him.
His heart beat faster.
"You hear them, don't you? The thoughts."
His mouth felt dry. He swallowed hard and stood up slowly, trying not to draw attention.
"Who are you?" he whispered, not sure whether he was speaking to the wind, to his own mind, or to something else entirely.
There was no reply.
But something had shifted. A pressure in the air. The wind stirred through the branches of the oak tree above, and in the distance, beyond the schoolyard fence, the woods stood tall and still—watching.
Nathan didn't know how he knew it, but he felt it deep in his chest:
This was not just a voice. It was a beginning.
The beginning of something ancient. Something hidden.
Something that had been waiting for him.