Everyone blamed her.
The whole world seemed to be against her.
She had grown used to it by now—how eyes lingered a little too long, how voices dropped to whispers when she passed. But even so, her heart still ached. Loneliness had built walls around her, but some things—like longing—slipped through anyway.
Since the dream, she had felt different. Not just haunted, but stirred—like something deep within her had woken up. A glowing door. A forest bathed in light. A boy she had almost forgotten… until he returned to her in sleep, smiling gently from the edges of memory.
It felt too real to be just a dream.
Too specific.
Too urgent.
She didn't know what it meant, or why it had come to her now—but the dream planted something inside her. A question she couldn't ignore.
Had the boy remembered her too?
Had that door—so warm and strange—really existed?
After that night, a quiet fire bloomed within her: a longing not just for the past, but for a future where things could change. If she could find that door, if she could see him again… maybe she could finally escape the shadows cast over her life.
So she began her search.
Not because she read a legend in a book, but because the dream felt like a message—a memory wearing the skin of a mystery.
Book by book, shelf by shelf, she scoured every dusty corner of the village library. It was her haven, her second home, and now, her silent ally in a new search. But even here, even among her oldest friends—the books—she found no answers.
No clues. Not even a whisper of anything resembling a door of light.
So she turned to the forests.
There were five of them scattered around the edges of her town—dense, winding places that most people avoided after dusk. The kind of places where myths liked to hide.
She didn't know which one might hold the answer.
So she made a quiet promise to herself:
She would explore them all. One by one.
Maybe something would guide her. A sign. A feeling. Anything.
Her search began on a cloudy afternoon, the kind that felt like the sky itself was holding its breath. She stepped into the first forest with her journal tucked under her arm and her heart pounding in her ears.
It was peaceful. Quiet in a way that felt safe. But nothing unusual happened.
No glowing doors. No voices in the wind.
Only leaves. Birds. Earth.
She returned home, feet aching, but undeterred.
And so it continued. Each week, she visited another forest—sometimes after school, sometimes at sunrise before the world awoke. She kept going, even when the silence began to weigh on her. She couldn't explain why, but something deep inside her urged her not to stop.
Then came something strange.
In each forest, without fail, she found a single feather.
They weren't the usual kind. Not fallen from birds she recognized. These shimmered faintly—silver with hints of blue, almost iridescent in the light. Delicate. Out of place.
She found the first one near the roots of a crooked tree. The second tucked beneath a patch of moss. The third on a flat rock, as though waiting for her.
At first, she thought it was coincidence.
By the fourth, she started to wonder.
By the fifth, she knew.
It meant something.
She pressed each feather carefully into her journal, letting them mark the pages like quiet milestones on a path only she could see.
And then—on her fifth forest visit—something changed.
The air felt heavier. Thicker. The trees stood taller somehow, their shadows longer. The silence wasn't peaceful anymore. It was loaded. Watching.
As she stepped deeper into the woods, the wind slowed until it stopped completely. Leaves rustled without breeze, and the branches of the trees swayed with an unnatural rhythm—like they were whispering to one another.
A shiver traced her spine.
Still, she walked.
She didn't speak. Didn't dare.
The deeper she went, the more the forest seemed to bend around her. Shapes shifted at the corners of her vision. And there—just beyond a cluster of silver-leaved trees—she heard it.
A whisper.
It was faint. Too faint to understand. But it was real. Like a memory being spoken back to her by the trees.
She froze.
Then, slowly, she whispered back.
"I'm not afraid."
The forest said nothing in return. But somehow, the silence that followed felt… warmer.
She left before sunset, heart racing—not from fear, but from the feeling that she had brushed up against something ancient. Something that had heard her.
That night, unable to sleep, she opened a box beneath her bed. It was filled with keepsakes—old notebooks, dried flowers, ticket stubs from long ago. Things from a life that once felt full.
And there, tucked between the pages of a worn storybook they had read together, she found a photograph.
It showed the two of them—her and the boy—sitting beneath a twisted tree with bark like scars and roots that curled like claws. He was holding a feather in his hand.
On the back, in his unmistakable handwriting, were five simple words:
"Forest of Whispers – 20th April, 2025."
Her breath caught.
The Forest of Whispers.
She had never been there. It was farther than she'd ever dared to explore. Locals spoke of strange things in that place—disappearances, dreams, visions that clung to your skin.
But now, she had a name. A place. A memory.
And a date that was drawing closer.
She pressed the photograph to her chest and closed her eyes.
No more searching without direction.
No more questions without hope.
She would go.
She had to.