Lyra Solane had never liked silence.
Because silence wasn't truly silent.
If you listened closely—really listened—you could always hear something crawling just beneath it: the low hum of electricity in the walls, the faraway murmur of wind bending trees, or, if you were unlucky like her, something stranger… something that sounded like it knew you were listening.
It began the night the stars refused to blink.
Rivenhollow was a quiet town. Tucked between two forgotten highways and swallowed by pine and fog, it rarely made headlines or memories. People were born here, worked here, and died here without ever questioning why the sky never changed.
Lyra questioned it every day.
She'd stare at it for hours, wondering why the stars in Rivenhollow didn't twinkle like the ones on TV. Why the clouds sometimes froze mid-drift. Why the moon occasionally vanished—not dimmed, but disappeared completely.
She asked her mother once.
"Just your imagination," her mother had said with a tired smile. "You've always seen the world differently."
That much was true.
But on the night it all began, Lyra didn't just see something strange.
She heard it.
It was 3:17 AM when the whisper first came.
She was in her room, wide awake, surrounded by notebooks, wires, and her favorite cheap microphone that buzzed on its own even when unplugged. Sleep never came easily. Not with her mind always on, racing to figure out what the world was hiding.
She was recording "ambient silence" for a sound experiment. That was her new obsession—capturing quiet. Every night she uploaded audio to an app that filtered frequencies below human hearing. Just to see what she might catch.
And then—something caught her.
A sudden distortion sliced through the static in her headphones. The buzz turned to rhythm: low-high-low, like sonar. Then static again.
Then, it spoke.
"You were not meant to wake."
Lyra froze.Goosebumps rose on her arms like something had breathed directly into her ear.
She yanked off the headphones. Her breath caught. Her heart thundered in her chest.
No one was in the room.
She replayed the audio.It was still there—a whisper curling through the quiet like fog through broken glass.Unfamiliar. Unnatural.
Not a person. Not a machine.
Something else.
Something... above.
Outside her window, the world looked the same.The moon hung still. The sky shimmered with too many stars, far too bright for this time of night.
It was beautiful. But it wasn't right.
She stepped away from the mic, suddenly aware of how loud her heartbeat was.
The next morning, Rivenhollow felt like it had shifted a few degrees to the left.
The air had a strange taste—metallic, like she'd chewed on a battery.Birds didn't sing. Trees stood too still.
And people… they moved like they were sleepwalking.
Even her best friend, Juno, was off.
They met at their usual spot behind the library, where the windows were always dusty and no one asked questions.
"You good?" Lyra asked.
Juno blinked, slowly, like her brain was waking from a nap.
"I think I lost time," she whispered. "I swear I was at home, and now I'm here."
"Sleepwalking?" Lyra asked gently.
"Maybe." Juno frowned. "But I don't think I've ever dreamed with my eyes open before."
Lyra spent the afternoon in the library's back room, where she connected her recording equipment to an old frequency visualizer she'd begged the science teacher to lend her.
She ran the whisper through it again and again.
Nothing matched. Not pirate radio. Not Morse code. Not sonar. Not satellite bounce.
It wasn't a language.
It was a warning.
"You were not meant to wake."
From what?
And who—or what—was speaking?
She stared at the waveform. At the long dead space between peaks of static.Then something strange happened.
The waveform moved. On its own.It bent into a shape. Three jagged peaks. Then paused.
Then the screen typed on its own.
wake_wake_wake
Her fingers twitched. Her breath hitched.
She slammed the laptop shut.
By evening, Lyra felt like a thread being slowly pulled out of the fabric of reality.
Every reflection felt delayed. Her phone glitched. Streetlights dimmed when she passed beneath them. Even time seemed wrong—she blinked, and entire minutes were missing.
She tried to tell her mother.
"There's something off with the sky," she whispered.
Her mother only looked at her with tired eyes. "It's just stress. You spend too much time staring into the dark."
"I think the dark is staring back."
Her mother didn't respond.
At 11:41 PM, Lyra sat back at her desk, her microphone on. Headphones in. Recorder armed.
The world outside was too quiet. The kind of quiet that suffocated.
She hit RECORD.
And this time, the sky didn't whisper.
It screamed.
"Transmission compromised. 43.7... breach detected... anomaly confirmed."
The voice was layered. Mechanical. But laced with pain. It stuttered like an old VHS tape. Then shifted into something human. Too human.
"Lyra Solane. You were not meant to wake."
And then came crying.
Soft, mournful sobs—filtered through static and wind, as if someone were grieving in a cave miles above the clouds.
Her fingers trembled.
She pressed STOP.
The recording froze.
Then the screen went black.
White text blinked across the monitor. Not typed. Branded.
THE SKY IS NOT YOURS. IT NEVER WAS.
Lyra didn't scream.
She didn't cry.
She simply whispered back.
"Then who does it belong to?"