Narrator: Katarina (future mom from Rebecca and Brunna)

The village had no name.

It lay hidden among the mountains in northern Skyrim, so remote that not even merchants ever reached it. In winter, snow covered the rooftops for eight months. In summer, the thaw turned the streets to mud.

The people there were hard and silent. They gazed at the horizon as if waiting for something—but they never said what.

It was there I was born. It was there I learned to walk, to speak, and to hold my tongue.

And it was there I found the cave.

I was eight or nine years old when I discovered the fissure behind the waterfall.

The water made no sound that day. The noise had simply vanished, as if the world were holding its breath. I should have run home. But curiosity won out.

I stepped inside.

The darkness within the cave was unlike the darkness of night. It was denser, heavier—as if the air had turned to water and I was diving into a black lake.

Something was there.

Not a creature. Not a being with eyes and teeth. Something older. A presence that occupied no space, yet filled everything.

It spoke. Not with words—but with thoughts that were not my own.

*You feel it. That which lies dormant. That which has always been here.*

My hands moved of their own accord. They groped along the dark ground. My fingers found something smooth, cold, and vibrant.

A fragment.

It was not stone. Not bone. Not metal. It was a piece of something greater—something that had been shattered, scattered, and forgotten.

*Take it.*

My fingers closed around it. Pain struck instantly—not physical pain, but pain of the soul. It was as if something were being torn from me while something else was implanted in its place.

I screamed. Or perhaps I didn't. The silence swallowed everything. When I woke up, I was lying at the edge of the pool behind the waterfall.

The water was making noise again. There was no fragment in my hand. But something had changed.

I perceived the world in a new way. The trees had voices. The stones held memories. The wind carried scents I had never noticed before.

I spent the following years learning to hide. The village did not forgive those who were different. I had already seen what they did to the strange ones—those who talked to themselves, those who knew things they shouldn't.

I pretended to be normal.

But deep inside, the fragment pulsed.

And in time, I learned to use it.

When I turned sixteen, I left the village.

There were no farewells. No tears. Just me, the road, and the fragment burning within my chest like a black flame.

I never returned.

Not out of anger. But because the place I had known, the girl I had been—all of that had died inside the cave, along with the silence, along with the voice.

I was no longer Katarina, the daughter of no one.

I was Katarina, the one who carried a fragment of what came before the gods.

And that, I knew, would make me both powerful and cursed.