Echoes of Forgotten Wings

Chapter 1- The Sound of Silence

Like a soft sigh, time ebbed away in this remote hamlet nestled in the mountains where days frowned into years without any visible change. It was a peaceful life, a life where calm was almost sacred and where the inhabitants moved as though their every step and every utterance carried some significance, which they were able to do only partially. The few words that are uttered are little more than a whisper against the blanket of silence that wraps everything. They were in the mountains, in the fog, far from the busy world, as if time had quieted to a slow, pleasant hum.

In this subdued picture, there was a young boy named Ivo who knew how to be in the painful yet soothing her of stillness. He longed for that tranquility more than most children would, who played more erratically and with the indelible noise of laughter. His love for the stillness was something that none of his mom or even his age mates would ever comprehend. It was as if he was aware of that which was behind the clamor of normal life – the river in the village, the leaves at the periphery, the wind slipping and infusing between stones of the houses. But within the quiet, he recognized something primordial; something that held existence – silence was a sound, the sound of silences, which contained information that he had not yet been able to interpret.

Ivo had agree with the perspective of the father and even try to express the depth of pain; it actually cannot be expressed. "Yes. They're... gigantic, shattered. It seems as though they are suffering."

But his father had merely sighed, his face adopting that faraway expression, the one that showed he had already started to withdraw from the discussion. "They are nothing more than winged vision Ivo. There is no sense in allowing your brain to get caught up in such make-believe. Confront the truth."

Yet in Ivo's perception, those dreams were not only products of fancy. He felt them throbbing inside him, an unsaid truth echoing inside the stillness of the village, inside the very ground. It was as if a long-forgotten entity was lying dormant under the placid surface of the village, a presence that still existed and was simply waiting. There was something about it that he could not comprehend but that he understood to be important, dangerous even. It was very similar to the force generated by the ocean, to a point, but what that implied was unclear.

Lately, however, it was the silence – heavy and almost palpable – that had started to change, as if it was simply holding its breath in readiness for something that was yet to come.

The ancients, in whose respectable presence spoke no evil fear, carried that which they were not free to articulate. Ivo spotted it in how their hands would shake ever so slightly with the rising wind, how certain words made their eyes shift to the dark corners. If they returned late, they kept away from the extremes of the village, and turned their heads up as though there was something frightening in the air. But instead of provoking fear in Ivo, it only intensified his interest, as if an extra layer had been provided over the reason behind the unwillingness to talk about such things.

Oddly enough, Ivo was not troubled by the sky above. Instead, the source of his discomfort was below, somewhere out of the innocence in the air, in the unsaid burden bearing down on the township. Time seemed to flit away like a dove, deep in the sepulchral womb of memories, whereas mangled feathers and tempests plagued his sleep, choking him with an unbearable pressure that lingered.

But it was out of the blue, when this turned out to be an ordinary day, that things started to change. The sun was just rising above the misty heights, pale beams of light breaking out across the shrouded valleys, when a thick and ghostly fog descended from the hills, creeping through the trees and throwing sharp shadows about the ghostly settlement. Ivo awoke from yet another dream, the same old vision of torn wings still vivid in his head. But not today. Today was different. It was a voice – unrelenting and ground-piercing in the dream within the storm, and yet, reaching out to him in a gentle audible whisper.