ikedisam
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*Chapter 1: The Day the Birds Stopped*
The Wall came on a Tuesday.
Nobody saw it rise. One morning it just _was_, stretching higher than the clouds, black as a bruise, cutting the city of Veyra in half. The stones were smooth, with veins of green light that pulsed like slow breathing.
Kael was ten the day it arrived. He remembers because it was also the day the birds stopped singing.
His mother said it was for protection. "There are things on the other side," she whispered, hanging iron charms on the windows. "Things that remember our names."
Nobody was allowed near the Wall. The Guard patrolled it day and night, their faces hidden behind masks shaped like screaming mouths. If you touched it, they said, you'd hear voices. If you listened too long, you'd walk into it and never come back.
But Kael was ten, and ten-year-olds are very good at finding trouble.
It happened three years later, when the wind from the north smelled like rust and sugar. He'd chased a ball into the dead zone - the hundred yards of empty street before the Wall where nothing grew.
That's when he saw the crack.
It was thin, barely wide enough for his eye, and the green light inside wasn't pulsing. It was _watching_.
He pressed his face to the cold stone.
On the other side, a girl was looking back.
She couldn't have been older than him. Dirt on her face. Blood on her lip. And her eyes - her eyes were gold, wide and unblinking, like a cat's.
She put a finger to her lips.
Then the screaming started. Not from her. From the Guard. From the sky. From the Wall itself.
Kael ran.
He didn't stop until he was home, under his bed, hands over his ears. But he could still hear her.
Not her voice. Her _silence_.
Because for the first time in three years, Kael realized something that made his stomach turn to ice.
The birds hadn't stopped singing.
They'd been listening.
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Want me to continue with *Chapter 2*.