DYLAN'S POV
Cassandra’s voice washed over me like a dream I wasn’t part of.
She spoke of the aircraft crash, how she’d found me bleeding, barely alive, a grown man.
Not a child.
I tried to listen. I really did. But her words felt… distant. Distant and cold, like echoes bouncing off the inside of a hollow skull.
She’s so sure of what she saw… but how? And why does it sound nothing like what I was told?
My head pulsed with the weight of the contradiction.
And then I remembered. A voice. One I’d clung to like it was gospel.
“You were just a boy when we found you,” Ethenia had said, her tone always gentle but unyielding. “You might not be able to remember it because of what happened to you, but you are an orphan. Abandoned in the forest, half-dead, terrified.”
I’d believed her. Of co
