🌾 Whispers of the Countryside
Chapter One: The Quiet Life
The countryside breathed in rhythms soft and slow — wind in the trees, birds in the hedges, and the hush of golden fields stretching to the horizon. Nestled between those fields, half-forgotten by the world, stood a small wooden cottage with ivy crawling up its walls and wildflowers blooming at its doorstep.
Inside that cottage lived a woman named Elara.
She moved through her days with quiet purpose, speaking more often to the chickens than to people. The town was a long walk away, and she only visited when she absolutely had to — when flour ran out or the weather demanded extra wool. She preferred her solitude. Or at least, that's what she told herself.
Elara had lived alone since she was a girl. Her parents had died in a carriage accident when she was just ten, leaving her to be raised by an aging aunt who passed not long after. Since then, the house had become hers — a place of memory, of healing, and of silence.
She tended the garden in the mornings, wrote in her journal in the afternoons, and listened to the wind in the evenings. There was peace in her routine, and though it was lonely, it was predictable — and predictable felt safe.
But on one late autumn afternoon, as she clipped lavender in the fading light, something broke the quiet.
A noise. Sharp. Sudden.
Elara froze, pruning shears in hand, eyes scanning the edge of the trees. Birds had flown up in a rush moments earlier — startled. Her heart began to race, not with fear exactly, but with an instinct she couldn't name.
And then she saw him.
A man, stumbling from the woods, one hand clutched tightly to his side. His steps faltered. His shirt was torn, blood soaked through the fabric. He looked up at her — just once — and then collapsed at her gate.
Elara dropped the lavender and ran.
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To be continue