Chapter Two The Mountain of Memory #3
“You are not being raised to become a prisoner.”
Claire swallowed hard.
“Then what am I becoming?”
Her mother smiled sadly.
“Someone who can walk between worlds.”
Claire lowered her gaze.
“The old world.”
“The modern world.”
“The hidden one beneath both.”
And suddenly she understood why her grandfather always looked so tired.
His generation had spent their entire lives trying to keep those worlds apart.
Hers would have to learn how to survive all three at once.
At first the dream made no sense.
It arrived in fragments.
Sound before image.
Stone before memory.
Claire drifted somewhere between sleep and drowning, suspended inside darkness filled with distant vibrations that did not belong to thunder.
The earth was moving.
Not gently.
Violently.
Ancient trees bent beneath invisible force while mountains groaned like living things awakening beneath the world.
Then came light.
Silver light spilled across black water.
Claire saw the lake again.
But not as she had ever known it.
The crater was whole.
Vast beyond comprehension.
Its waters stretched like polished obsidian beneath the night sky, perfectly still despite the trembling earth around it.
Surrounding the inner edges of the crater stood the obelisks.
Massive crystalline monoliths rising from the shoreline like the broken teeth of giants.
Some stood hundreds of feet high.
Translucent beneath moonlight.
Threaded internally with glowing silver veins that pulsed slowly like breath.
Others had already fractured, collapsed into the lake.
As the earthquake deepened, more began to fall.
The sound was unbearable.
Not crashing.
Singing.
The crystals emitted deep harmonic tones as they shuddered against the black water below, sending rings of silver resonance across the lake’s surface.
Claire stared upward and froze.
There were two moons.
One hung pale and familiar above the mountains.
The other, smaller.
Bluish.
Almost transparent.
Hovered lower in the sky like a ghost reflection trapped between worlds.
As light struck the crater differently, the first moon reflected normally.
The second distorted the water.
Time itself seemed to bend beneath its reflection.
Claire watched the lake ripple unnaturally.
Showing impossible images beneath its surface.
Cities not yet built.
Forests long extinct.
Creatures moving beneath the water larger than ships.
Two immense koi swimming together.
Yin and yang.
The second moon was not merely reflecting the world.
It was revealing overlapping realities.
The earthquake intensified.
Across the crater’s edge, figures ran desperately between the obelisks, carrying lanterns and bundles of scrolls while temple bells echoed wildly through the mountains.
The ancients knew something catastrophic was happening.
Then the largest obelisk cracked.
A fracture of blinding silver split down its centre.
The entire crater responded instantly.
The lake surged violently upward.
And from beneath the water, something enormous moved.
Not attacking.
Awakening.
Claire saw colossal forms descending deeper into the blackness beneath the crater.
Retreating from the surface world itself.
Maylion.
Or what humanity would one day reduce to the myth of a dragon.
Crystalline bodies illuminated the depths like constellations vanishing beneath an ocean.
Leaving again.
The dream shifted suddenly.
Time fractured forward.
The second moon faded.
The crater became quieter.
Smaller.
Human.
Now the shoreline was crowded with refugees.
Smoke rose from distant villages.
The great obelisk still remained.
Damaged now.
Half-submerged around the crater’s edge like a broken guardian drowned by time.
The earthquake had changed everything.
Trade routes collapsed.
Governments fractured.
Militias rose from the chaos.
And the descendants—
those tied to the crater and its resonance—
began disappearing.
Claire drifted through the dream like memory itself.
Faces blurred past her.
Families fleeing mountain villages.
Children carried through forests at night.
Lanterns hidden beneath blankets to avoid detection.
The atmosphere was no longer ancient and mythical.
It was painfully human.
Fear.
Hunger.
Survival.
And she saw herself again.
Not herself.
One who had come before.
Older than the Jeju memory that was yet to come.
Softer somehow.
Running through rain-soaked mountain paths toward Busan and the coastal villages, carrying what little remained of their lives.
The crater had become too dangerous.
Search parties spread through nearby provinces.
Some wanted the crystals.
Others wanted control of the families who guarded them.
Rumours spread faster than truth.
Witchcraft.
Sacred bloodlines.
Weapons hidden beneath mountains.
The descendants were hunted by stories as much as soldiers.
“Keep moving.”
Voices echoed through the dark forest.
Claire stumbled over wet stone, breathless, clutching a wrapped cloth close against her chest.
Claire did not speak much after that night.
Not because she was frightened anymore.
Because something inside her had settled.
The pressure she had carried for years.
The confusion.
The strange distance between herself and others.
It finally had shape now.
Not answers exactly.
But structure.
The crystal remained hidden inside the small stuffed ornament attached to her dance bag.
Close.
Quiet.
Alive.
It never left her room.
It never left her side.
And for the first time since leaving Korea, Claire stopped seeing it as a chain.
Instead, it felt like an inheritance.
She threw herself harder into her training after that.
Dance.
Languages.
Acting classes.
Movement workshops brought over from Seoul and Busan.
Her instructors praised her discipline but often criticised the same thing.
“You hold back emotionally.”
“Technically excellent.”
“But guarded.”
Claire never knew how to explain that emotion was not difficult for her.
It was overwhelming.
Acting exhausted her because pretending was difficult when she spent most of her life trying not to reveal too much of what she genuinely felt.
Imogen thrived effortlessly in front of cameras and crowds.
She could charm entire rooms naturally, borrowing energy from everyone around her without losing herself within it.
Claire envied that sometimes.
When Claire performed, she disappeared completely.
Climbing back out afterward was exhausting.
Still, she improved.
Rapidly.
Almost frighteningly fast.
Once she understood how to reach inward instead of outward.
Her mother noticed immediately.
“You’ve stopped resisting it,” she said one evening after class.
Claire looked down quietly.
“I think I finally understand what acting is.”
“And what’s that?”
Claire hesitated.
“Remembering feelings that don’t fully belong to you.”
Her mother went silent after that.
Then she said quietly,
“One day you’ll meet the girl who remembered tomorrow.”
“And when you do, you’ll understand a little more.”
That night the dream came again.
But this time it was not the crater.
It was not the water dragons.
Not crystal cities beneath black water.
This memory belonged to mankind.
And somehow that made it worse.
Rain lashed violently against dark waves.
Claire stood barefoot upon soaked wooden planks as dozens of villagers crowded together near the shoreline beneath torchlight and chaos.
People shouted.
Cried.
Prayed.
The smell of seawater mixed with smoke.