Born of Shadows, Raised by Dawn

I was born where the sun never reached.

Where dust clung to stone walls like memories too heavy to shake off, and every hallway whispered a secret no one dared speak aloud.

They say babies cry when they first arrive in this world.

I didn’t.

I listened.

Because the shadows weren’t silent.

They spoke in the hush between midnight and morning—telling stories of those who vanished, those who hid, and those who survived.

And I survived.

The people who found me called it a miracle.

“A baby,” the woman said, wrapping me in the warmth of her voice. “Left on the steps of the Eastern Chapel just before sunrise.”

The first rays of day hadn’t quite cracked open the horizon, but she said I looked… expectant. As though I’d been waiting—not to be saved, but to begin.

They gave me a name tied to the morning.

Aurelia.

It means “golden one.”

I didn’t tell them that I had never seen the sun until then. That shadows had rocked me to sleep, not lullabies.

But they wouldn’t have believed me.

I grew up in a village where everything bloomed under daylight.

Linen drying on lines.

Children chasing sunbeams like butterflies.

Old men carving wood with the windows open so the scent of pine could find its way home.

They taught me light.

They taught me warmth.

But I never quite forgot the shape of silence.

At night, I would lie awake, listening to the world’s exhale. The crickets. The creaks in the floorboards. The wind pressing gently against my window, like it remembered my name.

That was when the shadows returned—not to haunt me, but to remind me:

“You are ours, too.”

I never feared them.

You only fear what you don’t understand. And I understood them too well.

But still, I craved the dawn.

Because the light told a different story. One of blooming, becoming, breathing fully.

I remember the first time I stood barefoot in a dewy field at sunrise. The way the grass cooled my soles and the sun warmed my crown.

It felt like both halves of me finally shook hands.

The shadow-child.

And the sun-daughter.

There were others who never saw the balance.

“You’re too quiet,” they’d say.

“You stare too long.”

“Why do you always go walking at night?”

I didn’t have answers that made sense to people who feared the dark.

So I smiled. I laughed. I gave them pieces of the sun so they wouldn’t ask about the moonlight stitched into my skin.

But in secret, I kept a journal of dreams.

Of doorways between dusk and dawn.

Of voices that sounded like wind but spoke in truths.

Then came the fire.

It started in the forest beyond the chapel—where wild things lived and legends slept.

They said it was lightning.

I said it was a reckoning.

Flames tore through the trees like they were paper. The sky turned copper. Smoke filled every breath. People ran.

I didn’t.

I walked into the smoke.

Because something in me whispered:

You belong to both ends of the day. Now choose who you’ll become.

I found her at the center of the flames.

An old woman, bent and burning—not from fire, but from grief.

“The forest remembers,” she said, her voice as dry as ash. “But no one listens.”

I listened.

She pressed a stone into my palm. Cool, obsidian. It pulsed.

“You’ve walked both worlds,” she said. “Now walk between them.”

The fire receded. Not because it was done, but because it had delivered its message.

I walked back to the village, soot-streaked and silent.

They called it a miracle again.

But I had simply remembered who I was.

Now I stand at the edge of things.

At the place where shadow and dawn shake hands.

I walk children through their nightmares.

I plant seeds in graveyards.

I light candles in abandoned places just so they remember someone still sees them.

I am not healer.

I am not prophet.

I am something quieter.

A hinge.

A bridge.

A whisper between worlds.

People come to me now—not to ask, but to sit.

And I sit with them.

In their silences. In their shame. In the strange grief that has no name.

I tell them:

“You don’t have to choose.”

Because I didn’t.

I was born of shadows.

I was raised by dawn.

And both made me whole.