AN AMBULANCE PULLED UP TO MY MOM’S HOUSE, AND THE PARAMEDICS KNEW HER NAME
I scrambled down the porch steps, the blinding sun making it hard to see the chaos unfolding. My stomach clenched, twisting into knots as they wheeled her out on the stretcher, her face pale, almost translucent under the harsh midday sun, an oxygen mask covering her mouth. The urgent, pulsing siren vibrated through my bones, shaking the very ground beneath my feet.
Just as they were loading her, a sleek black car, so shiny it almost gleamed, skidded to a halt on the gravel driveway, tires crunching loudly. A woman I’d never seen before, dressed in immaculate white, stepped out with an air of profound authority. She moved with purpose, walking straight to the lead paramedic.
“Is Elara stable?” she demanded, her voice a low, urgent hum that sliced through the frantic air, smelling faintly of expensive, unfamiliar perfume. “The trust documents are still at the house; they need to be secured immediately.” The paramedic nodded grimly, then turned to me, his gaze unsettling. “She’s been checking in on your mother for weeks, ma’am. We thought you knew about… Elara.”
My heart hammered violently against my ribs, a chaotic drumbeat in my chest. Elara? Who in God’s name was Elara? That wasn’t my mother’s name, not the one I’d known for forty years. A sudden, piercing beep from the ambulance’s monitor cut through the suffocating silence, a stark interruption.
I watched the woman pull a small, tarnished locket from my mother’s neck before they drove off.
👇 Full story continued in the comments…The ambulance lights receded, swallowed by the shimmering heat of the afternoon. I was left standing on the sun-baked driveway, reeling. Elara. The woman in white. The locket. Everything was a bewildering puzzle.
“Who are you?” I finally managed, my voice raspy, directed at the woman in white who stood, now studying me with an unsettling intensity.
She turned, her features a study in composed elegance. “My name is Seraphina. I’m a… representative. Of a long-standing interest in your mother’s… well-being.” She paused, choosing her words with deliberate care. “Elara, as she’s known, possesses a unique… legacy. A responsibility that requires… discretion.”
“What legacy? What responsibility? What are you talking about?” My head swam with questions, each one more frantic than the last. The thought of some secret, some other life my mother had lived, was almost too much to bear.
Seraphina sighed, a delicate sound, as if the very air burdened her. “Your mother is a Keeper, charged with safeguarding a place, a gateway. The locket is a key. A key that must never be lost. The trust documents detail the procedures, the… protocols. We need to secure them, now.”
Following her into the house felt like stepping into a stranger’s life. The familiar scent of my mother’s home – lilac soap, brewing coffee, and old books – was somehow overlaid with an alien tension. Seraphina, moving with a predatory grace, began searching, her movements swift and precise.
We found the documents in the hidden compartment of an old oak writing desk. They were a series of coded instructions, maps of places I didn’t recognize, and cryptic notes. The language was ancient, almost forgotten. Reading it made the hairs on my arms stand on end.
Seraphina, translating, explained, “The gateway is hidden, not of this world. Your mother was charged with maintaining it, with preventing… intrusions. The locket is the key to its protection.”
Then, the phone rang. It was the hospital. My mother had passed.
The world tilted. Grief, a crushing weight, slammed into me. I sank to a chair, numb. Seraphina stood silently for a moment, then her face softened with something I couldn’t quite name.
“There are things that can be done,” she said quietly, her voice laced with a newfound sorrow. “Things your mother would want you to know, to understand. The legacy… it is now yours. We need to get to the gateway.”
At the foot of a waterfall, hidden in the forest, behind my mothers house, a faint shimmer, a distortion of light, played in the air. Seraphina produced a crystal key, shaped eerily like the locket. Touching it to the water, she held it out to me. The water rippled, and a doorway opened.
“You have the choice,” she said gently, and I saw something then. In her eyes and knew that I could either step into the gateway and continue my mother’s work, or I could stay, grieving, and let the portal be. And I knew I would have to choose.