The Keeper of Whispers
There is a before, and there is an after. The line between them was not a grand event, but a quiet shift in the air, the moment I turned from the bookshelf and saw him standing at the edge of the library's lamplight, looking at me not as a stranger, but as a long-awaited answer to a question I had never spoken aloud.
His name was Elias. But I did not learn that from an introduction. I learned it from the way the silence wrapped around us, thick and sacred, as if the world had stilled to witness our meeting.