You were never meant to hear it.
A voice came to you one night, curling through the shadows of your room, soft and patient, threading itself into your thoughts like smoke through cracks in stone. It did not speak your name, yet it knew it. It knew the shape of your fears, the corners of your memory, the quietest thoughts you did not dare admit. You told yourself it was the wind, the imagination of a restless mind, anything but what it truly was.
Then it urged you to write. At first a word, then a sentence. Your pen trembled as if it were afraid of what it was recording. The ink seemed to pulse under your fingers, warm, breathing, alive. Every word you wrote whispered back at you, shaping itself around your fears, learning you, remembering you. You tried to stop, tried to leave the notebook closed, but the story would not let you go. It slithered into your waking hours, hiding in reflections, in the pauses between heartbeats, in the darkness that pressed against your eyelids when you closed them.
When you read it again, it was not the same. It had grown while you slept, subtle changes that made your stomach tighten. The words were no longer just words. They were a presence. A living thing. Every whisper since has known you, has followed you. And the first one, the first whisper, waits patiently for the moment it can speak again, for the moment you cannot resist. It remembers you as you remember nothing else. You are not alone. You have never been alone.