Chapter 8: Dreamsongs of the Skywell

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

Teema lived in the high silence.

Her home sat atop an abandoned observatory outside Yellow Springs, its dome cracked open to the stars and its corridors filled with feathers, copper wire, and birdsong mapped like memory. Where others studied gravity, Teema studied pattern especially the strange murmurs of birds that didn’t migrate, didn’t mimic, didn’t sleep the way they used to.

Birds, she believed, were memory-keepers.

Especially the black ones.

Especially now.

The first one came at dusk. A glossy crow that landed on the observatory’s broken telescope and stared at her without blinking.

“Do you hear it too?” she whispered.

The crow tilted its head and began to hum.

Not caw. Not chirp.

Hum.

A low, droning rhythm that vibrated through her chest like a tuning fork against bone. Teema grabbed her field recorder and captured it, running it through her AI spectrogram named Toko.

[Language identified: UNKNOWN PATTERN.]

[Waveform anomaly: matches glyph imprint “Cerulia-Skywell Fragment.”]

Teema stared.

She’d only heard the word Cerulia once before in a dream her mother had on her deathbed.

That night, hundreds of birds appeared. Not flying, not calling, just standing on her roof and the treetops, perfectly still, watching the moon rise.

When she played back the crow’s hum on a loop, every bird turned their head toward her in unison.

And they began to sing.

Not in one voice, but in hundreds, fractured, layered, like overlapping echoes trying to re-form a single sound.

A sound that wasn’t for ears.

It was for memory.

“Skywell open,” Toko said softly, translating the data. “They’re trying to return.”

Teema closed her eyes.

The sound lifted her. Not her body, but her knowing. She saw flashes of glyphs drawn in ash, saw Zola’s face in a pool of light, saw Josiah Green’s journal pages fluttering backward into flame.

Then a vision of a well that led not downward, but upward. Not of water, but of sky. And at the top of it, a single, pulsing feather made of crystal and breath.

“This is not prophecy,” said a voice in her mind. “It is retrieval.”

She gasped awake.

The birds were gone.

But on her recorder, the last thing captured was her own voice, though she hadn’t spoken aloud:

“I am the Listener of the Skywell. And I remember the birdsong before the first rain.”