The Meridian

The Meridian carried air for four people for eleven more days. There were nine aboard.

Captain Osei Adeyemi-Roth studied the emergency display. The reactor was dead. The emergency batteries were carrying the ship, and every hour they ran, the charge fell. The backup scrubber was damaged and offline, and the main one drew more than the batteries could afford to spend for long.

The distress beacon had gone out through the relay chain, but the nearest relay, Tarsus, had been dark for a scheduled overhaul when the reactor died. The rescue tug Halcyon was listed fourteen days away, assuming the beacon had reached anyone.

“Do the math again,” said Priya Sharma, his chief engineer.

“I’ve done it six times.”

“Do it a seventh.”

He did. Three cryogenic pods could provide air for three people, with negligible drain on the system. The backup scrubber, if they could repair and power it, might stretch the number of days for those who remained, but even then, the numbers didn’t work. Fourteen days was still three more than eleven, and there would still be six people needing oxygen.

The batteries were a second clock, and it ran faster than the air. On the first day, he had cut heat to the crew decks to save charge. The cold had been creeping down the corridors ever since, and the cargo hold, unheated and furthest from the crew section, had been losing warmth into space for three days.

Through the bulkhead window, he could see the passengers. Adel Desa held her sleeping daughter, Kezi. Dr. Lindqvist played solitaire. Tomás Vega folded napkins into little swans, and Dev Rao, nineteen and the youngest technician aboard, sat across from him, failing to copy one. Dev owed Priya a drink from a card game, payable on Ceres. He kept reminding her. Pilot Mark Hart stared at a dead console.

Beside the window stood Kezi’s grandfather, Nazir Okafor.

Twenty-two years earlier, Osei had served under him aboard the Kestrel. During a pressure failure near Europa, Nazir had sealed a compartment with four crew members inside. Three survived. The fourth did not. The inquiry cleared him, but Osei had never forgiven the speed of his decision.

Three days ago, when the reactor failed, Nazir had stood in the doorway of the command deck and said, quite pleasantly, that he had lived a long time and would give up his air if it came to that.

Osei had not answered him. He still hadn’t.

“He’ll do it again,” Osei said now. “Offer himself so I don’t have to choose.”

“Would you rather he had no choice?” Priya asked.

“No. But not while there’s another way.”

He brought up the cargo schematics. “There’s a power unit in the cargo hold, the spare for the freight cranes. If we can reroute it into the backup scrubber—”

“It was never rated for that. It’s unstable, and the hold’s unheated. Minus forty.”

“Can it be done?”

Priya studied the display. “Maybe.”

Dev made the splice. Priya guided him over the comm while Osei watched his gloved hands tremble in the cold.

“Almost there, Captain,” Dev said. “Tell Priya the drink’s still on when we—”

The camera went dark.

When the picture returned, the backup scrubber glowed green.

They recovered Dev’s body at the end of the shift. Osei carried him to cold storage himself.

The reroute worked, and Osei didn’t know how to balance that.

Now the air would last twelve days and some hours, assuming the cargo unit’s cells held and the ship’s batteries lasted. The Halcyon needed fourteen. The shortfall was small, but still enough to be counted in lives.

Nazir studied the numbers. “Dev bought you time,” he said.

“Not enough.”

“Someone must tend the splice. It will drift as the cells fail.”

“Priya’s arranging shifts.”

“I’ll take one.”

“You’re seventy-one.”

“I commanded ships before you could hold a wrench.”

“This is my ship, Nazir.”

“I know.”

Osei looked away. He thought of the Europa inquiry, and of the compartment door, and of a man who had decided to close it and then had to live in the silence afterward. The findings had been sealed.

“I won’t sacrifice someone while another option exists,” he said.

“Dev knew the risk,” Nazir said.

“I authorized it.”

“Yes.”

Nazir said nothing more.

Dr. Lindqvist found a way to put Adel and Kezi in one pod. It was off-protocol, but it reduced the number of people breathing the reserve. It bought another day, though not the last half of one.

“I had eleven seconds,” Nazir said to no one, watching them seal the lid. “I used nine.”

Osei hadn’t known the timeline.

Six-hour shifts. Osei, Priya, Mark, and Nazir rotated through the frozen hold, bleeding pressure from the clamp and nursing the failing cells. Nobody worked alone, and nobody stayed past the handoff. That was the rule, and Osei repeated it at every shift change.

Tomás cooked enormous meals nobody wanted. They ate every crumb.

Dev’s station stayed empty.

On day ten, the cargo unit fell to nineteen percent.

On day eleven, Nazir did not come back after his shift.

Mark admitted as much while Osei was already pulling on his suit. Nazir had told him to sleep, that he had the clamp and a few more minutes wouldn’t matter. Mark had been awake for thirty hours. He had believed him.

Osei found Nazir beside the frozen freight, one glove locked around the splice, frost spreading across his helmet.

“You’re four hours overdue.”

“The bracket cracked.” Nazir’s voice came thin through the speaker. “If I let go, the contact breaks.”

“Then I’ll take it.”

“You can’t. My hand is frozen to the clamp. You’d have to cut the glove.”

Osei looked. The old man’s fingers were locked at an angle that said everything. Cutting him free meant ninety seconds, perhaps two minutes, with the splice unattended. He would need both hands for the glove, and the splice needed one hand and all his weight. The cells would drop out, the scrubber would cycle down, and it would take most of an hour to coax it back. The air they had was already counted to the hour.

If he held the splice, Nazir stayed where he was, in the cold, and Nazir was seventy-one.

“I can hold it,” Osei said. “Mark’s on his way. He can carry you.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes.”

“I don’t have ten minutes, Captain.”

Osei knew that. He had known it as soon as he saw the frost.

He put his glove over Nazir’s hand and took the pressure off the clamp. The readout had fallen to fourteen percent.

He could feel the eleven seconds, now, from the wrong side.

He used nine of them.

“I’m staying on the splice,” he said.

Nazir’s helmet turned toward him. He did not argue.

“Good,” he said. “That’s your answer.”

“It’s not an answer.”

“No,” Nazir said. “It’s a decision. They’re different. You’ll find that out.”

His hand tightened once under Osei’s, and then it went slack.

Osei’s wrist receiver chimed.

A faint transponder return. Bearing zero-zero-four.

Priya’s voice cracked over the comm. “Captain, it’s the Halcyon. They were servicing the Tarsus relay, nowhere near the position listed on the roster. They’re much closer than we thought. Tarsus came back up when they finished. It dumped the queue, and they got our beacon about nine hours ago. They’ve been burning hard since. They’re six hours out. Maybe seven.”

Osei did not move his hand.

“Captain? Did you copy?”

“I copied.”

He looked at the frost on Nazir’s visor and at the readout holding at fourteen percent.

Mark came down the ladder with the cutter. Osei held the splice while Mark worked the glove free, and he did not let go until the old man was out of the cold.

The Halcyon docked late on the eleventh day; the cargo unit was at four percent.

Later, the rescue commander handed Osei the evacuation manifest.

“Nine aboard?”

“Nine departed,” Osei said. “One dead. Eight living.”

He entered Dev Rao’s name under casualties and signed the ledger. In the margin beside Nazir’s name, he wrote critical, because the form had no field for unknown.

There was no field for courage, or fear, or the young man’s unfinished sentence. No field for whether the captain would make the same decision again.

When the pods opened, Kezi woke in her mother’s arms. When Kezi and Adel had climbed out, they joined Osei where he stood, looking through the med-bay window.

Nazir lay motionless beneath a thermal blanket.

“Is that Granddad?”

“Yes, that’s Captain Okafor,” Osei said.

“Is he going to die?”

“I don’t know.”

“He promised we’d see the sky from Ceres. He said the stars are bigger.”

“I know.”

“Did he forget?”

Osei sat beside her. “No,” he said. “He didn’t forget.”

On the monitor beyond the glass, a line rose and fell, rose and fell.

Osei took Kezi’s hand and didn’t ask himself whether he had made the right choice.

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Chapter Forty-Eight: Elreth

Velroth stood beneath the split tree across the ravine, one hand resting against its ancient trunk. The mark in his other palm gave off a pale, crooked light. Below him, Elreth hung among the damaged ley, his song silenced by his brother’s arrival.

Calethor’s staff remained raised. Thalen had moved slightly ahead of me, though whether he meant to protect me or simply wanted a clearer look at Velroth, I couldn’t tell. Aerenil crouched against his shoulder.

Kynami’s talons tightened through my cloak, as I rose carefully from my knees. “Áthir kept Elreth alive,” I said. “That is what I saw.”

Velroth’s eyes returned to the harp strapped across my back. “You saw what Mythravain preserved.”

“I saw you pulling on him until the ley tightened around him.” Something moved in Velroth’s face, gone before I could name it.

“You watched a moment,” he said. “I have lived with what came after.”

Calethor lowered his staff a fraction. “And Elreth has lived inside it.”

Velroth looked at him then. The calm left his face so quickly that I understood how thin it had been. “You do not get to speak for him.”

“I was there.”

“You left.”

The word crossed Tiralan harder than a shout.

Calethor did not defend himself.

Velroth stepped away from the tree. “You all left. You decided Ethárion had done enough because the breach stopped widening. You called restraint wisdom and endurance mercy. He held from Kaldora. You returned to Kelvaren. The Archives shut their records behind roots and warnings.” His gaze dropped toward Elreth. “My brother remained here.”

The three broken notes rose again from the ravine.

Velroth’s shoulders tightened.

For all the things I had imagined about him, I had never doubted that he loved Elreth. Watching him now made that certainty worse. His entire body responded to the sound before his mind seemed able to stop it.

He turned back to me. “Do you know what six centuries sound like, Elowen Sylvenor?”

I did not answer.

“They sound like that.”

Elreth tried the phrase again. The final note broke apart.

Velroth lifted his marked hand toward him.

Calethor moved immediately. “Do not...”

Velroth ignored him.

The crooked mark brightened. Across the ravine, another answered. Then another.

Light ran along fissures in the stone. Frost traced roots and vanished beneath moss. Marks I had mistaken for old damage came alive one after another until I saw how many there were.

Too many.

They had been worked into Tiralan wherever the land had cracked: stone, root, exposed soil, even the remains of an old paving block far below us. Each crooked line caught something I could barely see and drew it inward, toward Elreth, sharpening his form.

For a few heartbeats, he looked almost whole. The pale blur of his shoulders settled into flesh and cloth. His face became the face I had seen in my visions. His feet lowered toward the floor of the ravine as if the ley might finally release him.

Velroth’s voice softened. “Elreth.” His brother lifted his head. “Come back.”

Elreth’s mouth opened, and the ravine convulsed.

A silver strand snapped taut above him, and a dark one twisted around his arm. His almost-solid form broke at the shoulder, scattering into light. Stone cracked loose from the opposite bank.

Thalen seized my sleeve and pulled me back as a green-white strand lashed over the place where I had been standing.

“Velroth!” Calethor shouted.

Velroth’s hand shook, but he kept it raised. “He was closer.”

“He was tearing apart,” I said.

“He was closer.”

Another ley line strained until its light thinned almost to nothing.

Thalen stared at the marks. His attention moved quickly from one to the next, following something I could not yet see. “They all pull toward the same point.”

Velroth glanced at him.

Thalen took a careful step sideways. “The original ley distributes strain. These marks are doing the opposite.”

“They keep the breach stable.”

“No.” Thalen’s voice sharpened. “They keep Elreth trapped. Fixed in place by the tightening lines.”

Velroth’s expression hardened.

I looked again at the crooked marks. Once I saw what Thalen meant, the pattern became obvious. Each one caught a damaged line and bent it inward. They did not mend the break. They prevented anything caught inside it from moving away.

Hooks.

The word came with the memory of Kaldora: frostcrystal at the creek, crooked marks near the mine, arcs gathering toward Falcon’s Perch.

“You hooked him into the wound.”

Velroth’s gaze snapped toward me. “I held him.”

“By tying everything around him tighter.”

“I kept the land from taking him.”

Elreth made a sound below us, rougher than song.

Velroth turned toward him.

“You hear that and still think he wants this?” I asked.

“He wants to live.”

“How do you know?”

“He is my brother.”

“That tells me what you want.”

Calethor looked toward me, but he did not interrupt.

Velroth’s hand closed into a fist. “I know him.”

“Then listen to him.”

His face changed.

The words had reached somewhere the others had not. For one breath I thought he might actually look.

Elreth’s head had lifted. His face blurred in and out of the ley, but his eyes remained clear. He looked at Velroth. Then he moved his head slowly from side to side.

Velroth stopped breathing. “Elreth?”

The dark line around his arm tightened. His mouth moved in silence.

Velroth stepped closer to the ravine. “Again.”

Elreth tried. A single breath escaped him. “Veth.”

Aerenil lifted her head sharply.

Thalen whispered the translation even though I already knew it. “Free.”

Velroth’s mark flared. “No.”

The force of it struck the ravine, every crooked sigil answered, and the ground beneath me lurched.

Calethor drove his staff down. Thalen dropped to one knee, one arm shielding Aerenil as stone cracked between us. Kynami launched from my shoulder just before I lost my footing.

I caught myself on one hand. A pale line flashed across the ground and wrapped around my wrist; a cutting cold ripped through me. The line tightened and dragged me forward.

“Elowen!” Calethor lunged, but another strand broke through the stone between us. He stopped hard, staff already moving to deflect it.

I dug my free hand into the ground, but the line around my wrist pulled again. My knees struck stone, and I slid toward the ravine.

Thalen caught the back of my cloak, and for an instant he held me. Then a second crooked mark flashed. Something caught the strap of Áthir’s harp, and the pull strength doubled.

Thalen went down beside me. “Elowen, get the harp off!”

The buckle was under my shoulder, which I could not reach. The line around my wrist burned so cold that my fingers stopped obeying me.

Across Tiralan, Velroth stared. He had not expected this. That frightened me more than if he had.

“Release it!” Calethor shouted.

Velroth opened his marked hand. Nothing changed.

The hook pulled again. The edge of the ravine came closer. “Velroth!” I shouted.

“I am not doing that.”

Thalen gave a harsh laugh that held no humor. “You built it!”

The ground shifted under us. I felt the harp strike my spine.

Then the world opened, releasing stone, roots, and smoke. For one disorienting heartbeat, Tiralan disappeared beneath another place, Falcon’s Perch.

I smelled the hearth although no fire burned near me. I felt woundwood pressing through stone. Somewhere in the dark, paws struck root-black earth.

Nerion’s silver eyes flashed through my mind.

Then the sensation vanished as the hook dragged me another foot. It was pulling through the harp. Through Áthir. Through whatever still joined Tiralan to Kaldora.

“Cut the strap!” I shouted.

Thalen reached for his knife as the line around my wrist tightened.

A cry came from the ravine. Elreth had seized the dark strand connected to me. His form flickered violently as he pulled against it.

The pressure eased a little, just enough for Thalen to drag me backwards.

Velroth saw his brother fighting the hook. “Elreth, stop!”

Elreth pulled harder. The dark strand cut through his forearm in a line of black light.

Calethor crossed the broken ground toward us. “You wanted him to speak, Velroth. He is speaking.”

“He does not understand what will happen if the holding fails.”

“Neither do you!”

Another sigil ignited. The line around my wrist jerked me sideways.

Thalen lost his grip, and I slid closer to the precipice.

Kynami struck at the strand, talons passing through light. He wheeled and came again, furious and useless against it.

Then something hit me hard from the side. The breath left my lungs as I rolled across moss and stone and the ley strand snapped away from my wrist.

I stopped against a root and for a moment I saw nothing but pale fur. Iltharion stood between me and the ravine.

He rose over me, shoulders high, silver-gray markings rippling across his coat. His head was low, and his teeth showed. The sound in his chest was quieter than Nerion’s growl and somehow more dangerous.

The hooked line struck toward me again, but Iltharion moved faster. His paw hit the strand, and light burst across the ground. He staggered once but remained between us.

Kynami landed above me on the root, wings spread. Calethor reached my side and caught my arm. “Elowen?”

“I’m here.”

My wrist felt as though I had plunged it into fire and ice at once, but my fingers moved.

Thalen arrived a moment later, with Aerenil clinging to the front of his cloak.

No one spoke. Iltharion turned to face Velroth across the ravine.

Velroth had gone completely still. His gaze moved from the great cat to me. Then back again. Understanding reached his face before it reached mine.

“So,” he said quietly.

Calethor looked at me, but there was something in his expression I did not like. “What?”

He did not answer.

Iltharion backed toward me until his flank touched my shoulder. Warmth moved through the place where we met.

I froze. I had felt something like it before on the road, when he appeared among the trees and watched me without fear. I had wondered then. I had tried not to wonder too much.

Now the possibility became impossible to ignore. Iltharion had come because I was in danger. He had crossed whatever distance lay between us because something connected him to me.

My hand lifted almost without thought, and he turned his head. His silver eyes met mine.

I did not touch him, though I wanted to. The wanting startled me with its force.

For months I had been learning that belonging did not have to mean being trapped. That love did not become safer because I refused to name it. That the things I cared for could remain themselves and still choose to stay near me.

Iltharion stood close enough for me to feel his breath.

A possible guardian for me, if we both chose it. The thought carried joy before fear could stop it.

A sound from Tiralan, interrupted.

Elreth. Elreth was staring at Iltharion.

The dark strand still crossed his arm. Silver and green light wove through his failing form. Yet something had changed in his face. Recognition.

I remembered Mythravain. Iltharion at the edge of the old memory. Elreth looking beyond Áthir toward him. Velroth shouting that he was not his.

At the time, I had thought Iltharion had been offered to Elreth. Now Iltharion stood against me, having come when I was threatened. The old memory rearranged itself. Perhaps the offering had never been completed. Perhaps it had never been Elreth’s to claim.

Arieth did not make chains of gifts. Iltharion was free. So was I. And whatever might grow between us could not be transferred like property.

Elreth lifted his free hand. He reached toward Iltharion. The movement was small and painful. The dark strand pulled against him, but he kept reaching.

Iltharion took one step toward the ravine. My heart tightened.

Velroth moved immediately. “No.” The crooked mark in his palm blazed.

Iltharion stopped as a dark line struck the ground in front of him. Calethor raised his staff.

Thalen grabbed my uninjured arm and pulled me fully upright. “Elowen,” he said.

I barely heard him. Elreth was still reaching. Iltharion looked back at me. There was no command in his gaze. Only the same waiting I had felt every time he appeared. But he would not make this choice for me.

Neither would Arieth.

Across the ravine, Elreth’s fingers trembled as he reached toward him.

Velroth glared between them.

I looked from Elreth to Iltharion and knew, with a certainty I wished I did not have, what I might be able to give.

I also knew I did not want to give it.

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Chapter One

Chapter Forty-Seven: Tiralan

The bridge was gone. Whatever waited ahead of us, the way back to Kelvaren would not help us escape it.

I rolled onto my back, and Aerenil landed on my stomach with enough enthusiasm to drive the remaining air from my lungs. “Oof.”

“Rhaveth,” she said happily. Wings free.

“I’m glad one of us enjoyed that.”

Thalen sat beside me, breathing hard. “The bridge has stood for nearly four hundred years. An archivist dreams of witnessing history. Today, I learned that is a false longing.”

Calethor remained near the edge. He stared at the frost-covered roots on the opposite side. “That mark was waiting.”

Thalen got to his feet. “Or it woke when we passed.”

I sat up and looked east. The land beyond the gorge was greener than Kelvaren. That was the first wrong thing about it.

Winter had touched everything behind us. Here, moss covered the stones in thick velvet. Ferns crowded beneath the trees. Vines climbed trunks and opened small white flowers against the bark. Yet nothing moved. No insects drifted over the flowers. No birds shifted in the branches. Even the wind seemed unwilling to cross the gorge.

The beauty felt preserved rather than alive.

Thalen followed my gaze. “We are close.”

The old heart-road narrowed until only occasional paving stones remained beneath the moss. The forest grew taller and quieter. Some of the trees leaned east, not from wind but from years of slow strain. Roots showed above the soil in long pale ridges, all pointing the same direction, toward the breach, as if the trees were trying to walk away from it.

A road-stone leaned beside the path, almost buried in moss. The old mark on its face had been cut through by a crooked line rimmed in white.

Thalen crouched but did not touch it.

“Another?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Old?”

He looked toward Tiralan. “No.”

Áthir’s harp stirred. I hesitated. It hadn’t been a note, only a slight vibration. Faint enough that I might have mistaken it for my own pulse if it had not repeated.

Calethor looked at the harp slung across my back. “Do you feel it?”

“No, but I sense it.”

Thalen came back toward us. “What?”

I rested one hand against the case. The vibration traveled into my palm. Steady, then gone. “Áthir?”

Calethor did not answer immediately. His eyes had moved east. “Perhaps.”

I was growing to dislike perhaps; I had become surrounded by people who treated uncertainty as a respectable answer.

Calethor looked toward the eastern ridge. “Before we reach Tiralan, there is something both of you need to understand. Mythravain showed you the day Elreth fell. It did not show you what centuries inside that breach have done to him.”

I glanced at Thalen. “You don’t know?”

“No.” Calethor did not soften the answer. “When I last stood there, Elreth was still himself. Hurt, trapped, frightened—but himself. Áthir had steadied the ley enough to keep the breach from tearing wider. We tried to reach Elreth. Every attempt increased the strain around him.”

The memories of my visions returned too easily: Velroth pulling, the threads tightening around his brother.

“That was why Áthir stopped pulling,” I said.

Calethor nodded. “He understood before the rest of us did. Elreth was not caught behind a door we could simply open. He had become entangled in the break itself. I do not know how much further that has gone.”

Thalen’s expression tightened. “The old records map the ley before the fracture.”

“Then do not expect the lines you find to obey those maps.” Calethor looked at him. “Use the records to recognize what has changed, not to tell you what should still be there.”

That sounded like a warning meant particularly for an Archivist.

I touched the strap of Áthir’s harp. “And if Elreth sees us?”

Calethor’s gaze dropped briefly to the case. “He may know us. He may not. He may not be able to speak in any way we recognize. And if he reaches toward you, do not assume he is asking you to pull him free.”

I remembered the silent warning from Mythravain: not back. “What about the harp?”

“Áthir was part of what held Tiralan together. That harp was his.” Calethor’s voice lowered. “If it responds there, tell us what you feel before you act. Not because I distrust you, Elowen. Because none of us knows what still answers Áthir from inside that wound.”

Thalen looked east. “And Velroth?”

Calethor was silent long enough that I knew the answer mattered. “Assume he has changed Tiralan since I left it.”

“With the false marks?” I asked.

“With anything he believed would bring Elreth back.”

Calethor started walking again, then stopped once more.

“One more thing. If Tiralan is quiet, do not mistake that for healing. When I left, nothing there was at rest.”

As we continued onwards, the trees opened gradually rather than ending. One moment there was forest around us. The next I could see farther between the trunks than I had before. Then the ground began to fall away.

Thalen stopped. His hand went out, though none of us were close enough to need warning. “Tiralan.”

The real ravine was quieter than the memory. I had expected the shriek of ley lines. Torn roots. Light stretched across darkness. Some lingering violence that matched what Mythravain had shown us.

Instead, Tiralan seemed exhausted.

The ravine cut through the forest in a long, uneven wound. Trees leaned over both sides, their roots exposed where soil had fallen away over centuries. Some of the trees from the memory were still there, though larger now, bent beneath their own weight. Others had died standing and remained silver-gray among the living.

The ley lines were almost invisible. I saw them only when I stopped trying to look directly at them. Out of the corner of my eye: a silver thread between stones, a green shimmer beneath a root, a line of darkness crossing open air where nothing should have been able to hold it.

They stretched from one side of the ravine to the other, thin and taut.

Calethor came to stand beside me. He pointed across the ravine. “I remember that tree.”

One massive trunk split into two at shoulder height, both halves curving away from the breach. In Mythravain it had been young. The realization made the centuries between the memory and this moment heavier than any history Thalen could have shown me.

“How long?” I asked.

Calethor understood. “I was Thalen’s age.”

Possibly six hundred years, then. I struggled to fathom the passage of centuries in one lifetime.

A sound rose from below. I thought at first it was wind moving through the ravine, but then it came again. Three notes, each lighter and more broken than the one before.

Thalen went still, and Aerenil pressed herself against his shoulder.

I stepped closer to the edge. “Elreth?”

Calethor stepped in front of me. “Wait.”

The sound came again. The same three notes. Something moved among the ley lines. At first, only light changing against stone, then the light gathered around a shape.

His form was thinner than it had been in Mythravain and far less solid. Light passed through the edges of him, catching on shoulder, cheek, hand, then losing them again. One arm was drawn toward a blackened ley strand. The other remained braced against a silver line as though he were holding the two apart.

That was what the memory had not shown me clearly enough. Elreth was still fighting, and the broken notes came from him. His head lifted, and for one instant his face sharpened as he looked across the ravine toward us.

A dark strand tightened around his arm, and Elreth jerked against it. The sound that escaped him was not music, but a melding of humming and pain.

I lifted a foot to step forward.

Calethor stiffened. “Not yet, Elowen.”

“He sees us,” I said.

“I know.”

“He is trying to…” Warn us. The word died before I spoke it.

Elreth’s head moved once. Not toward himself. Toward the ground beneath my feet.

Thalen saw it too. “Both of you, back.”

We moved just as the stone at the ravine edge split, and a dark ley line burst through the crack.

Calethor struck it aside with his staff. The impact jarred through the wood and drove him back into me. We stumbled together as frost spread over the broken stone.

Thalen shouted something in Elven and the line retreated.

I saw Elreth pull against the line; Thalen’s command had no power against it.

Elreth’s whole form flickered, nearly disappearing as he dragged the dark strand away from us. He dropped to one knee in empty air, held there only by the web of damaged ley.

“Elreth!” Calethor called.

The name crossed the ravine, and Elreth looked up: recognition passed over his face, and then pain.

The silver line in his hand flared, and Áthir’s harp sounded behind me, just one clear note. Every ley strand in the ravine trembled. I felt it in my spine. It held something familiar within it. The same steadiness I had felt in Áthir’s rooms and beneath Falcon’s Perch when the house opened around us.

For an instant, Tiralan vanished. Cold stone under Falcon’s Perch. Living roots pressed beneath my feet. A weight held for so long that endurance had become indistinguishable from pain.

My grandfather was not here, but whatever he had done here had never ended.

I caught the harp case before my knees weakened and I knelt on the ground. “Áthir.”

Calethor’s expression told me he had heard the note even if he had not felt what followed. “He is still holding.”

“From Kaldora?” I asked, already knowing.

“Yes.”

Thalen came closer, keeping well back from the fractured edge. “Then this is still connected directly to Rootward.”

Calethor nodded. “The wound never separated cleanly.”

Below us, Elreth made the three broken notes again. This time Áthir’s harp answered the first.

Elreth’s face tightened. The dark strand around his arm pulled.

I crawled one involuntary step forward.

“No,” Calethor said.

“I know.” But I did know. Mythravain had shown me what happened when someone reached into this wound and decided that wanting another person back was reason enough to pull. I would not repeat Velroth’s mistake.

Even with Elreth kneeling before me. Even with Áthir holding from a mountain away. Even when every instinct demanded that I do something. I forced my hands away from the harp.

Elreth looked at me and something in his expression changed. The strain remained, as did the pain. But for one heartbeat, I thought he understood.

Then a voice spoke from the far side of the ravine. “You learned that much, at least.”

Thalen turned and Calethor’s staff came up. Aerenil spread her wings and Kynami dropped from the branch above me and landed hard on my shoulder.

A man stood beneath the split tree across Tiralan. I knew him before I could have described his face. He looked the same as he had when he last confronted us in Kaldora, but somehow aged. Grief had sharpened him where time had hollowed Calethor. Silver ran through his hair. His clothes were travel-worn, dark against the pale trunk behind him. One hand rested on the bark as though the tree belonged to him.

The other bore a glowing crooked mark.

Calethor’s voice was low. “Velroth.”

Velroth barely looked at him. His attention stayed settled on me, then on the harp at my back.

For the first time since we reached Tiralan, Elreth stopped singing.

Velroth smiled without warmth. “Ethárion’s harp,” he said. The mark in his palm brightened. “You brought it back to the one place he failed.”

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Harold Would Approve

Biscuit stretched her neck up from her shaded nook beneath a large tree, and gnawed a bit of bark for dessert. Lunch finished, she focused on observing Sadie and Marcy.

They sat at the picnic table beside the garden. She was happy to see it replanted with more tasty treats. Nibbles was sad the new fence was not climbable, but Biscuit knew she could find a way through when the time was right. The back corner seemed soft.

Right now, she was more interested in what Sadie and Marcy were doing. They had papers between them and were scratching more of that nasty-tasting ink on them. They had been dragging random stuff from the barn all morning. More excitement than the goats had felt since the group of women fell laughing in the pasture.

As her head drooped, she caught movement by the garden. Pounce was lurking in the back corner. He circled, then dug, then circled, then dug some more. She appreciated his efforts to enlarge the opening, but if he wasn’t careful, he would give away her plan.

Marcy and Sadie didn’t notice him working. They were too busy talking. Moments later, he was inside the fence, stalking the long black snake. Pounce had robbed her of access to future treats, all for an old snake.

Biscuit turned towards the table, but Marcy and Sadie were gone. They hadn’t seen.

A truck growled, sputtered, then growled again. Harold’s truck rolled out of the barn, pulling a limping livestock trailer to the gate.

Harold hadn’t used the trailer in a long time, but Biscuit was happy to see the truck. It was special. She and her Maamaah had ridden inside the cab when they first arrived on the farm. It held treats and tasty gloves behind a secret panel in the front.

Marcy climbed out of the cab. “If we sell what we don’t need, we’ll be able to afford to stay,” she said.

“But Grandpa used to take me for rides in the truck.” Sadie looked sad. “He loved that old beast, and so do I!”

Biscuit felt her pain.

Marcy placed her hands on her hips and sighed. “The retreat paid some of the bills, but there’s only been one call since then. If we don’t find other income, we’ll have no choice.”

The truck had always been a part of Biscuit’s world. It always would be. It smelled of Harold.

Later, Sadie and Marcy loaded some items into the rusty bed. Sadie cried as she worked. Biscuit wanted to comfort her, but Marcy did not look open to the idea.

Biscuit recalled Harold driving in the pasture to fix fences. She and the others would chase him. He would leave the tailgate down sometimes when it was parked under a tree, so they could jump in and sample the leaves. And Biscuit remembered the truck treats. They were even better than the licorice ones.

She decided no matter what it took, she was on Sadie’s side. The truck wasn’t going anywhere but back into the barn. It was Harold’s. He would need it when he came back.

Decision made and cud chewed, Biscuit stood, wobbled a moment, and then, with one last glance at the garden, called out to her friends, “Maaaahhhh.”.

Nibbles and Pretzel jogged and jumped a crooked path to Biscuit’s side. Their faces lit with curiosity and mischief. Their joy drained when Biscuit headed away from the garden and towards the truck.

A door was open, so Biscuit jumped inside. She pranced and grinned, placing her hooves on the dashboard.

She settled beside the steering wheel. Pretzel and Nibbles jumped in the bed and began sampling dirt and plants from the plow. Then Nibbles discovered the roof!

The occupation had begun.

Pounce danced around the truck, yipping and barking, ecstatic because he finally had friends to play Truck with him.

Marcy stormed over. “Get off of there! All of you. Out!”

Biscuit saw Sadie grinning, though she tried to hide it with her hand. If only they could get Marcy to relax.

“Calm down, Mom,” Sadie said. “I’ll talk to them.”

Marcy sputtered, then turned and fled back to the barn.

Sadie sat beside Biscuit and scratched behind her ears. “I appreciate what you’re doing here, Biscuit. I don’t think Mom understands about this truck.”

They sat in silence together, looking out over the homestead.

Nibbles and Pretzel grew bored and returned to grazing. But Biscuit knew what was at stake; she stayed, inching closer to Sadie’s side.

Sadie stared out the front window. “Biscuit, we’re in trouble here.” Biscuit didn’t remember doing anything wrong. “We can’t afford to live here.” Biscuit wasn’t sure what she could do about that. She let Sadie think aloud and focused on what was important: treats behind a panel that maybe she could open. She was good at opening things. She nudged it with her snout, then gently with her horns. One horn caught on something, and the panel dropped open. Stale smells and dirt-covered gloves.

Sadie roused from her daydreaming and started rifling through the glove box, then pulled out an old notebook that looked well-loved. Tears filled her eyes as she opened it.

“Biscuit, listen to this. Grandpa wrote about you: ‘Biscuit unlatched the fence again. That girl is as smart as a whip.’ And Nibbles too: ‘Found Nibbles on the barn roof. Not sure how she got there – she sure can jump.’” Sadie laughed. Biscuit smiled. It was good to hear Harold’s praise again, and she was happy to hear Sadie laugh after the afternoon of tears.

Sadie continued flipping the pages, while Biscuit listened to her read.

A neighbor was interested in leasing the south pasture, and another needed help repairing his barn. That didn’t seem helpful. Someone had asked about renting the goats to clear a new section of land to extend the park. Biscuit wasn’t sure what rented meant, but it didn’t seem safe.

“Biscuit, this might be it. If you and your gals don’t mind eating strange weeds, we can save the truck.” Sadie leapt down and ran to talk with her mother.

Victory in hoof, Biscuit jumped out and strutted to join her friends.

A few days later, folks came, along with someone who talked faster than a hungry goatling looking for his mother. The fast talker held up a treasure from the barn, then rattled off words, numbers, and random sounds. Someone raised a glove, then Pounce jumped and caught it.

Pounce loved the new grab-the-glove game. Biscuit heard some harsh words and some chuckles as they chased Pounce around the yard. After Sadie took Pounce inside, Biscuit headed back toward the garden. When she looked back, she noticed a lot of the tools salvaged from the shed were gone.

After a long rainstorm when they were trapped in the barn for meals and meals on end, a neighbor came to fix the trailer’s wobbly tire and crawl under the truck to collect stinky black water.

The garden was sprouting nicely by the time Marcy hitched up the trailer, and Sadie herded the girls inside.

There was panic all around, but Biscuit calmed them, assuring the others that Sadie wouldn’t do anything to hurt them. Biscuit wasn’t sure about Marcy – she had fenced the garden to keep Biscuit out. At least that’s what Marcy told Sadie when they were sitting by the garden. Marcy had a big grin on her face when she said it, too. Biscuit glanced out as the trailer door closed; she’d check the garden when she returned.

They went for a short, bumpy ride and were unloaded into a field, blessedly filled with weeds. A smorgasbord of treats and delicacies. They stayed all day, and grazed again in the evening. Biscuit’s tummy hurt; it was so full.

Home again, Sadie let them out of the trailer, then Biscuit watched as they dragged it back into the barn. She ducked away from the others to check out the garden access. She was full now, but there was always later. It only took a moment to see that Pounce’s hole had been patched. Even the ground was firmer, built up around the posts.

Biscuit heard a rumble and raced away from the fence, just in time to watch Marcy park the truck under a tree near the house, open the tailgate, and pat it before walking away.

Sadie came back out as the sun was setting, and sat on the tailgate. The goats, too stuffed to jump, gathered around her, gently nudging her swinging legs.

Pretzel and Nibbles wandered off, but Biscuit stayed. She lifted her front hooves to the tailgate and rested her head on Sadie’s lap.

Snuggling into Sadie, Biscuit smelled something delicious. Sadie laughed at her urgent nudging and pulled out a fresh licorice treat.

“You did well today, Biscuit.” She looked up to see the joy in Sadie’s eyes. “You think you and the girls would mind doing this again?”

An adventure, and Harold’s truck was safe. She could already feel his scritch of approval.

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Table of Contents

Songborne of Kaldora: Chapter One

Chapter Forty-Six: The Corrupted Path

Mythravain did not release us when the memory ended.

The mist remained around our knees, pale and quiet, but the ravine was gone. So were the false hearth, Thalen’s summer hill, and the younger guardians that had nearly held Calethor. Only the gray trees remained, stretching upward into a light without a visible source.

For several breaths, none of us moved.

Calethor leaned on his staff. The wood was scorched where the false ley thread struck it, leaving a blackened groove several inches long. Aerenil rested against Thalen’s chest, her wings drooped with exhaustion. Kynami had returned to my shoulder and was working his beak through a bent feather as if the past hour had merely inconvenienced him.

I envied him.

Thalen looked at the light beyond the trees. His weariness had returned, but so had the precision I had seen in the Archives.

Calethor straightened. “Can you find the way out?”

Thalen gave him a look that might have been annoyance if either of them had enough strength left for it. “Ask Mythravain.”

“I prefer answers that do not try to kill me.”

“So do I.”

Thalen closed his eyes and turned slowly. At first, I thought he was listening, but then I saw his free hand moving slightly at his side, tracing a pattern in the air. He stopped facing a pair of pale trunks.

“There.”

I saw nothing. “Where?”

“The entrance record placed us beneath the western restricted shelves. The path curved twice after we entered, but Mythravain altered the distance. If the Archives have not shifted with it, west should still be…”

Thalen stopped speaking as the tree to his left shuddered.

A dark line appeared in the bark. Crooked. I knew the shape before it completed itself.

“Back,” I warned.

Calethor moved between us and the tree before I had finished the word. His staff struck the ground, and Aerenil launched from Thalen’s shoulder.

The mark flashed, and frost spread over the pale trunk like branched veins. The mist at its base froze with a sound like thin glass cracking across water.

“That was not here before,” Thalen said. He did not take his eyes from the mark. “I know every recorded mark into Mythravain.”

Calethor glanced toward him. “Recorded?”

Thalen’s jaw tightened. “That one is not.”

The crooked line brightened.

I expected it to reach for me as it had in the memory, but instead, the trunk split.

Not wide. Only enough to expose darkness inside. Then another tree cracked behind us. And another. Mythravain was no longer quiet. Until then, the silence had felt watchful. Now it felt like something waiting for us to choose the wrong direction.

“Move,” Calethor said.

Thalen did, cutting between the two trees he had identified before the mark appeared, and we followed. The mist dragged at my boots, thickening almost to my knees. Behind us came another sharp crack.

Kynami lifted from my shoulder and flew ahead. Nothing unusual drove him. He did what he had done on roads and cliffs since I had known him: found open air before I did.

He circled once and cried.

“Right,” I said.

Thalen veered toward him without arguing.

The pale trees crowded closer. Their trunks no longer stood in even intervals. Roots pushed up beneath the mist, forcing us over and around them. Calethor stayed behind me, his staff striking the ground every third or fourth step, not in rhythm but in testing.

Another crooked mark burned across a trunk to our left.

Aerenil hissed.

“Do not answer it,” Thalen said.

“I had no intention of answering anything,” I gasped.

“I meant the harp.”

My hand was already on the case. I let go, distancing my hand from it.

The mark flared then disappeared.

Ahead, Kynami disappeared between two roots. I hurried after him and nearly ran into the wall. There should have been a passage. Instead, woven roots sealed the space from floor to whatever passed for ceiling in Mythravain.

Kynami perched on a narrow spur of wood above it and looked down at us.

Thalen pushed past me. He stared at the roots. “This is the place.”

“It looks closed,” I said.

Calethor turned to Thalen. The mist behind us had begun to darken. “Open it.”

Thalen touched the roots, and nothing happened. He tried one Elven phrase. Then another. The first sounded ceremonial. The second did not. The roots remained shut.

The crooked mark appeared in the mist behind Calethor without any tree to carry it.

For the first time, Thalen looked genuinely alarmed.

I stepped beside him. “What do you need?”

“Time.”

Calethor placed himself between us and the approaching mark. Aerenil landed on his staff and spread her small wings, making herself look considerably larger than she was.

Thalen traced the sealed roots with both hands now, touching lightly, searching rather than forcing. His fingers stopped at a knot near shoulder height.

I saw only wood.

He pressed two fingers against it and spoke a word I did not know. Nothing. His face tightened.

“Again,” I said.

He looked at me, “I said it correctly.”

“Say it again,” I repeated, as the dark mark slid closer through the mist.

Thalen pressed his fingers to the knot and repeated the word.

This time Aerenil answered from Calethor’s staff, with one note, clear and high-pitched.

The root under Thalen’s fingers shifted. He sucked in a breath, then repeated his word a third time while Aerenil held the note.

The roots separated. Warm lamplight poured through the opening.

“Go,” Calethor said.

Thalen ducked through first. I followed, with Kynami sweeping over my head. Calethor and Aerenil came last, and the roots slammed together behind them.

For an instant the crooked mark showed through them, blue-white between the seams, then it vanished.

We stood in the Living Archives. It was as if nothing had changed.

Lamps burned behind pale glass. Scrolls rested in their stone cradles. The dark water in the nearest basin reflected branches that were not overhead. Somewhere deeper in the chamber, a page turned though no hand touched it. The ordinary stillness felt miraculous.

Thalen bent forward, placing his hands on his knees.

I lowered myself onto a root curved up from the floor like a bench, before my legs decided to collapse under me.

Calethor remained standing; his staff was still smoking.

Thalen noticed it too. “You should let me look at that.”

“At the staff?”

“At your hand.”

Only then did I see the burn across Calethor’s palm. It was thin, no wider than a cord, but an angry red.

He closed his fingers over it. “Later.”

Thalen straightened. “That is what people say immediately before making my work more difficult.”

“You are my grandson, not my healer.”

“I am also the Archivist responsible for this chamber, and you are bleeding on it.”

Calethor looked down. He sighed. One drop had fallen beside his boot.

I would have enjoyed the victory on Thalen’s face if there had been one. Instead, he took a clean strip of cloth from his satchel and wrapped Calethor’s palm with brisk efficiency. While he worked, I looked back toward the sealed roots.

“Was that Mythravain?” I asked.

Thalen hesitated.

“Yes,” he said. “But not all of it.”

Calethor looked at him.

Thalen tied the cloth around his palm and sat back on his heels. “The false hearth was Mythravain. So was the path closing behind us, the memories trying to hold us, even the roots resisting our exit. Those are dangers recorded by others who entered before us.”

“And the crooked mark?” Calethor asked.

“No.” He looked toward the sealed passage. “That does not belong there.”

A coldness settled under my ribs. “Velroth.”

Thalen stood. “I cannot prove he placed it there himself. But the mark was his.”

Calethor flexed his bandaged hand. “We opened the memory of Tiralan.”

Thalen nodded slowly. “And Tiralan is not only a memory. The breach still exists. Whatever Mythravain preserved of that day is tied to something that has never healed.”

I remembered the crooked sigil turning toward me in the ravine. It had not behaved like the rest of the memory. It had noticed me. “So, we opened a way for it.”

“Not a doorway,” Thalen said. “More like exposing a thread that was already there. Mythravain let us see the wound. Velroth’s corruption was still attached to it.”

Calethor’s expression hardened. “And once it found us looking back, it pulled.”

I glanced again at the roots. “Can it corrupt Mythravain?” They looked ordinary now: living wood folded seamlessly over the entrance, green light moving beneath the bark.

Thalen took longer to answer. “I don’t know. Mythravain is older than Velroth and stronger than one false mark. But if the breach worsens, the memories tied to it may no longer remain safely separate from what is happening now.”

The Archives had shown us the past so we could understand the wound. Now the wound knew we had seen it.

Calethor flexed his bandaged hand once.

I looked between them, then asked, “How long before Tiralan?”

“On the old heart-road? Half a day, perhaps less.”

“Then we leave now.” Calethor said. His voice was calm, yet firm.

Thalen looked at him as though considering an argument. Whatever he saw stopped him, and he nodded.

Calethor exchanged his damaged staff for another kept near the Archive doors, though he paused before leaving the scorched one behind to join the artifacts of ancient memories.

I understood. It had stood with him through the memory of Tiralan, and now we were going to the real place.

Outside, Kelvaren had changed. Not visibly at first. The living homes still curved among the trees. Flowers still opened along the paths despite the cold higher on the mountain. Somewhere nearby, someone was chopping wood. A child called to another from across a terrace.

But the village no longer felt half asleep. People stood in doorways, listening eastward.

Maereth was waiting at the foot of the Archive path. Her eyes went first to Calethor’s bandaged hand, then to Thalen. “What happened?”

Thalen answered in Elven.

I caught only two words. Mythravain. Tiralan.

Maereth closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she looked at me. “You are going?”

“Yes.”

“You have just returned.”

“So has the thing waiting for us.”

Her gaze sharpened.

Thalen looked toward the eastern ridge. “One of Velroth’s marks appeared inside Mythravain.”

Maereth turned and called to someone behind her. Within minutes we had water, bread, a coil of rope, and three heavier cloaks.

That frightened me more than an argument would have. Those in Kelvaren knew what Tiralan meant.

We left by the eastern path. For the first mile, the road was almost beautiful enough to make me distrust my own fear.

Living trees arched above pale paving stones. Their branches had been trained together generations ago, but they did not look forced. The trunks leaned willingly across the road, leaves silver-green against a clear sky. Small winter flowers grew between the stones, their petals translucent at the edges.

Water ran beside us in a narrow channel lined with blue-gray rock.

Thalen walked in front. His pace was faster than it had been on the road into Kelvaren, but he never seemed hurried. He checked landmarks against his internal map, glancing at root markings I would never have noticed, and changed paths twice without explanation.

Calethor walked at the back, and I stayed between them.

For once, no one needed to tell Kynami where to fly. He ranged ahead, returning every few minutes to circle above us before disappearing again. Aerenil rode Thalen’s shoulder more often than she flew. She had spoken only once since leaving the Archives: her words untranslated and kept private by Thalen.

It almost made the morning feel ordinary. Then the sound of the water stopped. I looked toward the channel. Water still moved over the stones, catching light as it went, but I could not hear it.

“Thalen.”

“I know.”

He slowed. Twenty paces ahead, the flowers growing between the road stones all leaned in the same direction. East. Toward Tiralan.

Calethor stepped off the path and crouched beside the stream. He dipped two fingers into the water. His expression changed.

“What?” I asked.

“Cold.” Calethor shuddered oddly.

“It is winter,” I said.

“Not like this.” He lifted his hand. Frost covered his bluish fingertips.

Thalen said, “The old ward line crosses here.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Under the road.”

I looked down. At first, I saw nothing except pale stones, moss, and the thin brown remains of last summer’s grass.

Then Kynami cried overhead. A shadow crossed the road: no, a line.

It ran beneath the paving stones, too straight to be root and too dark to be water. Frost gathered along its edges.

Calethor stood immediately. “Do not step across it.”

I looked behind us. We already had.

The dark line ran from the stream on one side of the road into the trees on the other. It had appeared between us and the path back to Kelvaren.

Thalen swore in Elven.

Aerenil answered with a sharper word that required no translation.

“Was it there when we crossed?” I asked.

“No.”

The paving stone nearest Calethor shifted. Then another. The road buckled behind us. Roots tore upward through the stones, not growing but being pulled. The sound of water returned all at once as the stream surged over its bank.

“Forward!” Thalen shouted.

We ran.

The old road twisted sharply uphill. Behind us, stone cracked, and roots dragged themselves across the path. I glanced back once and saw frost spreading over the stream like a hand closing.

Kynami swept past my shoulder.

Ahead, Aerenil launched from Thalen and disappeared around the bend.

We reached the top of the rise. And stopped. The road ended at a bridge, at least, it had once been a bridge.

Living roots as thick as my waist curved from one side of a narrow gorge to the other, woven beneath pale stone. Most still held. One had split, opening a gap wide enough to see the drop below.

Aerenil hovered over the far side.

“There is another road?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How far?”

Thalen looked behind us. The first frost-covered root rounded the bend. “Too far.”

Calethor shoved the coil of rope into my hands. “Across.”

“You first.”

“Elowen.”

“If the bridge collapses, you are more useful on the other side.”

He almost argued.

Thalen did not give him time. “I agree with her.”

Calethor glared at both of us, then crossed.

The bridge shifted under his weight but held.

Thalen went next, moving carefully over the broken section. Aerenil landed on the far stone and called encouragement in Elven that sounded suspiciously insulting.

I tied the rope around my waist, and gave the end to Kynami, who had landed on the bridge rail.

I told him. “You have wings. Use them.”

He gave me the look he reserved for instructions he considered beneath him and flew across, dropping the rope to Calethor.

I stepped onto the bridge. The first few paces held. Then the road behind me cracked. The sound rolled through the roots beneath my feet. I did not look back.

“Elowen,” Calethor called. “Keep moving.”

“I am.”

“Faster.”

“I am considering throwing you into the gorge.”

“That would require reaching me.”

Far too reasonable.

I took another step. The split root beneath the bridge snapped, and the structure under me dropped as I grabbed for the rail. The rope jerked tight around my waist; Thalen and Calethor had it, though it was tightening painfully.

“Move!” Thalen shouted.

The bridge tilted, slamming into the wall of the gorge. I climbed faster, testing each root before I trusted my weight to it: one lesson from the mountain paths above Kaldora I hadn’t known I’d kept. There was no dignity in it. No bardic crossing worthy of song. I hooked one arm over a root that held, shoved my pack ahead of me, prayed the harp strap held, and scrambled up the far side while stones slid into the gorge behind my boots.

A dark root reached the near end of the bridge. Frost raced through the woven supports.

Calethor braced the rope around his uninjured hand. “Now, Elowen.”

I launched myself forward, catching Thalen’s extended arm. Calethor caught the back of my pack.

My momentum forced us to the ground together, while the rest of the bridge tumbled into the gorge. A moment later, the dark frost reached the broken edge. Then stopped.

For a while the only sound was our breathing.

The road behind us was gone. There was no going back the way we had come.

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A Prayer Consecrating the Use of Words:

Lord, guide my use of words and control my tongue and mind. Help me to speak and write with integrity and transparency. Let the proper use of words flow through me. May my yes be yes and my no be no.

I confess that I have used words in self-defense: to deny wrongdoing and not take responsibility for my actions. I use them to seek attention and praise. In these ways, I have corrupted my use of words. I renounce these attempts to manipulate through words and any corrupt use of words.

Forgive me, Lord.

I place my use of words on the altar and ask You, Lord, to sanctify them.

Holy Spirit, I ask You to control my tongue. Guide me in choosing both spoken and written words. Guard my words and my integrity, that I may serve You in truth.

Instill a sense of responsibility for the words I use; may I feel the real impact—the spiritual impact on others—of my words. And may this keep me ever mindful of the importance of consecrating my words before I speak or write.

In Jesus’ name, I pray.

Amen.

Chapter One

Chapter Forty-Five: Echoes of Truth

The way into Mythravain began as a narrow passage of roots drawn back from one another to form a sloped path. Moss defined and softened the edges.

Thalen stood inside the doorway, his shoulders squared and his face pale. He discarded the weariness he had carried since we crossed the seam, and embraced the energy of living research. My time with him taught me that he was exact, careful, and leery of knowledge only because he knew what knowledge could cost.

Calethor stood behind me, one hand closed around his staff, protective and watchful.

Kynami remained perched on me, feathers fluffed, body warm but tense. Aerenil clung to Thalen’s shoulder, her wings folded so tightly they looked carved against her sides.

I felt shielded on all sides, and yet completely unsafe.

Three places were named: Tiralan; The Well Where the Stars Fell; and Mythravain. The names pressed against one another in my thoughts until they blurred.

“What should I expect?” I asked.

Thalen did not answer at once. “Memory.”

“I have plenty of those.”

“Not only yours.”

I absorbed that slowly. “Will it show us what happened to Elreth?”

“If we find the right memory,” Thalen said. “And if Mythravain allows it to remain true long enough for us to understand it.”

That was not reassuring.

Calethor’s gaze remained on the open doorway behind us. “There are memories that defend themselves.”

“By frightening people away?”

“Sometimes.”

“And the rest of the time?”

Thalen answered. “By comforting them.”

Aerenil made a small sound and pressed closer to his neck.

“Mythravain does not always wound by terror,” Thalen said. “Sometimes it offers rest. Sometimes it gives back what grief has taken and waits to see whether you will leave it again.”

“Why would that be dangerous?”

“Because comfort can ask you to stay.”

The words settled coldly as I studied the dark passage waiting beneath the roots. I thought of the seam, of naming what held me steady. People. Places. Vows kept or broken. Anything true enough that naming it cost me something.

“What holds me may not be enough here,” I said.

“No,” Calethor replied. “Here, what holds you may be what Mythravain uses first.”

Kynami brushed his wing once against my cheek. Courage.

I nodded, then lied. “I am ready.”

Thalen spoke a line in Elven, parting the roots. He entered first. Calethor signaled for me to proceed, and then followed, staff held ready.

Behind us, the restricted shelf had sealed again, hiding the scrolls. Its roots folded together with a sound of earth pressed over a grave.

I turned back at once. Only a wall of root and green-veined stone remained. “Thalen.”

“I see it.”

His voice was too calm, which frightened me more.

He stepped back to the closed passage and ran two fingers above the bark, not touching it. His eyes moved quickly, searching for marks I could not see.

“The exit?” Calethor asked.

Thalen’s jaw tightened. “No longer here. Not until Mythravain has given what we came for.”

The air thinned around us. “So we cannot leave?” I asked.

“We leave when we find the true memory,” Thalen said.

“And if we find the wrong one?”

He looked at me then. “We must not follow it.”

The root passage widened after a few steps into a gray-green mist that moved around our knees. The floor beneath us was neither soil nor stone, though it held our weight. Pale trunks rose on either side, smooth and tall, without branches until far overhead, where their crowns vanished into dim light.

“Mythravain,” Thalen said. The mist drew around the word protectively.

He walked near me now, no longer several paces ahead; every step disturbed the mist.

Patterns rose in it after we passed: a spiral, a broken branch, a child’s hand, a stag’s antler, a harp string, a door. Each shape held for a breath and then folded back into gray.

“Are those memories?” I asked.

“Some,” Thalen said. “Or rather remnants of memory.”

A small wooden cup rose beside my boot. For half a breath it became the cup I had broken in Falcon’s Perch when I was seven, the one my mother had laughed over instead of scolding me. I saw her hand reach to gather the pieces. Then the mist swallowed it.

I stopped breathing. Kynami shuffled closer.

“Keep moving,” Thalen said.

The mist thickened as the air grew warmer.

At first, warmth seemed a mercy. My hands had ached with cold since the gate. My shoulders were stiff from carrying the pack and harp. The soft air loosened something in me before I could resist it.

Then I smelled bread. Fresh bread.

This was not coming from the travel bread in my pack. This was hearth bread, golden-crusted, warm enough to fill a room.

Falcon’s Perch.

I stopped.

Thalen stopped too, but not because of me. His face had softened and so had Calethor’s.

The mist ahead thinned, and through it I saw firelight.

Beyond the trees, the hearth burned bright. Tables stood straight. Chairs waited as if for evening travelers. The bar was polished. A kettle hung over the coals. Light glowed in the windows though no winter pressed against them.

Nerion lay on the hearth rug, safe and whole, his head on his paws, blue eyes half-closed.

Elarûk stood near the open kitchen door as if goats had always belonged in hearth rooms and anyone saying otherwise lacked imagination.

At one table, Áthir sat with his harp across his knees.

Alive.

My heart gave one hard, painful beat.

He looked up.

“Ellie,” he said, smiling.

I started to take a step.

Kynami cried out.

The sound came from far away, though he still clung to me.

I stopped.

The hearth room held its shape.

Áthir’s smile weakened, the way it had when I was young and ruined a song by rushing the ending.

“You have done enough,” he said. “Come in. Warm yourself.”

Come in.

Warm yourself.

The old ward-song twisted under the words.

I knew it.

I knew it, and still I wanted to believe.

My pack slid from my shoulder and struck the ground.

No, not ground. The floor of the hearth room.

I looked down. My boots stood on familiar boards.

The scent of warm bread, ash, and wet wool surrounded me.

Nerion lifted his head and thumped his tail once.

Home.

Every part of me longed to reach toward it, but I turned away.

Thalen had said comfort could ask us to stay.

He had not said it would ask in the voices we loved.

Thalen stood near a threshold, no longer in the forest. His hand rested against the frame of a doorway I did not recognize. Beyond it lay a green hill filled with summer grass. Children rolled down it, laughing, their hair bright with butterflies. A young elf stood among them, face turned away, singing a melody Thalen had once said he no longer remembered.

It must be his brother.

Thalen’s mouth had parted; he took one step.

Aerenil snapped her teeth into his cloak and pulled hard.

Thalen did not seem to feel it.

“Thalen,” I said.

He took another step toward the hill, then turned back to me. Tears filled his eyes; pain etched his face.

Calethor stood on my other side, one hand braced against a tree that had not been there a moment before. Around the tree moved figures I did not know, young, laughing, calling his name. Two of them turned with faces like Velroth and Elreth before grief had divided them. The last one might have been my father, or perhaps Áthir.

Calethor’s eyes closed.

The room warmed, and the lie became kinder.

“You do not have to lose them,” Áthir said from behind me.

A chair scraped back from the table. My legs ached with the sudden desire to sit with him. To put down the harp. To warm my hands. To let someone else be brave. To let Áthir tell me the wound had held long enough, that Kaldora would manage, that I was still a girl who had lost too much and owed no more.

“Come in,” he said again.

I kept my back toward the hearth. If I saw Áthir again, I would run to him.

Aerenil hissed, drawing my attention back to Thalen. He had stepped forward again and reached through the doorway. As the sunlight from the hill touched his hand, his fingers began to fade at the edges, as if Mythravain were dissolving him into the memory one breath at a time.

“Thalen!”

He did not turn.

Kynami struck my cheek with one wing. Hard. Pain flashed bright enough to cut through the smell of bread.

I glanced back. Áthir’s hands moved over the harp, but no sound came from the strings.

Áthir’s harp always carried sound, even closed in its case, even without being touched. Yet, this harp made none.

I looked at Nerion. His eyes were blue. They were too blue, and held no grief.

Elarûk did not hum or speak.

The fire did not crackle. The room had every shape of home and none of its living breath.

I bent and snatched up my pack.

The false Áthir watched me. His smile did not change. The real Áthir’s smile had always carried worry. Even joy had not freed him from listening to the land.

“You are not him,” I said.

The hearth room dimmed, and the false Áthir looked almost sorrowful. “I am what you remember.”

My voice shook. “No, you are what I want.”

The fire guttered. My hand caught the harp case. The clasp snapped loose. Áthir’s harp slid partly free, dark wood cold against my palm.

The false hearth room leaned closer as Áthir stood.

“Elowen,” he said, and this time his voice was not gentle.

The false room had stopped asking.

I seized the harp and struck the strings. A harsh, broken sound ripped through the room.

The false fire went black. Nerion vanished first. Then Elarûk. Áthir remained longest. Hunger looked out through his eyes.

Then Kynami flew at him, striking the false Áthir’s shoulder in a blur of gold.

The room shattered into mist, and I fell to my knees on cold, root-laced ground. Pain shot up both legs.

Thalen cried out somewhere to my left.

I twisted toward him.

The summer hill had not vanished completely. A strip of it still hung in the mist like a torn banner, and Thalen stood half inside it, one arm reaching toward the young elf who had begun to turn.

Aerenil had both claws sunk into his shoulders now, wings beating furiously.

“Thalen!” I pushed myself up. “The song. The real one.”

His eyes were fixed on the hill. “My brother,” he whispered.

“I know, but he cannot leave with you,” I said. “You would have to stay.”

My words hurt him.

Aerenil cried, “Veth!”

Free.

Thalen flinched as the young elf on the hill turned, his face incomplete. Memory had blurred it, softened it, repaired what grief had broken until no true person remained. A brother made of longing. A mercy made of mist.

Thalen closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the Archivist had returned. He spoke a command in Elven. His voice broke on the first word, but he spoke the rest with iron under it.

The hill tore away. Aerenil collapsed against his collar, trembling.

Thalen staggered back into the pale forest.

Calethor still had not moved.

The tree and laughing figures had thinned around him, but one shape remained: younger Velroth standing beneath leaves that no longer existed.

Calethor’s staff had sunk into the ground as if roots had grown around it.

“Calethor,” Thalen said.

No answer.

The false Velroth turned toward him. “Old friend,” it said.

The words were soft. Calethor’s mouth tightened.

“Elreth has been waiting,” the false Velroth said. “You left us here.”

Calethor’s knuckles whitened around his staff. The ground under us began to quake. Mist drew backward from our feet.

The false greeting had not ended, but was becoming the memory we had come to find, and it was trying to drag Calethor into it before he could stand witness.

I moved before thinking, catching Calethor’s sleeve. His arm was rigid beneath my hand. “You told me Mythravain would not soften what it shows us,” I said. “Do not let it use your grief before we reach the truth.”

His eyes opened, and, for a moment, he looked at me as if he did not know who I was.

Then Kynami landed on my shoulder, talons sharp through my cloak, and gave one piercing cry.

Calethor drew one breath, then another. He wrenched his staff free of the roots, and the false figures vanished.

The forest floor split beneath us.

I threw myself backward as a dark fissure opened where Calethor had stood. Thalen grabbed my pack strap and hauled me away from the edge. Aerenil launched from his shoulder, wings beating hard, and spat a thin stream of violet flame at the mist curling around our ankles.

The mist recoiled. For the first time, Mythravain felt angry.

The air tightened around my ribs. The pale trees bent inward. Far ahead, something pulsed in irregular waves.

Thalen gripped his staff in both hands. “This way,” he said.

“You know that?”

“No.”

He looked toward the pulse.

“But the wrong memories are trying to keep us from it.”

That was good enough. We ran.

The mist thickened around our knees, then our waists. Roots broke through the ground in sudden coils. One hooked my boot and nearly took me down. Kynami swooped low and raked his talons across it. The root snapped back, startled.

Aerenil flew ahead, violet body a flicker in the green-gray dark.

“Left!” Thalen shouted.

I veered left as a silver thread whipped across the path. It struck a pale trunk beside me. The bark burned black without flame.

“What was that?”

“A boundary.” Thalen’s breath came hard. Another thread snapped across the path, this one green-white and singing.

Calethor thrust his staff between it and my chest.

The thread struck the staff and wrapped around it. For one terrible moment, light climbed toward his hands.

Calethor drove the staff into the ground. “Stay behind me.” His staff burned silver. He grimaced, but did not let go. I saw him for the fierce guardian he was, bracing himself between the living and what would tear them apart.

Thalen spoke sharply in Elven. The thread loosened. Calethor tore the staff free, its tip smoking.

We started moving again, until the mist opened without warning and we stood on the edge of a ravine.

Tiralan.

The ravine cut through the land like a wound that had tried to heal by growing over itself. Trees leaned from both sides, roots exposed, clutching stone. Pale strands of ley light ran through the air, stretched across the gap in broken lines. Some glowed silver. Some green. Some had blackened to the color of frostbitten wood.

But we were not standing outside the memory. The wind from the ravine struck my face. Stone shifted beneath my boots. The smell of torn roots and burned rain filled my lungs.

At the center of the ravine, suspended in the tangled light, was Elreth.

He did not look as he had in the oldest visions. His face shifted with the strain around him: young, then old, then blurred by light, then sharp with pain. His arms hung slightly away from his sides, held there by threads that passed through and around him.

His eyes were open, but I could not tell whether he saw us.

On the opposite side of the ravine stood Velroth. Younger. Unbroken by years, though grief had already begun its work on him. He moved as if every breath cut. His hands were bloody from gripping the ley threads themselves. He shouted, but the memory gave us no sound at first. Only the shape of his mouth.

Elreth. Elreth.

Then sound arrived all at once.

Not from Velroth alone, but from the ravine, the ley, the air tearing. “Elreth!”

The name split through Mythravain, and the force of it drove me back a step.

Aerenil cried out as Thalen caught my arm.

Calethor planted his staff hard against the ground, but the memory did not stop.

Velroth reached into the threads, and the ravine answered. Three ley strands snapped toward us.

“Down!” Thalen shouted.

I dropped.

The first strand passed over my head close enough to lift my hair. The second struck the ground beside my knee and left a smoking line in the stone. The third wrapped around a root behind Calethor and pulled it apart as easily as thread from a hem.

“This is memory?” I gasped.

“It remembers pain,” Thalen said. “Stay clear of the lines.”

Velroth reached again. The threads tightened around Elreth. Elreth arched, mouth open, no sound escaping.

Calethor beside me made a sound low in his throat.

I looked at him, then back.

This was not the Calethor I knew beside me. This was the younger one within the memory, running toward Velroth, one hand outstretched. Another figure followed him.

Áthir, but not as I had seen him in death. Alive. Young. He moved with terrible calm.

The ravine shook. The threads shrieked. Velroth tried to pull Elreth free, but every place he gripped tightened around his brother. The more he pulled, the more the light cut into Elreth’s body.

Áthir seized Velroth’s arm and this time I heard him. “Stop.”

Velroth turned on him. His face held terror, nearing hatred, with nowhere else to go.

“He is there,” Velroth said. “He is there. Help me.”

“I am trying.”

“No. You are listening to it.”

The land. The wound. Arieth. I understood that much.

The ravine lurched. A broken thread whipped loose and snapped toward Áthir. Another toward us.

Calethor threw out one hand, and his staff flared. The thread struck the light around him and bent away, but the force drove him to one knee.

“Calethor!”

“Watch,” he said through his teeth. “Do not look away.”

I understood. He needed a witness.

Áthir looked toward Elreth. Elreth’s lips moved, but no sound came.

Velroth reached again, and the threads tore. Elreth’s body bowed in silent agony.

Áthir stepped past Velroth and placed both hands into the light. The living Calethor beside me flinched so hard I thought he had been struck.

I wanted to look away from his pain, but Mythravain did not let us. The memory held us where we stood.

Áthir stood with Elreth.

Velroth reached to take him back, but Áthir interceded to keep him from being torn apart.

The threads caught Áthir’s hands. Light burned into his palms. His face tightened, but he did not step away.

In the ravine, the silver and green lines steadied around Elreth briefly, but it was enough for Elreth’s eyes to focus. He looked at Áthir, and then beyond him. At something on the far side of the ravine. A pale shape stood among the trees.

Iltharion.

The snow leopard was not as I had seen him on the road. Whole. Strong. Silver-eyed. His body was lean with power, his paws silent on dark earth. He watched Elreth with a patience that broke my heart.

Elreth saw him.

Velroth did too.

“No,” Velroth whispered.

The word reached us clearly.

“No. He is not yours.”

Iltharion did not move.

Elreth closed his eyes.

A choice trembled in the air, and for one breath, the entire ravine held still.

Then Velroth broke it. He struck his hand against one of the ley threads, forcing a sigil into the light. The mark flared crooked and sharp.

The ravine convulsed.

Áthir shouted. Calethor tried to reach them both. Iltharion vanished behind a wall of light.

Elreth screamed without sound.

The crooked mark burned brighter, and then it turned toward me.

Cold drove through my chest.

“Elowen,” Thalen said.

The mark stretched out of the memory. A crooked line of frost-blue fire reached across the ravine, searching.

Kynami screamed.

Áthir’s harp burned cold against my side. The mark found the sound of it and then found me.

I stumbled backward, but the line followed. It did not move like flame. It moved as a hook dragged through water, catching on whatever answered.

For half a moment, I felt the cellar beneath Falcon’s Perch. Felt woundwood. Felt Nerion braced in the dark. Felt Veylan’s marked hand pressed against stone and the line tightened.

“Elowen!” Calethor drove his staff into the ground before me.

The crooked fire struck it. Silver light flared from the staff, bright enough to blind.

Thalen shouted in Elven. His words cracked through the ravine and the memory shuddered.

Aerenil rose from his shoulder and cried, “Arieth en varu!”

Arieth does not yield to force.

The crooked line recoiled from the words.

Kynami slammed into my shoulder, talons biting through cloth, breaking my fear.

I grabbed the harp with both hands and struck the strings. This time the sound was not broken.

The chord wasn’t beautiful; it was a refusal.

The ravine shattered into mist.

Released, I fell hard. Root and pale ground struck my shoulder, and for several breaths, I could not move.

Thalen’s face had gone gray. Calethor stood as if he had been struck. The tip of his staff smoked, and a dark line had burned halfway up the wood before stopping.

Aerenil landed clumsily against Thalen’s chest. He caught her with one hand, hugging her tightly.

Kynami pressed close to my neck, his heart beating fast.

“He saw Iltharion,” I said. My voice barely carried.

“Yes,” Calethor answered.

“Iltharion was not mine.”

“No.”

The truth did not wound me as I expected. Perhaps I had known since the road.

Calethor closed his eyes. “He was offered to Elreth, but not meant for him. Arieth does not make chains of gifts.”

Iltharion had stood whole and waiting, a possible mercy, yet Velroth had refused it.

He loved this version of Elreth, and he wanted him returned more than he could bear the form of release being offered.

Calethor whispered. “He did not lose his brother once. He chose to keep losing him.”

The words were harsh, but also true.

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In this section, I will explore my faith and my past experiences. Sometimes it will include prayers, Bible reflections, or even flash fiction. Today, it honors a memory.

This is autobiographical and represents my best recollection of the events and their timing. I could be off.

To my siblings, I narrowed the focus. There was evidence for all of you in our interactions and in my work on the condo. And the conclusion would be the same for each of you.

For Dad

I boxed up his living room, washed the dishes in the sink, and stood in the center of the small condo, imagining Dad sitting on the living room chair watching the news, cheering a great basketball move, or rewatching Star Trek – the things we had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. I had been avoiding his bedroom, but it had to be emptied as well. The estate needed to sell the condo as soon as possible.

Opening the door and turning on the light revealed an unmade twin bed and an oversized wooden desk. The desk was intimidating. That left the closet. His clothes hung on hangers, not on his shoulders. His shoes. Oh, his shoes. Why were those so hard to see empty? Was it the sock-covered feet that were left uncovered by the EMTs as his body lay almost forgotten?

In the middle was a giant box. A 3-foot cube! I peeked inside to find all my stuffed animals from childhood. I dragged the box to the middle of the room, pulled out one threadbare dog to hug, and remembered.

When I was young, my Dad worked long hours, but he was home for dinner and weekends. Then, he began traveling for work. I remember being in the car with him and Mom when she took him to the airport for his trips. Strangely, I don’t remember when he came home.

He’d be gone about three months at a time. And would be home for a couple of weeks before leaving again. When he was home, he seemed tired and worried. He would share photos and stories of Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. Evidence of a life we didn’t share.

He loved Australia and New Zealand. He loved Norway. I had thought he loved Seattle, too.

When I was in 6^th grade, he and Mom traveled to the South Pacific together for a month. My sister was over 18, so my older brothers and I were safe and well cared for while they were gone.

From that point on, Mom raised us more like a single mom, even though they were still married.

We lived far from other family, and I never really knew my grandparents. Mom’s mom died before I was born, and her father died when I was ten.

In high school, my parents divorced. It was amicable, as they say. He rented an apartment in a small town with a high school I wanted to attend. It was known for its music program and its nationally ranked academics. I lived there with him, while he continued to travel for work.

I believe I was a sophomore in college when his father died. Earlier that year, I had transferred to the Wheaton Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College in Illinois. The funeral was in Missouri, so he asked me to meet him there.

I agreed, not out of grief, but curiosity and to be there for Dad. I met his mother, whom I had last seen when I was very young. And we spent a couple of days with her, my aunt, and my cousin. I found out my cousin played the French Horn, as I did, and that he was interested in writing.

When I returned to college, I met with my advisor, the Dean of the Conservatory, to discuss catching up with classes and such. In a few short months, he had become more of a counselor and mentor, so he naturally asked about the trip.

I commented about making a special connection with my dad. On the way from his mother’s house to the funeral, he drove. I sat in the front passenger seat, while the other three were in the back. The drive was silent.

After he parked, he hesitated. I said something; I honestly don’t remember what, and in response, he took my hand and held it, almost like a hug.

That’s it. That was the warm family moment.

The Dean was amazed that such a simple thing meant so much to me.

We talked more, and he asked about my Dad. I replied that I didn’t really know him, and that we had few interactions.

He immediately asked why, and I shared the family history.

At the end, he had some advice. Fix it. “If he doesn’t reach out to you, you need to reach out to him.”

So, I did. I began calling him when I knew he was stateside. We would chat; he would ask about my studies, and I would ask about his travels. At the end of the conversation, I would say, “Dad, I love you.”

At first, he was silent. After a few calls, he began mumbling something back. After a few more, he said it clearly for the first time, “I love you, too.” Then it became a bit of a competition to see who would say it first as the calls wound down.

I looked forward to our calls. I usually waited for him to call because of his work, but we would talk every couple of weeks.

A few years after that, I graduated from college and returned to my hometown. I found an apartment with friends that was across the street from our church. My mom attended there as well, and we spent a lot of time together.

We both, independently, decided to go to Seminary. She to become a Christian counselor, and I to be trained for service as a missionary. While I was in Seminary, we received a call from Dad. His mother had died. He and Mom talked for a long time. They had been separated and divorced for a decade or more, but they were still each other’s best friends.

Again, he asked me to travel with him to the funeral, which I did.

We stayed a few days to help clear his mom’s house. He and his sister chose what they wanted, and the rest was dealt with according to the will.

A combination of pressure from his company (recession) and a moderate inheritance led him to retire a bit early. He decided to open a travel agency and school.

After one of our phone conversations (which continued), I sensed that he was feeling overwhelmed. So, I sent him a FAX. Four pages. A giant, full-page H. A giant U, and a giant G! Followed by a note: You sounded like you could use a big HUG!

I finished Seminary and began applying to doctoral programs in Biblical studies. My work had been well received by my professors, and over the years, I had worked as a graduate assistant to three of them: the Chair of the New Testament Biblical Studies department, the Dean of Faculty (and Greek exegesis professor), and the Vice President of Academics (strangely, to help edit his first attempt at fiction).

After graduation, I stayed enrolled in advanced exegesis and language courses while I researched my options. During the January term, I received a call. Dad had had a heart attack and was recovering in the hospital. He was okay, more or less; he had even driven himself to the emergency room, but it was serious.

My family wanted me to move home and work in the travel agency. Both to assist Dad and to learn the business. Everyone else was either working or raising a family.

It meant abandoning my plans, or at least delaying them significantly. I had found out by that point that I couldn’t be a missionary because of my health challenges. I was considering a doctorate and becoming a professor. But nothing was set. Going home seemed right.

That year was amazing. We celebrated every birthday and every holiday as a family. I worked at the travel agency as an agent, which required me to overcome my extreme shyness and social awkwardness. But he was there at the next desk to support me through it all.

One of my favorite parts was sharing breakfast at Denny’s for dinner, after we finished for the day. We talked, shared, laughed. Just the two of us. He told me about his church, and we considered my options for the future.

Towards the end of the year, I started taking courses in multimedia computer technology, including programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. He was supportive because his career began as a computer scientist: first as a professor, then working in research at NASA.

About a week after the last family birthday, my dad died. Alone, on a Sunday, at the travel agency. He had gone to church that morning, served communion as part of his duties, returned to work, and suffered a massive heart attack. He had been working at my desk.

My family asked me to write the sermon for his funeral, which I did. I wrote it as a letter to the pastor, introducing my dad and his incredible life. I ran across a copy when my sister and I were clearing our mom’s house. Mom had saved it.

I was also asked to sort, clear out, and clean Dad’s condo so that it could be sold, which is where we started.

I had cleared the main rooms, and was working on the bedroom. I decided to leave the rest of the closet to Mom. She would be the best one to choose funeral clothes for him and sort the rest.

Returning the well-loved dog to her friends, I walked to the desk and opened the center drawer. The H U G fax was carefully folded with my note on top. His desk chair caught me as I collapsed in my surprise.

A small bag on his desk was now at eye level. When I emptied it, his wallet fell out and opened. It was a mirror functioning as a time machine. My kindergarten face peered back at me. I stared at the image in the wallet. Protected, preserved. Available to him at a moment’s notice.

I looked back at the box. A box filled with all my stuffed animals, kept all these years. My Dad, who learned to say, I love you, a decade before retiring, quietly refused to let go of a single physical trace of loving me.

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This is a first draft, barely touched, so be kind with any mistakes. I wanted to get something out to you sooner rather than wait.

Let me know what you think! Thanks!

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Downward Dog and Goat

The sign had been on the front gate about three days when Biscuit investigated.

Always thorough in her examinations, she taste-tested the bottom corner, then grimaced. The posterboard flavor was fine, the ink, not so much.

Biscuit had watched her girl, Sadie, place the sign. She couldn’t read, but she had suspicions. Sadie and her mother Marcy had been cleaning the near pasture. The herd had been grazing there for weeks, and the grass was running out. Barely an inch or two remained.

Marcy and Sadie had been visiting the farm for nearly as long as Biscuit had been alive. About three batches of goatlings had been born during her lifetime.

But one day, Harold didn’t come to let them out in the morning. A young man came instead. And then Marcy and Sadie. Biscuit liked them. They brought licorice treats. They stayed in the pasture with the herd and played. Biscuit missed Harold’s dry wit, but she enjoyed the new folks.

Since Marcy had arrived, everything seemed to fall in place. The hay in the barn loft fell into the tack room when the wood floor gave out and a new feeding station for the herd was created. The water tank fell into a depression in the yard near the farmhouse, creating a new pond that the ducks loved.

Biscuit decided to dodge back through the hole in the fence, and rejoin her family. The sign was awful, not worth the trek. She was safely hidden in behind the fence when Marcy and Sadie discovered the vandalism.

“Well,” Marcy said, “at least she left the new name and schedule.”

“The first group arrives today?” Sadie asked.

“Yes. They should be here shortly.”

A few weed patches later, eight women in leggings spread mats across the lower pasture. Biscuit and her family wandered over, friendly like.

“They’re supposed to just... wander around us?” asked a woman, apparently named Lili.

Pretzel sniffed her with the wariness of a goat scared the keepers were changing again.

“That’s the idea,” Sadie said.

Biscuit wondered what they were talking about. This had never been done here before. Why did Sadie seem to know what was going on?

Pretzel wandered over to Lili’s mat, considered it for a moment, then began nibbling a small brick. It looked like the small mineral blocks they sometimes ate. Pretzel shook her head, and tossed the block with her horns. Her expression said nasty and tasteless. Like the sign, Biscuit guessed.

Sadie was still talking. “She does that. It’s like a bonding thing.”

“She’s tossing my yoga block.”

“That’s bonding with the block.”

Behind her, a woman climbed on her mat on all fours, and raised her bottom in the air. Nibbles, the youngest and most energetic doeling, jumped on her back.

The woman’s bottom made an excellent summit. For the first time, Nibbles was taller than the rest! She pranced in celebration.

Fortunately, the woman did not seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to be having a spiritual experience, eyes closed, breathing deeply. Like sticking your head through the barn window after a rain.

“This,” the woman said, to no one, “is exactly what my therapist meant.”

Marcy watched them from the porch of Harold’s house with a strange expression, the one she used when Biscuit and her friends explored the garden the other day. They’d been almost done clearing it out, so she’d left them to it...

The herd was quietly grazing, and introducing themselves. Friendly and innocent.

Pounce, on the other hand, was not. Pounce, who was called an Australian Shepherd, was stalking the ducks in the pond.

No, he wasn’t after the ducks, it was the long black snake that liked to bury its head in the pond. Pounce grabbed it and began chasing the ducks. The pond was leaking back out of the snake! The ducks ran and hid in their house, so Pounce headed toward the herd.

“Pounce, no!” Marcy yelled. “We talked about this.”

Pounce, prancing happily, did not appear to remember the conversation.

The black snake’s body went taut, reaching all the way back to the house. It chose that moment to fight, yanking its body from Pounce’s mouth. He flew back in surprise. The snake kept spilling pond water into the field, which seemed to please Pounce greatly as he rolled in the cool mud.

About that time Sadie made it back from untangling Pretzel from a yoga strap. Pretzel had gotten it around one horn and had been wearing it like a hornlace.

The women had given up crawling on their mats. They had instead formed a loose, happy circle around Nibbles, who was balancing on an overturned water bucket, and seemed quite pleased with herself.

“I have to be honest,” Lili said, sitting cross-legged now, block abandoned to the goat who’d claimed it, “I came for the yoga part. I did not expect to cry.”

“You’re crying?”

“A little. It’s the goat. She looked at me like she knew things.”

Sadie looked over the ridiculous pasture as though something had gone unexpectedly right. Pretzel sought more ropes to wear on her horns, Nibbles was mid-summit on a bucket, and Pounce now matched the muddy field. If Biscuit understood correctly, the eight women who had come for this strange visit were instead getting something closer to chaos with a heartbeat.

Nobody’s downward dog (well, that’s what it looked like) had lasted more than four seconds and they didn’t seem to care.

Marcy reappeared on the porch, Pounce’s leash in one hand, a fresh mug of coffee in the other, and watched the pasture with something that had softened, somewhere between the sign incident and now, into pride.

“You know,” she called over, “your grandfather ran cattle on this land for forty years and never once got anybody to cry over an animal on purpose.”

“It wasn’t on purpose.”

“Doesn’t matter. Word’ll get around.”

Sadie looked down at Pretzel, who had abandoned the yoga strap and was now chewing thoughtfully on the hem of her flannel shirt, entirely unbothered by the fact that she had personally derailed the visit. She scratched behind Pretzel’s ear, and Pretzel leaned into it, eyes half-closed, the picture of a goat completely at peace with the disaster she’d caused.

Sadie looked around and smiled. “Yeah, I think it will.”

For now, there was a goat eating her shirt, a dog wearing most of the pond, and eight women lying in the grass laughing uncontrollably.

Biscuit wasn’t sure what Harold’s old cattle land had been waiting forty years for. She couldn’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon.

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Chapter Forty-Four: The Living Archives

The living archives resembled a library, though not the kind I was familiar with. It did not have straight shelves and dust sleeping on the tops of ancient books. This place had order and purpose. The knowledge kept here had been gathered, tended, and guarded.

And Thalen belonged here.

I saw the change in him almost as soon as the doors closed behind us. The grief that had followed him through Kelvaren calmed. I saw his resolve come to life. His shoulders straightened. His hand moved over the nearest shelf-frame without touching the records, reading the carved marks as easily as I might read the order of cups behind the bar at Falcon’s Perch.

“This way,” he said.

Here, the grandson became the guide. His grandfather Calethor was not diminished, but he looked instead like a man taking his proper place, grave and watchful, his guardian’s staff in hand. He had brought us to the threshold. Thalen knew more about the way through what waited beyond.

Shelves rose between the roots, some appearing carved from dark wood and fitted into hollows where the great trunks curved inward, while others grew directly from the roots themselves. Scrolls rested in narrow stone cradles. Bound volumes stood in rows, their covers dark with age, their spines marked in silver script. Strips of bark, thin as parchment, hung from cords around clay tablets, scrolls, and rolled maps. There were also cases of glass holding more fragile items.

The roots curved over shelves like sheltering arms, pressed around doorways, and climbed into the ceiling where faint light moved at the edge of the bark. Moss grew in soft banks along the lower stones, but never over the records. Wherever a book or scroll rested, the moss stopped short, as if even the smallest life knew where memory must be left clear.

Low tables stood in open places, their surfaces worn smooth. One table had a shallow basin set into its center, filled with dark water that reflected branches I could not see overhead. Another held a rack of instruments: a reed pipe, a hand-drum, and a traveler’s harp.

The air smelled of rain, wood, and beeswax from the lamps that burned in niches along the walls. Their flames were small and steady, each enclosed in pale glass. The light they cast warmed the roots to amber while leaving the deeper passages green with shadow.

Kynami’s talons tightened on my shoulder, and Aerenil had gone very still.

The chamber was beautiful, but not gentle. I glanced from place to place, each more wonderful than the last. It was more than visual delight, though; it clearly held the responsibility of protecting the heart of Arieth. Here, songs had been written down to be preserved. Warnings had been sealed before fear could reshape them. Names had been protected when grief tried to bury them.

Thalen stopped a few steps inside and bowed his head.

Calethor did the same.

I followed a moment later.

The doors closed behind us without a sound.

“Can we speak?” I asked.

“Quietly,” Thalen said. “And only with purpose.”

His voice changed the room. The roots and limbs in the chamber perked and attended. The small flames burned steadier. The pale light under the bark drew closer to the path before us.

Thalen turned left, toward a row of shelves sunk deep into the curve of the wall.

We followed.

He moved through the aisles with the care of someone walking among sleeping elders. He paused at one shelf, checked the color of a thread tied around a scroll case, then passed it by. At another, he bent to read a row of markings carved low into the roots.

“These are road records,” he said. “Crossings, repairs, warnings, failed passages.”

“Failed passages?”

His mouth tightened. “The Archives record more than success.”

We passed records taking more forms than I knew how to name. Scrolls wrapped in silk and bound with a silver cord. Books with bark-thin covers. Maps etched into sheets of hammered copper. Stones marked with runes so fine they looked like frost. Clay tablets sealed behind glass.

I slowed beside one shelf where small objects had been placed in individual hollows: a child’s wooden flute, a braid of faded rope, a smooth river stone, and a feather darkened almost black with age.

The flute gave the faintest hum as I passed.

Thalen’s hand touched my sleeve before I reached toward it.

“Don’t.”

He could sense that I wanted to touch it, that its tone spoke to me.

“I wasn’t going to.” It wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t speak of my heart’s longing.

He looked at the flute, not at me. “Some records are kept because touching them would wake more than memory.”

I drew my hand back fully.

“Whose was it?” I asked.

“No one living knows.”

That seemed a harsh answer for a place made to keep what time would otherwise steal.

Thalen heard the question I did not ask.

“The Archives keep what they can,” he said. “But not everything can be named.”

I looked once more at the little flute. A place could remember a song after it forgot the singer. Would Áthir’s harp rest here someday?

That thought stayed with me as we walked deeper. Both my father’s and my grandfather’s songs lived in me that way: not always whole, nor attached to their first meaning. A line here. A melody there. A phrase that came when I was frightened or when I needed it most. I had thought memory meant possessing something, in order to honor it.

Perhaps memory was not only something frozen by time, but something that held a claim on me as I lived.

Thalen led us through two narrow aisles and stopped before a shelf unlike the others.

No books or scrolls were resting there, only a panel of living root, dark and smooth, grown across the hollow where records should have stood. Silver script marked the frame around it, but the center remained bare.

“No artifacts?” I asked.

“Not visible ones.” Thalen’s eyes moved over the silver script. “Restricted record. From the First Mending. Guardian witness required.”

Calethor stepped closer.

“Guardian witness?” I asked.

Thalen looked from the panel to Calethor. “Some records are not opened by knowledge alone. The Archivist may find them, but a guardian must stand witness before they are read.”

Calethor inclined his head. “And the one carrying the wound must first ask.”

I looked down at Áthir’s harp.

Of course.

This was why all three of us had been brought to the threshold.

“What opens it?” I asked.

Thalen’s eyes moved to the harp case. “Need, not demand.”

As I unfastened Áthir’s harp, the chamber seemed to grow quieter.

Thalen stepped back, though I could feel how difficult it was for him to do so. This was his archive. His place of work. His life spent among records, fragments, and songs half-preserved against forgetting. But this record did not open for expertise alone.

Calethor stood beside him, staff grounded against the floor.

Aerenil watched me with bright, solemn eyes. Kynami brushed his wing against my cheek once, then settled again, warm and living at my shoulder.

I knelt before the sealed panel and unwrapped the harp.

The dark wood caught the lamp-glow. The dragon carved along its frame seemed to move under the light; its body arched in a motion that never completed. I thought of Áthir carrying this as the guardian of Kaldora, of Falcon’s Perch. Before the expanding wound cost him his body. Before he left the harp where I would find it.

I set my fingers to the strings.

The first note entered the shelf and faded, but nothing opened.

I played a second note, then a third. Still nothing.

I stopped. Embarrassed. The chamber held its silence with a patience that felt almost merciless. My hand hesitated over the strings, not sure what to do next.

This was not Falcon’s Perch. These roots did not know my steps in the hallway, and they had not heard my voice in the hearth room. They did not know my lute. They did not know the songs I had played, pretending I could stay untouched by the people listening.

I was a stranger here.

Then I remembered the ward-song under Falcon’s Perch.

           Come in.

           Warm yourself.

           You are safe.

           You are not alone.

It was humble and needy. It had not tried to impress the buried house with my worthiness. It had offered welcome, and the house had known the shape of it. Perhaps that knowledge would carry to this side as well.

I played the first arpeggio and sang, “Come in.”

The panel did not move.

I played the second “Warm yourself.”

The harp trembled, and Aerenil made a small sound behind me.

I played the third, “You are safe.”

The silver script brightened.

I played the fourth line more softly, “You are not alone.”

The root-panel loosened, shifting with the patience of living wood, one seam forming where none had been, then another. Moss drew back from the frame. The dark root divided itself into three narrow panels and folded inward.

Behind them lay ancient scrolls wrapped in cloth.

The cloth coverings had darkened, and the weave seemed bare in places, revealing fragile parchment beneath.

From what little I could see, the scrolls’ edges were tattered, their ink faded in places to a gray-brown shadow. Some records had been repaired with thin strips of leaf-vein. Others had cracked along the edges despite all care. Each rested in its own stone cradle, marked by a narrow slip of bark.

Thalen came forward first, but he did not reach for the scrolls. He read the bark slips one by one, lips moving silently over the old script, almost meditatively. The Archivist in him had overtaken the exhausted traveler. His hands were steady now, careful without hesitation.

“This one,” he said at last.

Calethor looked at the marking. Something passed between them.

“You are certain?” Calethor asked.

“No.” Thalen lifted the scroll with both hands. “But this is from the right era, and the right place. This is where the wound first appeared.”

He carried it to the nearest table and set it down as gently as if it might burst into dust.

Aerenil climbed down his arm and settled near the edge, careful not to touch the cloth. Kynami left my shoulder and perched on a limb above us, golden eyes fixed on the table.

Thalen patiently unwrapped the scroll.

The parchment trembled slightly in the lamp-glow, as if being exposed was almost more than it could bear.

The script was Elven, written around diagrams of roots, stars, and spirals. Between the lines were notations of music, but unlike my father’s songs, these did not sit quietly on the staff. They crossed through the words, broke them apart, returned to them, and wound around symbols I recognized only because I had seen their crooked echoes in Velroth’s false marks.

A section near the top had been copied in the common tongue. The Well Where the Stars Fell.

I looked from the words to Thalen. “A place?”

“An old wound,” he said. “Older than Kaldora. Older than Kelvaren. Most of what people know survives as children’s tales and legends.”

Calethor touched one finger near the margin, careful not to brush the ink. “And as a warning.”

Thalen read the marks beneath the diagram, “Seal attempted. Failed.” His voice lowered. “Bound again. Failed.”

He followed the last line of music with his eyes. “Held from both sides. Partial mending.”

No one spoke for several breaths.

The words were ordinary for what they carried.

I looked down at the scroll, at the diagrams of lines entering a dark center from opposite directions. “So, the Well was not given to us as a place to seek.”

“No,” Thalen said. “The road to it is gone from any map still trusted.”

“As instruction, then,” Calethor said.

Held from both sides.

My mind returned to the gate: to Áthir’s harp warming in my hands; to Nerion beneath Falcon’s Perch, white paws braced against woundwood; to Veylan’s marked hand pressed to stone.

The wound was drawing from both sides.

Thalen unrolled the scroll farther.

The next section was badly damaged. Whole lines had faded. Others had been scraped nearly clean, leaving only rough pale scars where ink had once been. The music broke in several places and resumed after gaps too large to cross by guesswork.

Thalen bent closer, his finger tracing the script. “This section mentions a living breach.”

He read silently first, as if he would not speak without being sure.

Aerenil made a low, encouraging sound.

His words were soft, almost undiscernible. “When one living becomes bound inside a breach, do not mistake the bound one for the wound.”

Calethor’s mouth tightened.

I looked up. “Elreth?”

The chamber seemed to draw closer.

He continued. “The wound may speak through him. Hunger may wear his face. Grief may answer in his voice. But the one held is not the thing that wounds.”

I felt cold under my ribs. There was no question: Elreth.

I saw him as I had seen him in visions: caught in the ley lines, trapped, weakening. He had not attacked or tried to tear the breach. He held inside it, while Velroth reached and forced and marked the land in his refusal to accept what had happened.

“Elreth is not the corruption,” I said.

“No,” Calethor replied.

“Then what is he?”

“Caught.”

The word was simple enough.

Thalen’s hand tightened around the scroll’s edge, though he did not touch the ink. “Velroth knows this.”

“Perhaps he knew it once,” Calethor said. “But knowing is not the same as surrendering or accepting. Velroth loved his brother. That was never the lie. The lie was believing love gave him the right to drag Elreth back.”

I thought of the false sigils, crooked marks, and poisoned places Velroth left behind. “What is the truth then?” I asked.

Thalen pointed at a diagram below the broken text.

Three lines crossed at a dark center. One line ran west. One east. And in the center, one pierced downward through the roots.

Kaldora.

Venrathil.

And the wound between them.

The words were not written there. They did not need to be.

“The breach cannot be pulled shut from one side,” Thalen said.

Calethor’s gaze moved to the dark center of the diagram. “And Elreth cannot be dragged back through it.”

I stared at the dark center until it blurred, “Then what can be done?”

Thalen searched the lower edge of the scroll, then gently placed one of the stone weights so the parchment would lie flat. A narrow line of script waited there, half-hidden under an old repair.

His mouth formed the word before he spoke it. “Tiralan.”

The name moved through the Archives, as the light beneath the roots seemed to fade from us, as if even this guarded place knew the name was not safe.

“You know it?” I asked.

Thalen nodded once. “A ravine east of Kelvaren. Near the old heart-road to Venrathil.”

Calethor’s eyes had gone distant. “I told you to avoid it.”

“You said the ley shivered there long after the fall.”

“It did.”

“Elreth fell there?”

Calethor closed his eyes for one brief breath.

“Yes.”

Aerenil lowered herself until her belly nearly touched the table.

“Saevri,” she whispered.

Defiled.

The scroll gave no comfort. Only fragments, notes, warnings, a diagram, and a name.

Perhaps that was all old records could offer when those who wrote them had been afraid.

I leaned closer.

Beneath the name Tiralan, another line had been copied in a different hand.

I pointed towards it.

Thalen answered, “Seek not the first knot, but the wound that still believes it is a gate.”

“What does this mean?”

Thalen’s voice was low. “The first place the damage showed may not be where it must be healed.”

Calethor nodded. “Velroth has set marks throughout the paths. Kaldora bears one end of the wound plainly. But the breach that holds Elreth is at Tiralan.”

“Then we go there.” The words left me before I could consider them.

Thalen looked at me sharply.

Calethor did not. He had known I would say it, perhaps feared it.

“We go there,” Thalen said. “But not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Archives have shown us where,” His face tightened. “But not what happened.”

The scroll lay between us, full of broken places where truth had worn away or been removed.

I understood, though I wished I had not.

“The memory of Elreth’s fall is not here,” I said.

“No.”

“Where is it?”

Thalen looked toward the root work beneath the restricted shelf.

For the first time since we entered, the Archivist looked afraid of his own archive.

“Mythravain,” he said.

Aerenil shivered.

The name moved through the chamber like ice water through new sprouts.

“Where is Mythravain?” I asked.

Neither of them answered.

Thalen knelt before a narrow compartment carved low in the root work, no wider than his hand. I had not seen it before.

He whispered. “The Place Where Songs Sleep.” Then he touched the mark above it, and the living wood opened.

The roots overhead drew tighter.

Calethor stepped closer, and his staff touched the floor with a soft, deliberate sound.

“It is not part of the Archives,” Thalen said.

“No,” Calethor said. “It lies beneath them.”

“Why would a memory be kept there instead of here?” I asked.

Thalen looked up. “Because some memories are too dangerous to leave where others can read them.”

“What kind of danger?”

His voice had gone thin. “The kind that shows you both the truth and what it will cost to act.”

Calethor looked at him. “You know the way?”

“I know where the references point.” Thalen’s gaze remained fixed on the bark. “I know the access marks, the warnings, the names of those who entered and did not return, or returned changed.”

Kynami dropped back to my shoulder, as Aerenil pressed closer to Thalen’s neck. They seemed to sense our need for their comfort and strength.

Thalen traced the markings below the opening in the roots, and the roots beneath the restricted shelf creaked.

At first, I thought the sound came from the walls settling. Then the moss at our feet drew back, exposing a narrow line in the floor. One root lifted. Then another. They curved aside with slow care, revealing a dark, narrow opening.

There were no apparent steps, only a passage sloping down among the roots.

Thalen rerolled the scroll with reverent care and returned it to its stone cradle. The root-panel closed over the restricted shelf until no seam remained.

I stood before the opening and listened. Profound silence held for a moment, and then, far below us, one tone sounded. So faint, I thought I had imagined it.

Kynami lifted his head, fixing his golden eyes on the dark passage.

The silence returned.

Thalen looked from Kynami to me, and whatever he saw in my face made his expression more somber.

“What was that?” he asked.

I waited for an answer to reveal itself to me, but nothing came. All I sensed was an ache, and the hint of an unnamed memory.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The passage beneath the Archives waited.

I sensed it was a place where songs slept. A place where old grief had been hidden because speaking it was not enough.

I held Áthir’s harp against my side. Its wood had gone cool.

“Do we go now?” I asked.

Thalen looked down into the root-shadow.

“No farther until you are ready,” he said.

The relief that passed through me was so sudden it left me ashamed.

Then Calethor spoke.

“We enter when you understand that Mythravain will not soften what it shows us. When you are ready to see what actually happened, not what grief wishes for.”

I looked at the dark passage. After the road, after the gate, after Kelvaren’s half-broken songs and the fragile record of Tiralan, I should not have needed the warning.

Kynami pressed closer to my cheek.

Somewhere under root and stone, a memory had stirred.

And whatever it wanted from us, Mythravain would not let it sleep much longer.

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As I checked one last time on my fantasy diorama, I noticed a dragon and its elven rider flying near the tower under the terrarium glass. I had envisioned a stone tower against cliffs, a small pool of water, steps curving up the hill and through low bushes and trees, but a dragon was not part of the design.

I looked over my shoulder. Maybe it was a reflection from someone else’s work? But then the dragon circled the tower and flew toward me. What appeared to be a female elven rider looked up at me.

They were not my creations. They seemed alive.

Created for the Senior Fair Exhibit, this was the centerpiece in my application for a prestigious art scholarship. I spent weeks on it.

I volunteered at the library, and one day I discovered the old brass base in the library storage room. The librarian, Ms. Duffy, permitted me to use the base and its glass dome for the exhibit.

When I finished the final touch-up, I lowered the glass carefully into the groove in the base. As it connected with a click, I felt a slight vibration, and warmth radiated into my fingers. Then the dragon appeared.

I shifted to the side, but the rider’s gaze followed me. I raised my right hand in greeting. The rider hesitated a moment, then raised her hand, too. I tapped the glass. The dragon flinched away as if lightning struck nearby.

Then, I noticed the scenery. The tree branches waved as if blown by a gentle breeze. Smoke rose in the distance. Tiny huts clustered behind the tower, and a stream flowed beneath a stone bridge that the Elves were crossing.

This was not my diorama artwork. This was a living village.

Then the dragon circled lower, landing next to the pond. The rider pointed at the tower and then down to its foundation.

It took a moment, but I saw a crack forming beneath it, branching toward the village in one direction and the pond in the other.

The rider pointed at the tower and desperately mimed lifting it away.

I searched for a switch or mechanism, something powering this contraption. I lifted one edge of the brass base. A yellowed paper was caught beneath it.

If the world answers, it is no longer yours to shape. Keep the glass seated. Make changes only if the world’s Keeper agrees.

I looked back at the display. The rider was clearly trying to communicate, but it was hard to understand the simple gestures.

As I watched, a patch of ground near the tower collapsed into the growing fissure by the pond.

I moved around to the far side of the tower and saw the crack spreading through the hillside toward a small settlement growing wider as well.

The base had not been perfectly smooth when I found it. Faint channels and ridges crossed the brass, and I had used them to guide my design: the deepest groove for the pond, the raised curve for the cliffs, the winding line for the stone steps. I had assumed they were decorative. Now each one aligned perfectly with the living landscape beneath the glass. The tower was the only exception.

Its foundation seemed to be crushing or destabilizing something beneath the mountain.

The rider signaled me again, motioning to remove the tower, to pull it clear of the hillside, and the expanding crack.

I reached for the glass, then stopped. The note said, I should not move the glass. It should stay seated. But the rider was asking me to do it. Was she the world’s keeper?

The school bell rang, followed by an announcement to head toward the exhibit hall. Others would be here soon.

My design centered on the tower. Without it, the scene had no focal point. It would simply be a few artificial rocks and cliffs, covered with greenery and trees. And the now drained and broken pond.

My hope for the scholarship died. Without the tower, the judges would see a ruined project that no longer matched my formal design. Weeks of work, and perhaps my only chance at the scholarship, would be gone.

The dragon suddenly dove behind the tower. A figure lay across the crevice, desperately grabbing for something to keep from falling in. The rider leaned from the dragon to reach him. For this world, however it came to be, the danger was real.

I lifted the dome and set it aside. The living realm disappeared.

In its place, I saw the painted foam rocks and cliffs, the wire trees with green tissue paper leaves, the deep green-blue resin water, and the handmade brick tower.

The dragon, its rider, the people, and their village were gone.

For a moment, I considered leaving the dome off and displaying my scene without it. This was my vision. No lives seemed to be in danger now.

But if the note meant anything, it meant that that world was real. I might not see what was happening, but if the ground split further, more than one life might be lost.

I would have to work blind, trusting that my actions would rebuild the world I’d damaged.

I tried to pull the tower loose, carefully, but it didn’t move.

I heard footsteps and voices from the hallway and reached for my crafting knife. While cutting around the foundation, I discovered the glue penetrated deeper than expected.

I worked the blade deeper, trying to separate the tower without harming the cliff. The first cut split the painted stone. The second severed two trees and opened a white wound through the green hillside. Still, I angled the blade carefully, clinging to the hope that I could remove the tower and leave enough behind to impress the judges.

The outer doors to the room rattled, then opened. Students, teachers, and families streamed in.

I was measuring every cut against what the judges might think while a world I could no longer see broke apart beneath my hands.

Tugging at the tower, a section of cliff cracked; a surface that had taken me hours to paint and shade. I quickly pulled the tower clear, but the stone cliff wall, the trees, and what little remained of the resin water came with it. The tower crumbled, taking any remaining hope, and leaving a debris-filled scar in the landscape.

I began arranging the broken cliffs to conceal the scar. Then I remembered the elf hanging over the fissure. I was still trying to save my project.

I pushed the decorative pieces aside and flattened the ground as safely as I could. I cleared the wreckage quickly; their lives were more important.

I filled and smoothed what I could, and clicked the dome onto the brass base.

As my teacher called my name, nothing happened; the dragon did not reappear, and the huts were missing.

All I saw was my ruined diorama.

Then the details began changing again. The stream started flowing under the bridge, the smoke rose from the houses, and the wind danced with the leaves.

The living realm returned. The tower was gone, and the earth where it stood was scarred, but the crack stopped spreading, and the village remained whole.

The dragon rose through the drifting smoke just as my teacher approached. Its wings passed directly across his line of sight, but his gaze never followed them. Apparently, what the glass revealed was only for me.

I saw the rescued elf clinging to the rider as they landed on the scarred hill.

The rider placed one hand over her heart. I mirrored the gesture.

My teacher examined the damaged model, but did not indicate that he noticed the movements or creatures.

“Elsie, the judges are already in the exhibit hall. What happened?”

“The tower didn’t belong there.”

His gaze moved over the torn cliffs and broken resin. “A work can change while you’re making it. But the judges will expect you to explain what changed, and why.”

I looked at the broken tower on the table beside the living valley beneath the glass. How could I explain the mess? The display no longer matched my formal design paper.

I nodded.

He spoke softly, almost sympathetically, “Sometimes our vision is incomplete until we see the product. Explain what changed.”

The scholarship was essential for me, but I could not buy my future with the lives of the elves. And I couldn’t tell the judges that the living elven world was better without the tower.

At the end of the night, I opened the wooden carrying box and lifted one of the fitted packing panels. Another panel shifted beneath it, revealing a thin, leather-bound book in a false bottom.

I settled the diorama safely into the box, then opened the book.

The Record of Devyn Hughes and Ilyana, Keepers of the Worldglass

The opening entry had been written in faded brown ink.

We did not make the Worldglass to rule Ilyana’s country. We made it because her people were dying, and neither of us could save them alone.

Beyond the glass, the dragon and rider circled once above the scarred hillside. Then they turned toward the mountains, keeping watch over their world.

I closed the journal and watched with them.

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Choose One Master

My father knew I was the traitor because he had taught me where to place a comma. He’d drilled it into me since I was eight: the comma splice, that lazy joining of two complete thoughts as if they shared a single breath. Just that afternoon, over the remains of the lunch that was our daily excuse for lessons, he’d tapped his pen against my third paragraph. “Two thoughts, Isabel. Choose one master for each.”

I’d corrected it without argument. His rule, my ingrained habit. But whenever he was not looking over my shoulder, I still chose the comma. I liked the way it forced two thoughts to face one another, almost poetically.

I was shouldering the satchel containing my essay notes and assignments when the courier knocked on my father’s office door. He handed him a folder addressed to the Minister of Civic Formation, received his signature for the documents, then stepped outside to wait for a response.

Casually gathering the leftover food and disposing of the trash, I glanced at the pages spread out on the desk. A familiar printed pamphlet, a short list of names, and a brief letter, signed by our Honored Leader.

I remembered another such letter, two years prior. A leaflet had circulated about the failure to feed the hungry in the city. The printer’s son had been accused and convicted. He’d been marched out the main gate in chains and hadn’t been seen since. My father had signed the order. I remembered because he’d made me proofread the offending text the next morning, as if the sloppy grammar in it was the offense.

I could see recognition flash in my father’s eyes as he read the pamphlet. His voice trembled as he whispered, “You teach your sons to read, you command your daughters to remain blind. A nation that silences half its minds cannot call itself wise.”

He recognized my style and the comma splice I had chosen for its rhythm. He had trained me too well to think I had used it through ignorance.

Dropping the pamphlet, he grabbed the list of the accused. It was short, listing the names of the sons of other government officials and a few known activists. All young males, since literacy was forbidden for females.

One name jumped out. Cousin Cleopas, the son of my father’s brother Alecio, and likely next in line for his post as Minister of Doctrine and Policy. No love was lost between these brothers.

Years earlier, Alecio had taken the ministry Father believed should have been his. My father still kept the letter from that year, its seal broken, the paper frail with age. Alecio had offered him a junior assistant’s post as consolation: charity, dressed as family loyalty. Even my father’s eventual rise to his own Ministry post did not dull the sting.

“Cleopas.” He said quietly, testing the substance. His pen hovered over the name a half-second longer than the decision required. Enough of a hesitation that I understood, even as he saved me, some part of him was glad for the excuse to repay the pain. Then, for a moment, a glint of satisfaction crossed his face before he caught it. He circled the name, initialed beside it, and regathered the papers.

I drew breath too sharply. Father glared at me, rapidly shaking his head for silence. I had not intended to bring harm to the family. I only thought of being right and drawing attention to a just cause. Anonymously, of course.

Officially, no females were taught to read or write. Privately, my father considered an ignorant daughter unacceptable. I knew I would not be suspected, at least by anyone other than my father. But I had not thought of the punishment for those they might accuse.

As the door closed behind the courier, my father spoke. “We will not speak of this. Have your persuasive essay completed by tomorrow at noon.”

I nodded. He corrected my arguments the next day, and my grammar each day after, his pen as precise as ever, but he no longer looked me in the eyes. He was still teaching me, but he had stopped wanting to know what I did with the knowledge.

I heard, weeks later, that Cleopas had been sent to the northern mines. My father never mentioned it. Neither did I. Some nights I still saw his name circled, my father’s pen hovering. I told myself the truth had been worth the cost. One wronged victim, among many. Some nights, I almost believed it.

When the city gossip settled, I double-checked the grammar on another pamphlet.

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Please let me know what you think, and if you would like to see more posts like this!

Thank you for reading.

Mercy’s Accomplice

Abel was frantic. Slamming his paws against the front door. Sondra looked up from her chair by the fire. This wasn’t like him. The blizzard outside was howling, the farmhouse groaning; it wouldn’t be safe outside. Yet with the threat of darkness, he added shrill barking.

She couldn’t take it anymore. Looking out the front window, she studied the field between her and the tree-lined dirt road a few hundred feet away. Deep snow, swirling in the wind. It might be safe if they hurried. She bundled up, including her husband’s winter boots.

Abel quieted when she put on her coat, and he sat before her as she offered his leash. She grabbed a flashlight, a meager help if he ran into the coming dark.

When she opened the door, he lunged ahead, scanning the road, searching. Then the frenzied bark returned, and he broke loose, running straight for the woods.

Following his tracks, she found Abel prancing and growling at a man half-buried. The flashlight revealed one leg folded awkwardly beneath him, and the snow around his chest held the tint of old rust.

“Abel!” When he came, she firmly wrapped his leash around her hand. Certainly, a motionless, bleeding man couldn’t have survived long in the storm; she turned back toward home. The sheriff could investigate once she contacted him.

A few steps away from the road, a rustling sent Abel into a register she had never heard from him before. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the man struggling to move. She shuffled across the road, released the leash, and got an arm under the stranger.

It was dark and frigid by the time she had dragged him across their yard and down the storm cellar stairs. He would be warm enough in there until dawn.

Widowed, she lived alone. Injured or not, she didn’t trust an unknown man in her home.

Later, she brought him a blanket and pillow. He told her his name was Clay Bower. He said he’d fallen from his horse at the fork in the road and crawled until he saw a chimney with smoke. He said thank you, ma’am, more times than a man in that much pain should have breath for.

Abel wouldn’t come down the cellar steps. He sat at the top of them while she spoke with Clay. His eyes never left her as he watched the darkness below him.

Around midnight, she checked again. Clay was half-delirious with fever, mumbling about his family, two valleys over. About his wife being gone, and his children too. Between the delirium and his sobs, he was difficult to understand.

She’d brought broth to warm him, but when she heard what sounded like ‘so much blood’, she went still, the ladle full in her hand.

Fever talk, she told herself. She remembered the rust stain in the snow from an injury she’d yet to discover. That was all it was. But she was careful to lock the storm cellar doors before she returned inside.

There was no way she could get word into town this late and in a snowstorm. She’d figure it out in the morning.

Sheriff Norbert Layton and his deputies came with first light. “Morning, Mrs. Grayson. Did you happen to see anyone pass through this way last night?”

She had the whole truth sitting right there, and it would have cost her nothing to give it to him. But snow had covered the bloody drag marks; there was nothing to tell him about the man lying in her cellar.

“No one’s come to my door,” she said. This was true enough; he hadn’t come to her door, and he hadn’t passed through. She’d gone out and brought him to the cellar herself.

Layton nodded. “Be careful. A man murdered his family two valleys over. He was last seen riding this way.”

Abel chose that moment to squeeze past the sheriff’s legs and plant himself on the cellar doors. The rumble wasn’t quite a growl.

“He’s never done that with…” she started to say, then caught herself. Let her dog stand there growling for no reason, she’d say nothing to explain him.

Layton looked at the dog and the locked cellar doors. “Abel’s usually got better manners than that.”

She nodded. “Long night.”

He looked at his hands, then back at the cellar doors. “I expect I’ll swing back through tomorrow. Check on you.” He seemed satisfied, though as she watched them ride off, she wasn’t sure.

“Come, Abel. Back inside.”

Clay’s fever broke that afternoon. The please-and-thank-you politeness thinned out, revealing a colder heart underneath. He asked her, almost idly, whether the sheriff came around often. He looked in her eyes as he asked.

She understood then, with a clarity that came too late, exactly who she’d been protecting.

By early evening, he had healed enough to move about in the cellar. She made sure to have Abel with her when she checked on him. She saw it in his eyes plainly, for the first time undisguised; he was not an innocent traveler.

So much blood. Why hadn’t she listened?

Sheriff Layton came back the next morning, as he’d said he would, but this time Clay stood behind the door, by her shoulder, the whole conversation, listening to every word she gave. The tip of a knife pressed into her back, hidden, but clearly present.

The cellar latch hung open. She was not, ordinarily, a careless woman. The sheriff knew this. She let Abel do what he wanted, which was to stand between the sheriff and the house without moving.

Layton looked from the open latch to the dog, then to her anxious face. “Roads seem clear today, should you need to come to town. The man we were seeking must be long gone.” He did not look back at the cellar or her as he rode away.

She watched as he crossed the road into the woods, taking the narrow path that led toward town. His horse’s blaze flashed briefly as he turned to face her land.

That afternoon, Clay twisted her arm back, forcing her to the barn. He told her plainly what happened to people who saw too much. He smiled when he told her what had happened to the family two valleys over. While she saddled her horse, he wrenched Abel’s collar, holding a knife at his throat.

Then Sheriff Layton peered in the open door.

It was her last chance. She yanked on the cinch and shoved the horse toward the stall wall. He reared as expected, shrieking and striking out. With Clay startled, Abel pulled back and latched his teeth onto his wrist. The knife dropped.

He kicked Abel, who flew, whimpering, into the wall. Layton moved fast, wrestling Clay to the ground. As he reached for the knife, Sondra stepped from the stall, planting her boot on it.

Afterward, with Clay in irons secured to the wagon, Layton didn’t ask why she hadn’t told him. They both knew there’d been a window, and that she’d ignored it.

“Abel,” was all he said, crouching to scratch the dog’s ears, “is a better judge of character than most folks I know.”

She said nothing. There wasn’t a version of the truth that made her even half as good as Abel.

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Chapter Forty-Three: Kelvaren

Kelvaren did not receive us with song, though the valley should have been alive with sound.

Water fell in silver threads, flashing through moss and fern before disappearing under the roots of living houses. Slender bridges curved from one rise to another. Wind moved through long grasses that remained green under a winter sky.

Yet the whole valley seemed to be holding its breath.

Beside me, Thalen stood motionless.

I had seen grief on faces before: in Mhira’s stillness, in Bran’s rough hands, in Quill’s careful refusal to say too much. Thalen’s grief was different. This was the pain of seeing what he had feared and finding his home neither destroyed nor whole.

Aerenil climbed to his shoulder, her claws gentle. She touched her snout to his jaw.

Kynami shifted against me, feathers brushing my cheek.

“Is it worse?” I asked.

Thalen sighed. “Yes.”

The village remained beautiful enough that a stranger might have mistaken its sorrow for peace. Living homes nestled into the slopes. Roofs curved beneath branches. Stone steps wound between terraces, softened by moss and the fine roots of climbing plants. Thin winter flowers grew along some of the walls, trembling in the wind.

But there were places where the pattern failed.

A bridge of woven branches sagged at the center, though nothing weighed it down. A stream spilled from a narrow cleft and bubbled over stone, but no sound came from it until it reached the lower pool. Then the sound arrived, striking the air in a broken rush.

I felt the sorrow of that in my bones.

The path from the seam wound down through trees whose trunks leaned close over us, as if to see who had come. Their leaves were silver beneath the green, and their branches braided overhead, creating massive living arches.

The air smelled of wet bark, crushed fern, and the green breath of Arieth.

Thalen’s steps had changed, firm on a familiar path. His hand brushed a low branch once, as if greeting it. The branch bent toward his fingers, then stopped.

He stilled.

The branch remained where it was, stretched toward his hand but not touching.

Thalen lowered his arm. “It used to know me,” he said.

The words were so soft I almost let them pass without reply.

“Maybe it still does.”

He looked at the branch. “Perhaps. But it is afraid to touch.”

At the first bend, the trees opened enough to show a field of winter grass sloping toward the village. It was the hill Thalen had described, or near enough that I knew it at once: the hill where children had once rolled until their hair filled with butterflies.

The grass was still green, but the butterflies were gone.

Near the bottom of the field, three children stood in a loose cluster beside an older elven woman gathering pale blue flowers into a shallow basket. The children looked up when we came into view. One of them held a carved reed flute. Another had both hands buried in the fur of a small gray animal I did not recognize. The third, a little girl with dark hair braided with white thread, stared at me as if she had known I was coming.

The older elf watched as Thalen stopped at the edge of the field.

For a moment, neither moved.

Then the woman set the flower basket down and walked toward him.

She was tall and slender, her hair silver-white and braided close along one side of her head. She stopped a few paces before Thalen and looked at him in a way that held both relief and accusation.

“You came late,” she said.

Thalen bowed his head. “I came as soon as the road allowed.”

“That is what Calethor said you would answer.”

His mouth tightened.

The woman’s gaze shifted to me.

I felt it pass over my cloak, my road-stained boots, Áthir’s harp case at my side, Kynami on my shoulder. It did not linger on my ears, though perhaps she had already seen enough in my face.

“Sylvenor,” she said.

It was not a question.

My spine drew straight. “Elowen.”

“I know whose child you are.”

Thalen turned slightly toward me. “This is Mareth. She kept the lower gardens when I was young.”

“Kept?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Mareth’s expression did not change. “We nurture what remains.”

The little girl with the white-threaded braid had come closer, though she hid behind Mareth. Her eyes were fixed on Kynami.

“Is he from Kaldora?” she asked.

Kynami tilted his head.

“Yes,” I said.

The child seemed puzzled. “My grandmother says Kaldora is where the cold learned to rot.”

Mareth’s hand moved once, a small motion, not quite a rebuke.

The child lowered her eyes.

“It is one place where the wound has shown itself plainly,” Thalen said.

He spoke with care, but the child looked at me as if the simpler version had been enough.

From somewhere down the hill, someone began singing.

A child’s voice.

The melody was light at first, a rising thread that should have belonged to spring. The little boy with the gray animal turned toward it. The girl with the braid held very still.

The song lifted three notes.

Then stopped.

No crack. No cry. Only an abrupt breaking off, as if the singer had forgotten what came next.

The field seemed to dim.

Mareth closed her eyes for one brief breath.

“That happens often?” I asked.

“Often enough that the children have begun expecting it.”

They were growing up waiting for the song to fail.

Thalen’s hand tightened around his staff.

“We need Calethor,” he said.

“He is in the upper hall,” Mareth replied. “He has been watching the eastern dark since dawn.”

“Does he know we crossed?”

“He knew before the bell.”

She looked at me again, and this time her gaze rested on the harp case.

“Did you bring that willingly?”

I looked down at the wrapped shape against my side. “Yes.”

The word came more easily than I expected. The harp still felt like another life entrusted to my hands, but it no longer felt like a burden laid on me without consent.

Mareth seemed to hear more in the word than I had said.

“Then come,” she said. “Before more Kelvaren gather to stare.”

She turned and led us down the hill.

The children stared. So did others. Some bowed their heads to Thalen. A few spoke his name. One older man reached out as if to touch his shoulder, then thought better of it and drew back.

Kynami remained on my shoulder. His claws held carefully, but he did not soften his posture. He watched every window, every branch, every still figure we passed. Aerenil had climbed beneath the fold of Thalen’s cloak again, though her head remained out and her eyes were bright.

We crossed a small stone bridge over a narrow stream. Halfway across, I stopped.

The water below moved over green stone, clear enough that I could see each pebble in the bed. Tiny white flowers grew along the banks. Their reflections trembled in the current.

But only one side of the stream made sound.

On the left, water whispered and clicked over stone.

On the right, it moved in silence.

The two currents met under the bridge and slid away together; sound and silence braided so closely my mind could not separate them.

Mareth looked back.

I had not realized I had stopped until Thalen spoke my name.

“Elowen.”

The village rose in terraces toward the upper hall. It stood at the point where three ridges met, grown partly into the hillside and partly out of it. Great roots formed columns along the front. Between them, pale stone curved upward in smooth lines that reminded me of water shaped into permanence. Moss softened the edges. Winter vines crossed the outer walls, some green, some blackened, some bearing tiny closed buds that trembled as if deciding whether to bloom.

At the top of the steps, Calethor waited.

In Kaldora, he had seemed old and gentle, a bard shaped by patience, grief, and more knowledge than he often chose to speak.

Now, his hair was bound back. His cloak was travel-worn, though he had been here at least a week. His lyre rested at his side. His eyes went first to Thalen, then to Aerenil, then to me.

No, not to me, to Áthir’s harp.

He paused, studying us, then came down the steps.

Thalen bowed his head.

Calethor placed one hand on the side of Thalen’s face with a tenderness so brief it might have been missed by anyone not watching for it.

“Grandfather,” Thalen said.

“She crossed the seam.”

Calethor turned to me. He did not ask if I was well. We had passed beyond the use of questions with answers that small.

His gaze lowered to the harp case.

“May I?” he asked.

I unfastened the strap and lifted the wrapped harp carefully from my side.

Calethor received it with both hands.

He did not uncover it at once. His fingers rested on the cloth. When he drew the wrapping back, the dark wood caught Kelvaren’s pale light.

His face changed. Grief moved through his eyes like wind crossing water.

“Ethárion carried this before he learned how much silence could cost,” he said.

Calethor’s thumb hovered over the carved frame without touching the strings. “He left this for you to have.”

The words strengthened me.

Calethor wrapped the harp again and returned it to me.

“It warmed at the gate,” I said.

His gaze lifted to mine as I continued.

“Nerion was there, beneath Falcon’s Perch, shielding the woundwood. And Veylan, too.”

Thalen had told him nothing, but Calethor did not look surprised.

“You expected that?”

“I hoped the guardians would feel the pull,” he said.

“Nerion?”

“Yes.”

“And Veylan?”

Calethor’s silence was answer enough, though he gave words to it after a moment.

“His blood may have opened the path,” Calethor said. “His choice may decide what he does with it.”

I held the harp close. “He may be called because of Velroth.”

“He may be called because he is not Velroth.”

That I had not expected.

Behind Calethor, several elves had gathered at the hall entrance. Some were young. Some old. Some watched the harp. Others watched Kynami. One woman, dark-haired and severe, looked only at me.

Mareth had joined them silently.

No one spoke, and the waiting began to feel like a judgment.

Calethor noticed. His face did not harden, but something in him became less yielding.

“Elowen Sylvenor has crossed from Kaldora by the wounded seam,” he said. His voice carried up the steps and into the hall. “She comes with Ethárion’s harp, with witness from Thalen and Aerenil, and with the golden falcon who has stood beside her beneath the Watcher’s House.”

The severe woman’s eyes narrowed. “She also comes with Kaldora’s taint upon her.”

“Yes,” Calethor said.

Murmurs moved through the gathered elves.

I felt Kynami's feathers lift.

The woman descended one step. “We have kept what we could while Kaldora’s wound spread under stone and through old paths. Now one from that valley arrives carrying a dead guardian’s instrument, and we are to call that hope?”

Thalen moved before I could speak. “She did not make the wound.”

“No,” the woman said. “But she has passed close enough to carry it.”

“That is enough, Saelwen,” Calethor said.

Her gaze flicked to him. “Is it? We have children forgetting river songs. We have water that moves without voice. We have roots growing away from their own soil. If the wound has sent her here, I would know whether she is a healer or a scar.”

The hall fell quiet.

I recognized her questions. Kaldora had asked its own version, but with rougher tongues.

I looked at Saelwen, then at the elves gathered behind her, then past them toward the living hall whose walls seemed to listen with strained patience.

“I do not know all that I carry,” I said.

Saelwen did not soften.

I continued anyway. “I carry Kaldora. I carry Falcon’s Perch. I carry a wound I did not make and cannot pretend has not touched me. I carry Áthir’s harp because he left it where I could find it. I carry my father’s songs, though not enough of them. I carry fear. And grief. And more ignorance than I would prefer.”

Thalen turned his head slightly toward me.

“But I did not come to open what should remain closed. I did not come to force the land to prove itself. I came because Kaldora is dying, and Venrathil is not as whole as I was told, and whatever lies between them is hurting both.”

My hand rested on the harp case. “I came to listen before more songs fail.”

No one spoke.

Saelwen looked at Aerenil, then at me.

When she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its edge, though none of its caution. “Listening will not be enough.”

“No,” I said. “But forcing would be worse.”

The words were Aerenil’s reminder, Thalen’s teaching, Mhira’s warning, and everything the gate had shown.

Calethor inclined his head slightly, as if something had been settled, though not made easy.

“The Archives must hear her,” he said.

Saelwen stepped aside, and we entered the upper hall.

Inside, Kelvaren changed again.

The hall was not built in the way Falcon’s Perch had been built, with beams set by hand, walls raised against the weather. This place seemed to have grown around a long central space where light fell from openings high above. Branches formed the ribs of the ceiling. The air smelled of living wood and old music.

As we passed through, I saw more signs of strain. A cluster of hanging chimes moved in a draft, but only half of them sounded. In one alcove, flowers bloomed thick and white along the left side of a vine, while the right side was bare and black to the root.

Calethor saw where I looked.

“Three days ago,” he said, “both sides bloomed.”

We walked deeper into the hall.

“Elowen,” Thalen said quietly beside me.

I looked at him.

His face was drawn, but his eyes were fixed ahead with purpose now. Returning home had wounded him, but it had not weakened him.

“When we reach the Archives, do not think of them as shelves.”

Despite everything, the warning nearly startled me into a laugh. It died before reaching my mouth.

“What should I think of them as?”

“Ancient listeners.”

Calethor heard and nodded. “Guardian roots.”

We came to a set of unremarkable doors at the far end of the hall.

They were narrow, grown from pale wood that had darkened along its grain into patterns like flowing script. They had no handles or hinges. The two panels met at the center in a seam so fine it nearly vanished.

Calethor stopped before them. The elves who had followed remained several paces back.

Saelwen stood among them, arms folded. “You would take her in without a witness?”

“I take her in because the Archives are witness enough,” Calethor said.

“She does not know our ways.”

“No,” he said. “But she has already learned the one Velroth forgot.”

Arieth en varu.

Calethor turned to me. “Living memory does not open for rank, nor for blood alone. Ethárion’s line may bring you to the threshold. It will not carry you through.”

“What will?”

“Truth,” he said. “Yours first, then my witness after.”

I faced the doors.

“I am Elowen Sylvenor,” I said. “I come from Kaldora, where the wound has broken stone and root and trust. I carry Ethárion’s harp. I carry my father’s songs, and questions I should have asked sooner.”

The grain in the wood darkened.

“I do not ask for power,” I said. “I ask to hear what has been kept, so I may know what must not be forced.”

For a breath, nothing happened.

Then Aerenil sang one low note. Kynami lifted his wings slightly but remained on my shoulder. Áthir’s harp warmed beneath its wrapping.

The seam between the doors deepened, but did not open.

Calethor placed his palm against the wood.

“Archives of Kelvaren,” he said, voice low. “Hear the granddaughter of Ethárion. Hear the child of two songs. Hear the wound that has crossed the mountain. She comes not to command, but to learn.”

The doors drew inward without a sound.

They folded away from the center like leaves unclasping after frost, and a breath moved out from within, smelling of rain on bark, river stone, and something I could only call song because no other word came near enough.

Beyond the doors, dim green light waited among roots and shadows.

Calethor looked at me. “The Archives are not always kind,” he said. “But they hold truth.”

After the road, after the gate, after Kelvaren’s half-broken songs, kindness seemed too small a thing to ask.

“Then let that be enough.”

Calethor entered first. Thalen followed with Aerenil on his shoulder. Kynami leaned forward, talons tightening, but did not fly ahead.

I stepped through the open doors, and the living chamber received us.

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Chapter Forty-Two: The Seam Beyond the Gate

Morning came without birdsong.

I woke beneath the broken arms of the half-frozen tree, my cloak drawn close and my face numb from the cold. For several breaths, I lay still, listening to the dim gray around us, to the slow scrape of Thalen tending the small fire, the faint scratch of Aerenil’s claws against a branch nearby.

The forest held itself quiet.

Thalen knelt a few paces away, stirring the remaining embers with a stick. His staff leaned against the tree beside him. Aerenil perched above his shoulder, violet scales dulled by morning frost, her narrow head turned toward the ridge ahead.

Kynami was gone.

I jolted completely awake and sat up, panicking. “Kynami?”

Thalen looked back. “He is scouting.”

I pulled my cloak tighter. “How long has he been gone?”

“Long enough to circle the ridge. Not long enough to worry.”

Aerenil spoke quietly, still watching the trees ahead. “Vaer.”

“He is near,” Thalen translated.

The reassurance helped a bit. Kynami had ranged ahead before. He had vanished among trees and clouds and over cliff-edges more times than I could count, and always returned with the joy of a creature who had better use for flight than calming the wingless.

But this forest did not feel like the cliffs above Kaldora or the open road through the pass.

It felt damaged and too aware of us. Or maybe I feared it because it was new and unfamiliar.

I rose stiffly, shook ice from the hem of my cloak, and helped Thalen scatter snow over the darkening embers of our fire. We ate little. The bread had dried out overnight, and the cheese tasted sharper with cold, but hunger mattered more than taste.

After fastening my pack, I slung Áthir’s harp against my side. Its weight had become more familiar through the climb, but not more comfortable. It did not swing as lightly as my lute had. It did not rest against me as if it knew the shape of my ribs and hip. It hung with a steadier claim, and every movement reminded me that I had not chosen it, so much as been entrusted with it.

I adjusted the strap and looked toward the ridge lifting behind a curtain of pine and thinning mist.

“Is the gate near?” I asked.

Thalen followed my gaze. “Near enough to mind our step. These wards are older than the Guardians. I’ve read three accounts of their making, and no two agree on the order of the stones. Some wards are broken now. I would rather not learn which by stepping on one.”

The wind moved a strand of pale hair across his cheek.

Aerenil dropped from the branch and settled on his shoulder. Her wings folded slowly, with none of yesterday’s fierce pleasure. She looked smaller in the gray light.

Then Kynami’s cry broke through the trees.

I turned as he swept down from the ridge, gold against the colorless morning, wings cutting cleanly between the branches. He did not come to my shoulder. He landed on a low pine limb ahead of us and looked back once, then turned east again.

The ancient road narrowed after the camp.

At first, it remained visible in scattered fragments: a flat stone under snow, a moss-choked edge, the faint line of paving where roots had lifted the old way from beneath. Then the stones disappeared more often than they showed, and we walked by other signs.

A thin pressure built beneath my feet.

Kaldora was far behind us now, yet I carried it with me: Falcon’s Perch folded around its wounded heart, Mhira at Rowan’s Nook, Bran and Tamsil holding a frightened village steady, Rhyden and Sira listening where others would only stare, Veylan walking the mine road with his marked hand hidden under linen.

Nerion. His white fur stark against the dark trees, silver eyes fixed on the mountain path, his body held firm by a loyalty more profound than his desire to follow.

Kynami moved ahead, low and silent. Aerenil flew beneath the branches, never far from Thalen. Their paths crossed and parted, gold and violet threading through the gray-green forest.

The climb steepened. Once, a stream crossed the path under a sheet of clear ice. I could see water sliding beneath it, dark and swift over stone, but it made no sound. Thalen paused beside it and rested two fingers on the ice.

I stopped behind him.

“Is it safe to cross?” I asked.

“The ice is thick enough. The water’s moving beneath. I can feel it,” he said, withdrawing his hand. “The sound isn’t. I’ve read of roads that swallowed noise near a boundary, so nothing on this side would announce itself to whatever listened on the other.”

I looked down at the stream. “Can sound be trapped?”

“Where the stream runs close to the seam between realms, yes. There’s an account of a valley that went a generation without birdsong before anyone thought to ask why.”

The stream moved beneath its clear prison, swift and voiceless.

He stepped across and offered me his hand.

I took it, careful on the slick stone. When my boot touched the far bank, a dull pressure passed under the arch of my foot and faded at once, like the memory of a drumbeat heard through a wall.

Thalen noticed my face. “You felt it?”

“Something under the path.”

“The old roads carried more than travelers.” He looked ahead, where the trees thickened around the slope. “Messages passed through them. The couriers had a word for it: road-ache. Warnings. Welcome. Grief, sometimes. When the roads weaken, they said the feeling stays behind, the way an ache outlasts the injury.”

We walked on.

Gradually, the pines drew farther apart. The slope gentled. The snow lay smooth where wind should have disturbed it, and the trunks formed a broad, uneven ring around a hollow filled with silence.

At the center stood a gnarled tree.

After all the stories, all the fear, all the talk of roads between realms, I had imagined something vast enough to make the heart kneel at first sight. This tree did not do that. It stood with the plain endurance of something that had weathered too much to spend strength on grandeur. Its bark was dark gray and furrowed deep, one side scarred from root to branch by an ancient burn that had healed into a raised seam. Snow rested in the grooves of its bark. Its branches were bare.

It might have been any old tree in any winter wood, except that Kynami would not cross the hollow to be near it.

He landed on my shoulder and folded his wings.

Aerenil settled on Thalen and lowered her head.

“This is the gate,” I said.

Thalen stood at the edge of the ring. “One of them.”

“It looks near death. Will it help us?”

He did not answer quickly. “It was built to open,” he said at last. “I can still feel the want of it from under the bark. That much remains. But it’s been closed since we received word of Velroth’s failed attempt.”

I looked at the scarred trunk, and the faint outline of a crooked mark burned into it. “May I go closer?”

“Not yet.” He spoke gently, but the words stopped me where I stood.

I looked down. My boot was inches from the untouched snow of the hollow.

Thalen stepped beside me. “Like the stair beneath Falcon’s Perch, we ask before we enter.”

Aerenil raised her head. “Arieth en varu.”

Arieth does not yield to force.

The phrase had settled into me since yesterday. I did not understand it fully, but I knew where it belonged. At a creek marked by false sigil. On a road that had forgotten its own shape. Here, before a gate that had once carried travelers between the wounded valley and the Elven realm.

I knelt at the edge of the clearing.

The snow did not crunch beneath my knee. It sank quietly, soft as ash. I rested one gloved hand on the surface and bowed my head.

For a time, nothing happened. Cold crept through the leather of my glove. Kynami shifted to a branch behind me, talons scraping bark.

I thought of the ward-song beneath Falcon’s Perch. Come in. Warm yourself. You are safe. You are not alone. The song had opened what force could not.

I did not ask the tree to open. I listened to its core and the sap coursing in its veins.

The first thing I felt was age.

The passage of years beneath the snow, years of feet passing in trust, years of roots deepening around stone, years of songs moving through the valley and returning changed but whole. Beneath that lay a thinner thread, stretched east and west through earth and memory.

I lifted my head slowly.

Thalen watched me with great care.

“The road still reaches for Venrathil,” I said. “But it cannot find the way through.”

He stepped forward then, just to the edge, and raised one hand toward the tree. His palm faced the scarred trunk. The words he spoke were not like the ones he had taught me on the road. These were older, shaped with more breath than voice, carried low in the throat. They passed into the hollow and faded among the roots.

Aerenil joined him.

Her voice laced through his, bright yet solemn. She held her wings tight to her sides and sang with the gravity of a creature far older than she looked.

Nothing changed.

Thalen spoke again. Aerenil answered.

The hollow remained what it had been: a circle of trees, a winter floor, and one old tree whose trunk bore a scar from a grief older than I knew how to name.

At last, Thalen lowered his hand, and the forest seemed to draw in around us.

“It will not open,” I said.

“No.”

“Because it can’t?”

“Because the paths beneath it no longer meet cleanly. Because they were weakened, severed, and forced. Because the gate was made to carry those who came in trust, not those who try to force it.”

Velroth’s name did not need to be spoken.

I could feel it in the silence after Thalen’s words.

My hand moved to Áthir’s harp.

I had not meant to touch it. Yet there it was beneath my palm, wrapped in its case, warm through the leather as if it had been lying near a hearth rather than pressed against me in winter air.

Thalen saw. He did not tell me no.

I unwrapped the case with care and drew the harp free.

The dark wood caught the morning’s gray light along its polished curve. The creature carved on its frame seemed almost alive in the hollow’s stillness, its long body arched in motion that never completed. I thought of Áthir’s hands on these strings. Of him carrying this instrument before he became a memory under Falcon’s Perch. Before his body lay preserved by the wound he had tried to hold.

I settled the harp against me, and my fingers hovered over the strings.

For one raw moment, I wanted my lute with a force that nearly stole my breath.

My lute would have known what to do. It would have carried my fear. It would have let me hide inside familiar chords and draw courage from muscle memory.

This harp offered no such shelter.

I touched one string.

The note was quiet, lower than I expected, and it crossed the clearing like breath over sleeping embers. The harp warmed beneath my hand.

I played another note, then a third. The notes floated into silence. Each note faded quickly.

I closed my eyes and felt a thin thread beneath the gate stir.

It reached backward through the old stones under my boots. Through the ridge and the forest and the path we had climbed. Down toward Kaldora, toward Falcon’s Perch, toward the buried place where woundwood pressed against the foundations of the home that had held secrets longer than I had held a name.

Smoke came to me. It was not the dead ashes of our camp, but hearth smoke.

Warmth against stone. Beams darkened by years. The old room at Falcon’s Perch with its hearth on the right wall and the air forever carrying bread, ash, and the faint wild scent of Nerion’s fur.

My fingers trembled, but I kept the next note whole.

The vision pulled deeper.

White paws braced against woundwood; silver eyes fixed into a darkness beneath the inn; a growl so low it moved through stone rather than air. Nerion.

My throat tightened.

The harp gave another note under my hand.

Then came pain, sharp and human.

A marked palm pressed to cold rock. Linen slipping. Breath held through clenched teeth. A man standing where he had every reason to flee, choosing instead to put his hand against the place that called him. Veylan.

I opened my eyes.

The tree groaned. A single flake of bark loosened along the scar and fell into the snow.

Aerenil spread her wings halfway, eyes wide.

Thalen’s face had gone pale.

I let the last note fade and took my hand from the strings.

“What did you see?”

“Not see as much as felt.” My voice was unsteady.

He waited.

“Nerion. Beneath Falcon’s Perch. Growling.” I swallowed. “And Veylan, grasping stone. His mark felt the pull.”

Thalen looked toward the tree. The muscles along his jaw tightened, but not with anger. “Then the wound is drawing from both sides.”

“Is that why the harp warmed?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps Áthir’s harp remembered the hand that held Kaldora before you.”

I looked down at the instrument.

Kynami gave a low cry from the branch behind me. It was not alarm. He watched the scarred tree as if some part of him had seen farther than the rest of us.

“Can we try again?” I asked.

“No.”

The answer came quickly.

Thalen’s gaze remained on the tree. “It stirred. That is enough for now. If we press harder, we become part of what damaged it.”

Arieth en varu.

I wrapped the harp and returned it to its case.

The gate stood as it had when we arrived: old, scarred, and closed.

Yet I no longer saw it as sleeping or dying. It was wounded yet aware. It held a purpose it longed to fulfill, but could not.

“What now?” I asked.

Thalen turned away from the hollow, toward the deeper forest beyond the ring of trees.

“The gate was the safer passage,” Thalen said. “It once carried travelers between Kaldora and Venrathil without tearing at either side. Kaldora and Venrathil were not meant to be reached by cutting through this world.”

“And the other way?”

“There is a seam beyond this grove. Older than the gate. It asks more of the one crossing.”

The trees ahead stood close together, their branches interlaced until the forest seemed to lower itself over the path.

“Can we cross it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

The certainty in that word did not comfort me. It only meant crossing was possible.

Aerenil lifted from Thalen’s shoulder and flew once around the hollow. She moved slowly, passing each tree in the ring before hovering before the scarred trunk at the center. Her wings beat without sound. She bowed her head.

“Arieth veth,” she whispered.

I looked to Thalen, as Aerenil returned to him.

“May Arieth be free,” he said softly.

Kynami launched from the branch and circled the hollow once. He cried over the tree, sharp and bright. The sound rang through the ring, struck the scar, and vanished into the high branches.

The stones vanished under roots and snow within a dozen steps. Thalen led by signs I could not read. Aerenil flew ahead, returning often. Kynami came at last to my shoulder, his talons careful through the fabric of my cloak.

His presence steadied me, as mine seemed to steady him.

The forest grew stranger as we descended from the gate and walked along a ridge of exposed stone. The air changed in pockets. Winter in one step, then the dry scent of leaves long fallen, then damp green. Snow gathered in places where the branches overhead were bare, yet the ground beside it lay dark and soft as thawed earth.

Once, a root crossed the path ahead of us. We stepped over it. Three turns later, the same root crossed again, marked by the same twist in the bark and the same silver lichen shaped like a crescent moon.

I stopped and looked back.

The forest behind us did not show the path we had taken.

Thalen waited until I began moving again.

“The seam confuses direction,” he said. “Do not trust the path simply because you remember seeing it.”

“What should I follow?”

“Not what you can merely prove, but what you have lived. The seam will pull hardest at what you refuse to name.”

I almost asked what that meant, but the question died before I spoke it. He was not being obscure.

I knew what was real for me, and who I held close to my heart. So much was new, yet I knew more than when I first came to Kaldora, thinking I could play songs, keep my distance, and leave before anything claimed me.

Falcon’s Perch held me.

Mhira, with her herb-stained hands and stubborn tenderness.

Bran and Tamsil, in their different and stubborn ways.

Rhyden’s quiet watchfulness. Sira’s steady listening. Quill’s warm laughter in Wyrdveil. Even Veylan, willing but uncertain, standing now with his marked hand against the wound his father had helped tear open.

Nerion held me.

And Kynami, warm and living against my shoulder.

Áthir’s harp now reminded me of his presence walking with me.

My father’s songs, though I remembered too few of them.

My own promise to return.

We reached the end of the path near midday, though the light made time difficult to trust.

It disappeared between two leaning stones at the foot of a narrow rise. The stones were not tall. Moss covered their faces, and dry grass grew in the shallow space between them. A thornbush, leafless and black, had rooted there, its branches twisted into the gap.

Beyond the stones, the air seemed thin, as if the space had been stretched until the world showed strain along the edges.

Aerenil landed on one stone and lowered her body close to the moss. Kynami lifted from my shoulder and settled on the other. The two of them faced the gap, gold and violet, silent.

Thalen stood before the stones, holding his staff in both hands.

“This is the seam,” he said.

I looked at the thornbush. At the narrowness of the passage. At the air beyond it, pale and strained. “It does not look wide enough.”

“The stones are not the narrow part.”

I drew a slow breath. “Then what is?”

“Keeping hold of yourself.” Thalen stepped closer, and his voice lowered. “Do not hide from what it shows you. The seam will try to pull loose whatever grief has already clouded your heart.”

The words were simple enough, but they did not make the task simpler.

I thought of stone walls falling beneath Falcon’s Perch.

Of Nerion turning back.

Of the villagers’ voices hurling words of hate, of fear.

I thought of my lute under broken beams and living roots.

“What if I cannot hold on?”

“You must.” He reached out and touched my shoulder, “You will not cross alone.”

Aerenil lifted her head. Kynami’s feathers smoothed against his body. Áthir’s harp warmed through the case.

“Before you enter,” Thalen said, “name what holds you steady.”

“I don’t understand.”

“People. Places. Vows kept or broken. Anything true enough that naming it costs you something. My uncle crossed here once without naming enough. It took him three days to find the way home again.”

I looked between the leaning stones. The thornbush stirred, though no wind touched it.

I could have named bloodlines. Sylvenor. Ethárion. Nytherion. Almaris. The names mattered, but they were not all of it.

“Kaldora,” I said first.

The ground beneath my boots felt colder, then steadied.

“Falcon’s Perch.”

The scent of hearth smoke brushed the air and vanished.

“Mhira. Bran. Tamsil. Rhyden. Sira.”

Thalen did not interrupt.

“Quill,” I added, softer. “Though he is not here.”

The wind moved faintly through the grass.

“Veylan,” I said, and the name surprised me with its weight. The mark under the linen came back to me.

“Nerion.”

Kynami gave a low cry.

“Kynami.”

His golden eyes fixed on mine.

“Áthir.”

The harp warmed.

“My mother and father. My brothers.”

The words nearly failed, but I made them sound.

There. A quieter grief, older and less often touched.

“And my own voice,” I said, because it was time I stopped leaving it outside the circle of what mattered.

Thalen’s eyes softened, but he only nodded.

“Hold those,” he said.

Then he stepped through the seam.

For one breath, the space between the stones took him apart into light, shadow, and motion. His outline thinned. His staff bent, though it did not break. Aerenil leaped from her stone and flew after him, wings beating hard in the air that did not want to move.

Then both were beyond the gap.

Thalen turned back, pale but standing, and gestured for me to pass through.

Kynami looked at me.

I placed one hand against the harp case and stepped between the stones.

Cold raced through me, not over my skin, but through memory.

The seam took the first fear it found and gave it shape: Falcon’s Perch cracking beneath my feet, beams groaning, stone dust filling my throat. I saw my lute under rubble, strings bent and silent. I felt again the helpless reach of my hand toward what I could not save.

Then the scene shifted.

Nerion stood at the last fencepost, silver-eyed and still. I walked away from him again and again, each step heavier, until the distance between us became a wall of snow and stone.

Then the villagers’ voices rose.

She brought the rot. She woke something evil. She is not one of us.

The seam pressed the words close, trying to make them fit against my skin.

I held to Kynami’s cry. It came from somewhere ahead, sharp and living.

I held to the harp’s warmth beneath my palm.

I held to hearth smoke. Goat bleats. Mhira’s hands. Bran’s voice. Tamsil’s debts. Rhyden listening to impossible warnings. Sira kneeling by stone. Veylan’s marked hand refusing to open a way for his father.

I held to Nerion beneath Falcon’s Perch.

White paws. Silver eyes. Root and stone.

The cold deepened.

For an instant, I stood nowhere. No Kaldora behind me. No Venrathil ahead. Only a wound stretched between two lands and a road too frayed to bear my weight.

Áthir’s harp sounded one low note inside the case.

The seam loosened, and my boot struck earth. I stumbled forward, and Thalen caught my arm before I fell.

The air on the other side was warm.

I bent over my knees and drew it in, breath by breath, until the world steadied.

Kynami landed on my shoulder and snuggled close, his heart beating fast against my cheek. Aerenil clung to Thalen’s cloak with all four claws, her wings trembling.

Behind us, the two leaning stones stood in a patch of moss and thorn, ordinary and small. The seam had narrowed until it looked like no more than a tight place between rocks.

Ahead, the trees opened and light filtered through leaves that should not have been green in winter. A vibrant green, deeper, older, held in the land even under cold. The forest sloped away into a valley veiled in silver mist.

Roofs, if they could be called that, rose from the hillsides below, shaped around branch and root, their lines softened by moss and living wood. Water flashed over stone in narrow falls, catching pale light as it descended through terraces of fern and winter grass.

Kelvaren.

Beyond the village, the mountains rose in long blue folds, and somewhere past them waited Venrathil: wounded, guarded, and still alive enough to call.

Thalen released my arm, and something in his face eased. The sight before us moved through him like freedom after long confinement.

“The first edge of home,” he said.

I looked down into the valley.

Beautiful did not seem a large enough word. Sorrowful was not large enough either. The place held both so closely that separating them would have been a lie.

Áthir’s harp rested warm against my side. Falcon’s Perch ached behind my ribs, no less real for being beyond the seam. For the first time since leaving the last fencepost, I understood that walking toward Venrathil did not mean walking away from Kaldora.

The wound had two sides, and so did home.

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Chapter 41: The Path that Remembers

Snow crusted the path in thin, brittle sheets that broke beneath our boots as we began our climb toward the concealed overland trail to the Elven realm. Pine needles lay trapped in the ice. The stones beneath were uneven; some jutted up, while others sank deep into the ground.

Thalen walked ahead by several paces. Aerenil had abandoned her offense at the arrival of dawn and now rode high on his shoulder. Her attention shifted constantly: sky, branch, stone, snowbank, and back to sky.

Behind us, Kaldora disappeared by degrees.

Falcon’s Perch vanished early, taken by the bend in the road and the shoulder of the hill, as if the land had folded it away before I could change my mind.

Kynami did not perch on my shoulder. He searched ahead, vanished among the pines, then returned in a bright sweep of gold, always circling back as if counting us, or maybe judging us for being bound to the ground.

Aerenil rose from Thalen’s shoulder with a sudden snap of violet wings, shooting upward between the pines, scattering frost from the lower branches. For a moment, she was only a flash of purple and silver against the morning gray. Then she swept back, wings wide, body long and bright and alive.

“Rhaveth!” she called.

The word rang through the trees like struck glass.

“Freedom?”

“Stretch,” he said. “Or, more exactly, wings free after being confined too long.”

Aerenil circled us once, then wove between trunks with a pleasure so fierce it made my chest ache. She had spent too many days hidden under cloaks, tucked beneath beams, concealed from frightened eyes.

“She hated hiding,” I said.

“Yes, but it was necessary.”

Aerenil landed on a high branch above us and folded her wings with great dignity, as if she had not just been racing the wind for joy.

“Rhaveth,” I repeated, awkwardly.

Her head snapped toward me, and I regretted speaking immediately.

Thalen’s mouth softened, but he did not laugh. “The first sound is not quite right. It begins farther back. Rh—like breath against stone.”

“Rhaveth,” I tried again.

Aerenil considered me with open skepticism.

Then she said, very clearly, “Veth.”

“Is that a correction?”

“It means free,” Thalen said.

I looked up at her. “Thank you, I think.”

Aerenil’s tail flicked once, and she seemed to smile at me. I returned her smile.

Áthir’s harp pressed against my side beneath its wrapped case. I had thought the shape of it would become familiar once we started walking, but it didn’t. Every step reminded me that I carried someone else’s music.

The track cut along the shoulder of the mountain, high enough that the valley opened behind us in brief, treacherous glimpses whenever the trees thinned. Kaldora lay pale and small below, fields folded under snow, roads nothing more than tan threads, the village gathered around itself like a creature curled against the cold.

Mhira would be at Rowan’s Nook by now, likely making sure Rhyden and Sira ate whether they remembered hunger or not. Bran would be trying to make frightened people listen. Tamsil, I knew, would be speaking plainly to anyone foolish enough to interfere. I suspected she and I would become close friends when I returned—if I returned.

Nerion was harder to imagine. Had he gone back to the hearth, or was he still in the yard, watching the mountain route long after I disappeared? Wondering about this did not help me. I wanted to run back and hug him, burying my face in his fur.

I knew Rhyden would be listening to goats and chickens, and Sira would be listening to stone and woundwood.

And Veylan would be walking the mine road with Velroth’s blood in his veins and the land’s mark under linen.

We crossed the last ridge as the sky broke into a sickly grey, and the valley of Kaldora disappeared behind us in the mist like a wound slowly clotting shut.

Ahead lay the path to Kelvaren, and beyond that, Venrathil.

The place where the songs were first written, and maybe, if the land remembered, the place where they could be restored.

Mist floated behind us in tatters, clinging to the valley we had left like a ghost shredded by time.

The path became steeper. The air was crisp here, clean, as if the sky had not yet been poisoned.

Before us, the hills lifted into folds of deep forest and brighter stone. The trees here stood tall and well-spaced, not choking each other or contorting in fear.

The grass bent with frost but held its rich winter gold. The streams we passed whispered under the ice.

“Kaldora’s beautiful,” I said, not meaning to speak aloud. “But not what I remember from when I was young.”

Thalen didn’t answer right away. He was watching the curve of the slope, the place where the mountains began to rise.

Then, he said softly, “Kaldora has changed. I visited once as a child, your father had just been born, so Calethor brought me to meet the future Guardian. It was green, and lush, and beautiful. It was not frozen, like it awaited burial, as it is now.”

He stepped ahead of me. “You will like Kelvaren,” he said. “It has always been green. Full of life.”

“The wounding hasn’t reached there, yet?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. My family’s home was built into the side of the hill that drank the first morning light. We planted songs in the soil with the roots. When the wind moves through the trees, you can hear them humming back.”

He said it without embellishment, without yearning, the memory worn smooth as an ancient stone step. “You could feel the land cradling you. That’s what made it sacred.”

I let that settle. Let it anchor me against the echo of boots on icy stone and the ache behind my ribs. “Is it still like that?”

He walked several steps before he answered.

“Most of it is, but it was changing rapidly; that’s why they called Calethor home. His songs were needed.”

Truth, bare and cold and worth chasing.

As I walked, I contemplated the road as it curved through golden trees and frost-laced brush, up toward a land that might hold hope.

The snow remained with us, crusting over sleeping roots, but it was not the same cold as Kaldora’s. The air smelled of pine and running water, fresh and not yet tainted by rot.

We walked in silence for a while, comfortable, carrying our own thoughts.

My pack felt heavier than it had when I had arrived, and Áthir’s harp hung unfamiliar and more substantial than my beloved lute. Even without Nerion pacing beside me, even with half the village’s fears and possibly hatred behind us and the fire out cold, I felt lighter than I should have.

I heard their voices sometimes, the Kaldorans.

“She stinks of death.”

“She woke something.”

“She’s not one of us.”

But here, the land didn’t seem to echo them. It echoed the memories of living in harmony. Vibrant life laced with joy.

“It remembers itself,” I said without thinking.

Thalen stopped.

I smiled, “Or perhaps I am becoming unbearably poetic from lack of sleep.”

“No.” His gaze had gone to the tree, then to me. “This is close.”

“To what?”

“To how Venrathil felt before the wound deepened.”

I waited, hoping he would say more, but he turned back to the pathway and began walking again, slower this time.

We passed a stretch of ancient stone pavers, barely visible beneath moss and ice, carved with lines so worn they could’ve been roots, or veins, or script.

Kynami dropped to a low branch above them, talons gripping tight. He leaned down, head tilted toward the stones.

Aerenil left Thalen’s shoulder and glided to the ground. She placed one foreclaw near the worn marking, not touching it.

“Saevri,” she murmured.

Thalen’s jaw tightened.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Faded,” he said. “Or grieving.”

The stones continued ahead, half-hidden beneath snow, but several had shifted out of line. One lay cracked across the center. Another had been turned almost sideways, its worn markings facing the trees instead of the trail.

The road was still here, but uncertain of itself.

“Velroth?” I asked.

“This is older. Perhaps part of the original weakening that Elreth sensed.” Thalen rose slowly. “But yes, Velroth would have known what to damage. What to corrupt. What to leave almost whole.”

“The land is quieter here,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But not healed.”

I needed the truth more than kindness now. “Tell me what I am walking toward.”

Thalen glanced at me.

“Not the pretty version,” I added. “Not the one people tell half-elven bards to keep them from feeling ignorant.”

“I have never told you anything because you were half-elven, nor kept anything from you. Your human mother embraced the land with as much love and nurturing as any elf could have.”

“You may have left things out because I am new to them, or felt like it was not yet time.”

“That is true.”

The path narrowed, and Thalen pushed a pine branch aside and held it until I passed.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“All of it.”

“That is not possible before sunset.”

“Then begin with what matters before I reach Venrathil.”

He was silent for several steps.

Aerenil glided ahead, low enough that the air from her wings stirred loose snow from the taller grasses. Kynami hovered above her, higher and more restless, gold against gray.

“When I was young,” Thalen said, “I believed Venrathil was the shape all places wished to become if they were loved properly.”

I watched him.

He kept his eyes focused ahead. “Kelvaren isn’t a fortress,” he said. “It is a song you can live inside.”

“That sounds like a fantasy,” I said.

He smiled. “It isn’t. We grew our homes around the established trees. We didn’t mark the seasons; we sang to them. There was a hill of summer grass where children used to roll until their hair was filled with butterflies.”

He hesitated, then added, “My brother taught me the melody for my first river-song there. It was innocent and short and beautiful.”

“Do you remember it?”

“No,” he said. “But the land does.”

I blinked. “Wait, you grew your homes? They weren’t built?”

Thalen tilted his head slightly, the corners of his mouth twitching, as if deciding whether to explain it like fact or myth.

“We coaxed them,” he said. “Guided root and branch, stone and moss. Water, where it wanted to run. Light, where it needed to rest. It was not done with magic, at least not in the way you’d think. We worked with patience and respect. Acknowledging the land’s needs and dreams as well as our own.”

He tapped his staff once against a half-buried rock, testing it before stepping over. “It took time.”

“How much time?”

“Years. Longer, if you count the trees that were ancient before we asked anything of them.”

“For one house?”

“For one home.”

I had no answer to that.

Two banks of broken fern lined the footpath. Their fronds had curled inward, silvered and fragile. Aerenil flew from Thalen’s shoulder and sniffed one as we passed, then sneezed a tiny thread of smoke.

“You make it sound ordinary,” I said.

“It was ordinary.” He looked ahead, and his face softened in a way I rarely saw. “You do not harm the land by building in it. If you love the Arieth, you teach it to grow with you.”

The words walked with us, and my mind raced to understand.

Falcon’s Perch had been built, not grown.

Nytherion had created his cabin where the nexus had to be watched and protected. Then, after the wounding, the house had taken grief into its beams, one room after another, until Falcon’s Perch stood above secrets it had no language to explain. It had sheltered. It had endured. It had grown woundwood to protect what lay underneath.

Thalen glanced at me, the smile fading into something quieter.

“Some of those places are gone now. Or worse, twisted and deformed.”

I didn’t answer at first, then, “But I thought the land here was clean, unaffected by the decay.”

Thalen nodded slowly, “Much of it is. But not everywhere. There are places where the trees stand, and the stones shine, but the songs don’t echo anymore. Like someone rebuilt the memory without knowing what it meant.”

“Is that what Velroth keeps hinting at? Changing the song of the land?”

“When he was in Venrathil, Velroth tried to preserve the beauty. The land spoke to him, as it spoke to Elreth and our grandfathers.”

“Did Velroth listen?” I asked.

Thalen’s jaw tightened. “At first,” he said.

He spoke so softly that I almost missed the pain beneath it.

“At first?” I asked.

“He loved Venrathil. That is part of the danger. Do not imagine he began as a man who hated Arieth.”

Kynami flew ahead, his golden wings a faint silhouette against the grey light. Aeranil slipped behind, silent and watchful.

I thought of Nerion again. His absence was louder than most people’s presence.

“What changed?”

“Elreth’s sacrifice, or accident. The cause was not clear. One moment he was with them, and then, he was in the breach.”

I had seen this in visions. An elf, struggling in the ley lines, trapped, weakening. And Áthir, standing with him to offer strength, but ultimately failing.

Velroth and Elreth. Velroth and the land. Velroth and every false mark he had set into places that had once sung.

Aerenil returned, landing on a branch above us. Her wings folded slowly. Her eyes sharpened.

“Elreth is why Velroth stopped listening,” Thalen said.

“That sounds like blame.”

“It is not meant as blame. Grief overwhelmed, then fear. Then the refusal to accept any result that was not the one he wanted.”

I thought of Mhira’s wisdom. Fear lies, but it also reveals. Do not let it lead, but do not ignore where it takes root.

“What answer did he want?” I asked.

“That nothing had to be surrendered. That no wound had to be honored as a wound. That if he found the right song, the right force, the right pattern, he could make the land return what it had taken.”

Aerenil spoke from the branch. “Arieth en varu.”

The words moved differently than in her earlier cry. Lower, steadier, with the resonance of an old refrain.

He repeated them slowly. “Arieth en varu.”

I tried to shape them silently before attempting sound.

“What does it mean?”

“Roughly: Arieth does not yield to force.”

Aerenil gave a small, approving hum.

“Say it,” Thalen said.

I glared at him.

“If you are going to Venrathil,” he said, “you should carry more than names you do not understand.”

He was right.

“Arieth en varu,” I said.

The first word was familiar in my mouth. Arieth. The land’s breath. The first song beneath songs.

“Arieth en varu,” I said again.

This time, the words sank in.

Thalen watched me carefully. “You do not have to be fluent to listen. But every word you learn is one less door you must wait for someone else to open.”

“Then teach me another,” I said.

His expression changed, his eyes revealed something between approval and grief.

“Saevri,” he said.

Aerenil lowered her head.

I remembered that word from the creek. From the false sigil. From her recoil.

“Defiled,” I said.

“Also wounded or deformed from its proper shape.”

“Saevri,” I repeated. The word passed through me with a gust of cold.

We walked on.

The trees grew thinner, taller, reaching up as if they craved the sun.

But here and there, I saw things I couldn’t name: a tree with roots that jutted from the ground at sharp angles, not naturally, but as if forced; a stream that made no sound, though it moved over stone; a hollow where no snow had gathered, though the rest of the world lay blanketed.

Thalen didn’t comment, and neither did I, but the shift was real.

The land wasn’t untouched. It wasn’t yet fully corrupted, but it was aware.

“If the way is closed,” I said, finally, “what will we do?”

Thalen didn’t slow. “We’ll sing anyway.”

That was it. No plan?

The mist thickened as we climbed the next ridge, dragging itself low across the frozen fields.

The last of the sun caught on the rim of the world, staining the horizon with bruised gold and dying copper.

Kynami’s cry split the mist. It was sharp, urgent.

I jerked my gaze upward, following the arc of his flight, and saw it.

A pale shape moved at the edge of the woods. At first, I thought it was a trick of the light, a shadow slipping free of a tree.

A giant snow leopard, like the one that ran with Aldros and Nerion, and yet so different. A Windborne.

Massive shoulders, long haunches, the sleekness that spoke of power.

His body was lean and strong, shaped for speed rather than hunger. His paws danced lightly across the ground, leaving marks in the snow.

His eyes glowed silver, like Nerion’s, and yet wholly catlike. They pierced into the mist, bringing light and clarity.

Thalen stiffened at my side; neither of us moved.

The Windborne turned his head toward us, slowly, as if it was struggling to wake from a nightmare. He watched us with patience, a quiet vigilance.

I couldn’t breathe. Was this my Guardian-form-to-be? Iltharion?

He stood a moment longer, then slipped back into the trees without a sound.

The world around us seemed to exhale, then fall deathly quiet. I knelt, pressing my hand against the earth, feeling for the songs, the roots, anything real. But the ground beneath my fingers was worse than cold; it was silent.

We didn’t speak after that.

We passed under a natural arch of stone, crystal strands hanging along its base like cobwebs caught mid-thought.

The wind rose for a moment and then calmed again. The path leveled out as the sun sagged low behind the hills.

The air thinned. The mist fell away into long fingers clinging to the gullies and streams, leaving the ancient path exposed under the bruised sky.

We stopped for a breath, standing at the shoulder of a low ridge.

Ahead, beyond the gold-crusted grasses and the frost-black trees, the land rolled toward the east, beautiful and green, but along the farthest hills, I saw a line of darkness, like a hand smearing ash across a painting.

Velroth’s reach into Venrathil seemed distant, but growing, a shadow not yet rooted in the land.

Thalen stood silent beside me.

The wind pressed against my coat, cold fingers threading through the seams. But under the bite, under the scent of pine, I felt it. The land was aware.

It wasn’t begging, but watching and waiting to see what we would do.

I set my pack higher on my shoulders.

I’m coming, I thought, though the words didn’t quite reach my mouth.

I’m coming. And I will not leave you to die.

Silently, we made our camp under the broken arms of a half-frozen tree, with Iltharion’s silver eyes bright in my memory.

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Chapter Forty: Toward Venrathil

Veylan declared Falcon’s Perch safe to return inside by late afternoon, though the kitchen and the guest rooms above it were for merely passing through, not actual use. The outside chicken coop was shifted to a vacant stall in the barn, and the pantry crew was relocated for their own safety. They formally protested, at length, but agreed to stay until my return.

We were able to spend the evening by the hearth and sleep in our own rooms.

The supplies had been gathered from Rowan’s Nook, then carried back by Bran and Thalen in dusk’s fading light: food from Mhira’s shelves, spare gloves, wrapped bandages, dried herbs, two waterskins, a coil of cord, a small knife I did not remember owning, and one packet of candied ginger tucked into an inner pocket where I would find it later, having forgotten it was there, and cry, probably at the least convenient moment.

Mhira had packed that one. She had packed everything as if the act of tying straps could personally restrain death.

By morning, Falcon’s Perch felt smaller. That was not true, of course. The inn still stood where it always had, stubborn against the cliffside, roofline dark beneath a sky the color of unwashed wool. The old hearth warmed.

But after the cellar, after the map’s reveal, after the thought of Venrathil had settled over us, everything seemed to have drawn inward.

The inn looked less like a place that sheltered people and more like something wounded, hiding where it bled.

I stood in the yard with Áthir’s travel harp shielded in its case, and tried not to count the ways I was leaving.

My lute remained beneath the stones. Nerion would stay beside the hearth, where he had faithfully watched for centuries. Falcon’s Perch was damaged, hastily repaired, and watched. Kaldorans were still afraid.

Now, in the faint light of dawn, Mhira stood on the porch, arms folded over her dark shawl, watching Bran tighten the last buckle on my pack.

“You’ve put enough in there to supply a siege,” Bran muttered.

“It may become one,” Mhira said.

He paused, considered, then pulled the strap tighter. “Then better too much than not enough.”

Aerenil perched on Thalen’s shoulder with her wings tucked close, violet scales catching what little light the morning offered. She had spent most of the pre-dawn in a state of offended silence, which Thalen said was normal. Early morning did not agree with her.

Kynami was less silent. He circled above the yard once, then twice, then dropped to the peak of the stable roof and gave a sharp cry toward the storm-cellar doors.

“I know,” I said softly.

He looked at me, golden eyes bright and furious.

“I know.”

He did not seem satisfied.

Bran straightened and shoved my pack toward me. “There. If the road kills you, it won’t be for lack of dried apples.”

“Comforting.”

“I aim to provide practical encouragement.”

“You missed, but I will embrace the effort.”

His mouth twitched, but the expression did not survive.

For a moment, we stood awkwardly in the yard, all of us aware that the time for tasks was thinning. The shoring posts under the kitchen had held through the night. The inn had groaned twice, loudly enough to wake everyone within earshot, but it had not fallen.

Held, Veylan had said. More repairs would be needed when, or if, the winter weather passed.

He stood now near the storm-cellar doors with two miners, speaking too low for the yard to hear. His marked hand was wrapped in clean linen.

Sira stood several paces away, watching the line of the wall rather than the men. Rhyden stood with her, one shoulder bound under his cloak, his eyes moving from the roof to the goats to the trees beyond the yard.

Sira looked up as I approached.

“You’ll know if it shifts?” I asked.

“Yes, some,” she said. “Not all, but enough, I think.”

“That is not as reassuring as I would like.”

“I am trying not to lie.” She gave me the faintest smile.

Rhyden nodded toward the barn. “Your goats disapprove of the morning.”

“My goats disapprove of most things.”

“Useful trait.”

“You’re sure about the watch routes?”

“No.” He adjusted the sling at his shoulder and winced. “But we are as sure as people can be while asking goats, horses, hens, and miners to warn us before the land does.”

“That sounds absurd.”

“It is, so it may work.”

Sira touched one of the thread-marked scraps of parchment in her hand. “The creek first. Then the lower road. Veylan will take the mine road. Bran and Tamsil will keep Kaldora from turning on itself, and Mhira will make sure no one starves.”

“And if Velroth pulls through Veylan?”

Rhyden’s expression lost its dry edge. “Then Veylan tells us before he succeeds.”

“That is not much warning.”

“No,” Sira said.

I looked toward Veylan.

He had turned away from the miners and was looking at the inn. At the wall where old stone met newer timber, where Falcon’s Perch had grown around secrets and then pretended to be only an inn.

His father had tried to force the old gate.

His father had marked stone, water, and tree with a false mark, setting hooks in weak places.

And Veylan, son of Velroth, stood in my yard because the land had called him to hold beams in place. No one could have written a song like that and expected to be believed.

Veylan must have felt me watching. He looked over.

For a breath, neither of us moved.

Then he gave the smallest nod. Acknowledgment.

I would have to trust him.

I turned toward the barn. “I need to say goodbye to the goats.”

Rhyden fell into step beside me. “That was my next suggestion.”

“Were you afraid I would forget?”

“I was afraid you would try to avoid it.”

The barn smelled of hay, dust, and worried animals. The goats had been restless all night. Bramble stood at the front of her pen, ears pricked, eyes bright and accusing. Her kids pressed against her sides, too sleepy to understand disaster but old enough to resent disruption.

I opened the pen and knelt.

Bramble pushed her nose into my chest so hard I nearly tipped backward.

“Yes,” I said, stroking the ridge between her ears. “I know. I am terrible.”

She huffed into my cloak.

Rhyden leaned on the rail. “She agrees.”

“You do not speak goat.”

“I read posture.”

“And you are reading judgment?”

“They are often related.”

One of Bramble’s kids climbed halfway onto my knee and began chewing the edge of my sleeve.

“No,” I told her.

She chewed harder.

“Excellent discipline,” Rhyden said.

“You may stop helping whenever you like.”

“I am storing observations.”

“For what?”

“The survival of Kaldora, apparently.”

Despite everything, I laughed.

Then Elarûk hummed.

The sound came from the far pen, low and steady, vibrating in the boards under my feet. He stood with his horns angled toward the door, beard dusted with bits of hay, yellow eyes fixed on me with the grave superiority of a creature who had never doubted his own importance.

He waited until I opened the gate, then pressed his forehead into my hip.

“Don’t be impossible,” I whispered.

He hummed again.

“That means he will consider it,” Rhyden said.

“It means he will be impossible in whatever way proves most inconvenient.”

“Useful trait,” Rhyden said again.

I rested my hand against Elarûk’s neck. His coat smelled of hay and ordinary life. I had not realized ordinary life could hurt this much.

“If he faces the north wall and hums for no reason,” I said, “send for Sira.”

Rhyden nodded.

“If Bramble refuses the west pasture, listen to her, and check the nearby paths. If the hens leave the coop and fly from the stall, do not assume they are being dramatic.”

“I will assume drama first, then investigate.”

“That is practical.”

Elarûk lifted his head and made a soft, broken sound that was not quite a bleat.

I had no answer for it.

Goats were herd creatures. They knew the shape of leaving before people admitted it. They knew when one body stepped out of the pattern and did not return by sundown.

“I’ll come back,” I said.

The words felt dangerous, like promises waiting to be broken.

Elarûk stared at me as if judging whether I had said a useful thing or only a human thing.

Then he bumped my hip again, softly. I took that for mercy.

When I stepped out of the barn, Tamsil was waiting by the door with a bundle wrapped in coarse cloth.

“I’m not here for sentiment,” she said.

“I would never accuse you of it.”

“Good. Sentiment travels badly and spoils faster than cheese.”

She thrust the bundle into my arms. Bread. Dried meat. Hard cheese wrapped in waxed cloth. A little packet of salt. A flask small enough to hide in a sleeve.

I lifted the flask.

“For cold,” she said.

“It smells like tavern brandy.”

“Then perhaps it will be useful in several forms of weather.”

I tucked it away.

Tamsil looked toward the inn, then back at me. Her mouth tightened. “My boys will help. Mhira and I will keep food moving where it’s needed. If anyone in this village decides fear makes them clever, Bran can glare, and I can shout.”

“Thank you.”

She waved that away as if it had landed too close. “Don’t thank me. Come back and pay your debts properly.”

“I owe you debts?”

“Everyone owes me debts. I keep better count than they do.”

Her gaze dropped to the wrapped harp at my side.

“That’s his?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Her eyes softened for half a breath, then sharpened before the softness could be accused of lingering. “Take care with it.”

“I will.”

“I meant take care with yourself while carrying it.”

“Oh.”

“Honestly.” She stepped back. “Bards. So good with words, except when they are not.”

Then she turned and shouted at one of her sons for holding a plank like an idiot, though he was holding it perfectly well.

Bran waited near the road. He had been pretending to check a strap on Thalen’s pack for longer than any strap in history had needed checking. When I approached, he stopped pretending.

“There’s still time to change your mind,” he said.

“No, there isn’t.”

“I know.” He looked annoyed by this. “Thought I’d say it anyway.”

Thalen stood a little distance away, giving us the gift of not listening, though of course he was listening. Elves seemed to have whole traditions built around pretending not to hear things.

Bran cleared his throat.

I braced myself.

He opened his arms.

That undid me more efficiently than any speech could have.

I stepped into the embrace, and he folded me in like I was younger than I was, smaller than I was, someone who could be kept safe by the stubborn width of his shoulders.

“Áthir and I argued for thirty years,” he said into my hair.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” His voice roughened. “We pretended to argue. Half the time, anyway. He was the best friend I had, whether he admitted it or not.”

My eyes burned.

“He admitted very little.”

“That was part of the charm, according to no one sensible.” Bran held me tighter for one breath, then let go as if releasing me required deliberate force. “Come back.”

“I will try.”

“I said, come back.”

I looked up at him.

His face was stern, frightened, and unbearably kind.

“All right,” I whispered. “I’ll come back.”

He nodded once, accepting the lie because love sometimes needs a shape to stand inside.

Mhira came next.

She did not open her arms at first. She adjusted the strap of my pack, checked the knot on the harp’s wrapping, slid another packet into my cloak, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear with hands that trembled.

“You are the image of your mother when you are about to do something terrifying and pretend it is necessary,” she said.

“I am not pretending.”

“No. That is what worries me.”

Then she took my face between her hands. “Elowen,” she said.

My name sounded different when she said it. Less like something I had to answer to. More like something she was keeping safe until I came back for it.

“Listen,” she said. “Not only to the land. Not only to Thalen. Not only to old songs, old guilt, or men who speak as if grief gives them authority.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. But you will.” Her thumbs brushed my cheeks once. “Listen to yourself when you are frightened. Fear lies, but it also reveals. Do not let it lead, but do not ignore where it takes root.”

I swallowed.

She kissed my brow.

“Come home with answers if you can,” she said. “Come home without them if you must. But come home.”

I could not speak, so I nodded.

We left Falcon’s Perch with the morning still undecided around us. A gray between-state held the valley, as if daylight itself had paused before choosing whether to wake.

Thalen walked at my left, his cloak drawn close, Aerenil tucked against his shoulder beneath the fold of wool. Kynami flew ahead, then circled back, restless and bright against the low sky. The wrapped harp bumped against my side with each step. It was heavier than my lute had been, in every way.

Nerion walked at my right, and for a while, I let myself pretend that meant he was coming.

Falcon’s Perch fell behind us one familiar shadow at a time.

At the village road, a few people watched from doorways.

Rinna stood near the cooper’s lane with her arms folded, face pale and unreadable.

Selen stood beside her home, leaning on her cane. The old woman’s gaze followed the harp at my side, then rose to my face.

For one breath, I thought she might speak, but she did not.

We walked on.

Near the square, a child’s face appeared at a window. The little girl who had said I sang as if the wind missed me pressed both hands to the glass.

I lifted my fingers.

She lifted hers back.

I would need to keep an eye on her when I returned. She felt the land. She needed to learn how to listen.

Then the road curved and took her from sight, and the village thinned into fields.

Fences ran crooked under frost. Sheep huddled in low clusters near stone walls. Smoke rose from chimneys and flattened under the hard sky. Beyond the last farms, the land lifted toward the mountain path, where old pines leaned over the road, and the snow lay deeper against them.

Nerion’s steps slowed.

I felt it before I looked at him. “No,” I said.

He stopped at the last fencepost before the mountain track, where the worked fields ended, and the old path began. His ears were forward, his eyes blue and steady.

“Nerion.”

He did not move.

“You came farther than this before,” I said. “You came to the cave in the pass. You found me in a blizzard.”

His gaze did not waver.

“That was different, wasn’t it?”

Thalen stood silent beside me.

The wind moved through the pines.

I knelt in the snow and put both hands in Nerion’s ruff. His fur smelled of smoke, frost, and Falcon’s Perch.

“You can’t cross this time.”

He pressed his forehead against mine.

For one moment, I was back under the mountain storm, half-frozen and lost, with his body between me and death. For one moment, I was a child hearing wolf stories by a hearth. For one moment, I was standing in the Watcher’s House, looking at the portrait of a man who had become something more than memory.

“You hold the line,” I whispered.

His breath warmed my cheek.

“Hold the inn. Hold Sira and Rhyden to sense. Keep Bran and Tamsil out of trouble if possible, though I know that asks much of anyone.”

Behind me, Thalen made a sound suspiciously close to a laugh.

Nerion’s tail moved once.

“And when the land pulls, you pull back.”

His eyes silvered.

I understood then, not with thought, but with the ache beneath it. He was not refusing me. He was answering something larger than me.

This was the edge of what he guarded.

He could pass it to rescue. He could cross a distance for love. But the guardian in him belonged to Kaldora’s wounded side, and that side needed him now more than I did.

I kissed the white fur between his eyes. “Be here when I come home.”

Nerion licked my cheek once, rough and final, then he stepped back.

Kynami gave a sharp cry from above, wheeling once over us. Nerion looked up at him. Something passed between them that no human, elf, goat, or dragon had language for.

Kynami cried again, softer.

Nerion turned. He did not whine. He did not look back twice.

He loped down the road toward Kaldora, toward Falcon’s Perch, toward the damaged inn and the wounded ground beneath it. The gray morning took him slowly: first the arch of his back, then the white of his tail, then the last pale flicker of him between the fenceposts.

I watched until there was nothing left to watch.

Thalen did not hurry me.

Aerenil emerged from his cloak and climbed onto his shoulder, eyes fixed on the road Nerion had taken.

“Rhû,” she said softly.

It was the first word she had spoken all morning.

I did not know what it meant.

Thalen’s expression told me not to ask yet.

I stood then. The harp’s strap had slipped. I adjusted it with hands numbed from more than the cold.

The mountain path waited. It rose between pines and frost-bent brush, the old road half-buried under snow and fallen needles.

And beyond that, I didn’t know what lay. I had crossed the pass to Wyrdveil, but not the one to the Elven realm.

Venrathil, the land of first songs.

Where I might find questions and answers I was not ready to hear.

Thalen stepped onto the path first, then stopped and looked back.

“Ready?”

“No.”

His mouth curved faintly. “Good. It would worry me if you were.”

Kynami settled on my shoulder, feathers bright against the gray. He looked down at me with fierce impatience, as if to say grief was understandable, but delay was not.

I set my pack higher on my shoulders and clutched the harp against my side.

Behind me, Kaldora held its breath, and ahead, the mountain waited.

I took the first step after Thalen.

The surface ice gave under my boot, and the road to Venrathil began.

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Chapter Thirty-Nine:

The Wrong Side

By the time Veylan reached Falcon’s Perch, the yard had settled into an uneasy truce.

Men who had shouted at me an hour before now carried shoring posts toward the storm-cellar doors with their heads down and their mouths shut. Fear had not left them, but now it gave them purpose.

Bran stood near the side path, directing them with short, rough words and the authority a tavern keeper earned by knowing every man’s debts, thirst, and worst habits.

Tamsil’s two boys arrived with a sled of tools and eagerness to help.

Neither Rinna nor Selen had gone far. They watched from the edge of the yard while Veylan descended into the damaged cellar.

I did not go down.

Not because I feared the cellar, but because beneath the rubble and broken woundwood, my lute lay, and I could not bear to look at the place where I had abandoned it.

Nerion nuzzled my hand, his blue eyes mirroring my pain. Kynami perched on the edge of the kitchen roof, feathers ruffled hard against the wind, his golden eyes fixed on the storm-cellar doors.

Veylan’s voice carried up through the open doors. “No one touches the fall. The rubble is supporting what is left of the beams.”

A miner muttered something I could not hear.

Veylan answered sharply. “Then argue with it after it kills you.”

Bran glanced at me.

A cluck rose from the cellar. Everyone froze.

I tried to smile, but nothing on my face obeyed.

Another cluck followed, pleased and self-important.

Bran stared down the steps. “Is that—”

“Revel,” I said.

Bran descended, and a moment later, came up from the cellar holding one of Áthir’s hens under his arm. Revel had dust on her feathers, oats in her beak, and the offended dignity of a duchess arrested for theft.

“She was eating spilled grain,” Bran said.

“That sounds like Revel.”

Veylan appeared behind him, his expression grim. “She came through the pantry floor.”

The small smile that had begun on Bran’s face vanished.

“Alone? What of the others?” I whispered. I added worry for Rowan and Lyra to my list. Were they safe?

No one heard me.

Bran asked Veylan, “The crack runs that far?”

“Far enough.” Veylan flexed his marked hand once, then hid it.

In that moment, I saw the raw symbol tighten across his skin.

Velroth’s false marks poisoned what they touched. Veylan’s mark was not that.

Raw, badly healed, unwelcome—but a true guardian mark. The land had marked him because he could feel what was about to break.

I wasn’t sure if that was enough for me to trust him, given what his father was trying to do.

“Will it hold?” Bran asked.

The word struck me harder than it should have. Hold.

It seemed more than I could do. Hold the wall. Hold the crowd. Hold the old hearth while the ground beneath it fought not to tear. And withhold the truth from the Kaldorans, who deserved to know, but couldn’t.

“For now, it will,” Veylan said. “But I can’t mend it.”

I shook my head to clear it. If he couldn’t fix it, then who? Was my family home destroyed?

Tamsil took Revel from Bran with disgusted affection. “No one goes into the kitchen. No one goes into the pantry. No one lets the hens decide the safest path through the house.”

Revel pecked at her sleeve.

“Yes,” Tamsil said. “Your opinion has been recorded.”

Even Rhyden almost smiled.

Then the inn groaned softly behind us, and every face in the yard grimaced.

The old kitchen wall gave one complaining creak. Dust sifted from the eaves.

Veylan spoke as he walked back down the cellar stairs. “Posts under the kitchen joists. Cross-brace them. Wedges after the weight settles. Do not dig into the fall.”

The miners moved carefully; this time, no one argued.

Bran stepped close enough that his voice would not carry. “How bad?”

Veylan looked at him, then at me. “The inn can be held,” he said. “But whatever pulled that wall down is not finished pulling.”

Sira stood near the side door, her face pale. “No,” she said quietly. “It is not.”

Veylan looked at her.

Something passed between them—recognition, perhaps. Or only the weary understanding of people who had both learned the ground was not as innocent as it pretended.

Thalen came to my side. His hood shadowed his face, and Aerenil remained hidden beneath his cloak.

“We need the map,” he said.

I looked toward the yard, the cellar, the villagers who continued watching me.

Then I nodded, “Not here.”

I looked toward the inn. The kitchen was unsafe, the hearth room too visible, and half the yard watched us as if their fears had grown eyes.

Mhira was not among them. That meant she was either healing someone, scolding someone, or both.

“Rowan’s Nook,” I said.

Bran looked at me.

“Mhira has space, discretion, and a locking door.”

“Three rare blessings,” Rhyden said.

We each took our own route and time, informing those who needed to join us along the way.

We gathered in Mhira’s corner library, sliding around her table. The fire burned low but steady. Its warmth touched the room without demanding explanation.

Thalen spread the map between us.

One corner was torn. Dust streaked the parchment. Charcoal lines crossed the valley in uneven strokes, some half-smudged where he had folded it too quickly in the chamber below.

But the marks remained: the Frostcrystal mine; the creek near Falcon’s Perch; Hearth Ridge; Greenly; Fenmar; Grellin; Talrowen; and Holwen.

Separate troubles, until the black lines gave them shape.

Bran, whom I had invited, stood behind one chair, both hands gripping its back. Mhira, seeing the blood stain on Rhyden’s shoulder, set a basket of bandages and herbs on the table.

“Come, let me look at that.”

Rhyden shifted from where he had leaned against the wall with one hand pressed to his injured shoulder. Bran offered him the chair in exchange for his place against the wall.

Sira sat in the corner, eyes fixed on the map as if the drawn lines were painful to see.

Veylan came in last, with stone dust on his coat and the marked hand half-hidden at his side.

No one had invited him, but we didn’t send him away, either.

He crossed to the table and looked down. His gaze went first to the mine. “That line was the deepest,” he said.

It was not a question.

Thalen watched him carefully. “Yes.”

Veylan’s hand twitched before he could stop it.

Sira saw. “You felt it?” she asked.

Veylan’s mouth tightened. “I felt pressure.”

Rhyden looked at him. “That answer is carrying a large pack.”

“It is the only answer I have.”

“Is it?” Bran asked.

Veylan’s eyes lifted as the room tightened around the question.

Bran did not step back from it. “You know more than stone. We all know that much.”

Veylan’s face closed. “Knowing a man’s blood does not mean knowing his mind.”

“No,” Bran said. “But when the man is Velroth, blood starts looking less like a private matter.”

Kynami gave a sharp cry from the rafters. Aerenil flew from Thalen’s cloak to a shelf, unsettled.

Veylan went still.

The truth had followed him into the room, whether anyone spoke it or not. It had been there in the mine dust, in the way the false sigils answered, in the badly healed mark on his hand that did not look like Velroth’s crooked working and yet had come too close to it for comfort.

“I did not choose my father,” Veylan said.

“No,” Mhira said. “But you choose what you do with what he left.”

His eyes moved to her.

She did not soften the look she gave him. Mhira could be kind without being gentle. “The land marked you. That does not clear you. It makes you responsible.”

Something in Veylan’s face shifted. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I am here.”

Thalen tapped the map. “Then bring what you know. We do not have time to distrust useful knowledge simply because it comes from painful places.”

Veylan looked down at the map. “The mine road. The lower supports. The old well near the east slope. Anything built into stone should be watched.”

“Not just stone,” Rhyden said. “Animals knew before we did. Kynami. Aerenil. Nerion. The goats.”

“Elarûk,” Bran added, as if the day had finally become too much.

“They are unreasonable enough to be honest,” Rhyden said.

Nerion’s ears flicked once.

“I think Nerion agrees,” I said.

“It was either agreement or a low opinion of our methods.”

“Both seem possible.”

Mhira leaned over the map. “These marks. Are they spreading from the inn, or being drawn to it?”

“Neither, exactly,” Thalen said. “They are being drawn through weak places. Anchored by Velroth’s false sigils.”

“Hooks,” I said. The word scraped my throat.

Thalen’s eyes lifted briefly to mine. “Pulled by his hooks.”

Sira touched the mark near the creek without quite touching the parchment. “Some may be weakened from this side. But not all.”

“Why not?” Bran asked.

“Because the wound reaches here,” Thalen said. “But it did not start here.”

My mind returned to the woundwood chamber, and I heard the single note again. The way it had brightened, then twisted. The way the black lines had pulled, breaking the wall.

My hand moved toward my shoulder before I could stop it. Empty.

Thalen caught the gesture.

“The note did not cause the damage,” Thalen said gently. “It showed us where the damage was being forced.”

“It answered wrong.”

“It answered from the wrong side.”

The hearth cracked softly.

I looked at the map until the lines blurred.

“We cannot fix this by standing here,” I said.

“No,” Sira said.

Her voice was quiet, but it steadied the room.

I looked at her.

She had changed since she came to Falcon’s Perch. Or perhaps I had only just learned how to see her. The frightened flood survivor was still there, but so was something older and firmer: a woman who heard strain in the land and did not look away.

“We split,” she said.

The words landed like a beam being set into place.

Bran frowned. “Split?”

“Elowen and Thalen go to the side where the wound opens,” Sira said. “Venrathil.”

My stomach turned, though I had known it before she said it.

“The pass is failing,” Bran said.

“Yes,” Thalen answered. “But we will find a way through.”

“The hidden gate?” Mhira asked.

The room turned toward her.

She rarely spoke of old things in front of relative strangers, but when she did, the words demanded to be heard.

Thalen’s expression dimmed. “Closed.”

“Still?” I asked.

“As far as Calethor knew.” He looked to me, then to the map. “The gate in the deeper woods has not answered since he passed through it. He may have been the last to travel that route. I had to come through the pass.”

“Velroth said he tried last week, but it was blocked,” I said quietly. “He boldly noted my failures to protect the land.”

“Velroth tried,” Veylan said. “Years ago.”

Everyone looked at him.

His jaw tightened. “Years ago. Before the mine. Before I understood what he was searching for. He thought the old tree would open if he applied enough force. If he spoke to the ward.”

“And?” Rhyden asked.

“It did not open.”

“No,” Thalen said quietly. “It would not.”

I thought of Velroth’s false marks, crooked and poisonous, pressed into bark and stone, left near water and roads. Hooks thrown into wounds because he could not bear that a door had closed to him.

“What happened?” I asked.

Veylan’s gaze stayed on the map. “The grove went silent. Birds left it. Nothing nested there for a while after.”

Kynami shifted in the rafters.

Nerion’s eyes had gone very still.

Bran rubbed a hand over his face. “So, no gate. Failing pass. Roads cracking under us. Wonderful.”

“There may still be a way through,” Thalen said. “But not an easy one.”

“Naturally.”

Sira’s hand hovered over the lines. “Rhyden and I stay. We watch the inn. The places where the hooks pull through.”

“The old foundation,” I said quickly.

Veylan glanced at me. He knew that was not all we were referring to, but he said nothing.

Rhyden looked up from Mhira’s work on his shoulder. “I can set watchers. Farmers watching stock. Miners watching stone. Children telling someone if the snow starts singing again.”

Bran stared at him. “That is a sentence I never expected to consider practical.”

“Practicality has broadened,” Mhira said.

Veylan nodded toward the mine road. “I can keep men watching there. The miners will listen to me.”

“Will they?” Bran asked.

Veylan’s face hardened. “They will if they want to work.”

“That is not the same as trust.”

“No,” Veylan said. “But it may be enough for a warning.”

Rhyden studied him. “And if Velroth pulls through you?”

The words were soft.

Veylan looked down at his marked hand. For a moment, he seemed young and tired. “Then I tell you before he succeeds.”

Bran let out a breath through his nose. “That is meant to reassure us?”

“No,” Veylan said. “It is meant to be true.”

I left this in their hands, their decision, because in the end, they were the ones who would be here to deal with him.

Sira looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded once in recognition of a useful truth.

Mhira looked from Sira to Rhyden to Veylan, then to Bran. “And I stay here. People will be afraid. Fear makes sickness worse, wounds worse, tempers worse, and fools more ambitious.”

Bran nodded once. “I’ll keep the tavern open. People talk when they drink. I’ll hear what shifts before it becomes a crowd.”

“You’ll also keep them from turning on the inn,” I said.

His jaw tightened. “I’ll do what I can.”

What he could do might not be enough, but it was something.

The plan was forming without me holding every piece.

That should have been a relief, but instead it made leaving possible, which was worse.

“Nerion comes with us,” I said.

Nerion stood beside the hearth, silver moving faintly through his eyes. He was not looking at the door. He was looking down, listening to something beneath the stones.

Thalen’s voice softened. “No.”

The word was small, striking like a gate latch closing.

“No?” I said.

“He cannot.”

“Cannot, or will not?”

“Both, perhaps.”

I turned toward Nerion. “You have crossed every threshold in this house with me.”

His head shifted, revealing sorrow in his eyes.

Thalen stepped closer, but not too close. “He is not a familiar, Elowen. He is a guardian. This is the side he holds.”

I looked at Kynami in the rafters. His feathers lifted, as if daring anyone to take him away from me.

“Kynami comes,” I said.

“Yes,” Thalen said. “He is bound to you. To your family. He can follow where you go.”

“And Aerenil?” I asked.

Aerenil’s head emerged from Thalen’s cloak, eyes bright with insult.

Thalen glanced down. “I would not survive telling her no.”

“Wise,” Rhyden said.

Nerion came to me then. The room parted for him without anyone meaning to move. He pressed his broad head against my side.

I buried one hand in his dusty fur. “You stay,” I whispered.

His eyes lifted to mine. Blue now. Almost ordinary.

“You hold the inn,” I said.

His tail moved once.

“And Kaldora.”

Another slow movement.

“And when I come back, you had better be here to look smug about it.”

Nerion breathed against my hand in promise. I will.

I looked back at the map. “I should stay,” I said.

No one answered quickly enough. So, I said it again.

“I should stay. Falcon’s Perch is mine. Kaldora is mine. The cellar is broken. The villagers are frightened. My lute is down there.”

My voice caught.

Mhira’s face softened, but she did not come to me. Good. If she had touched my shoulder, I might have come apart like rotten cloth.

“Elowen,” she said. “Staying may feel like loyalty.”

“It is loyalty.”

“No,” Thalen said softly. “Not if staying keeps you on the wrong side of the wound.”

I turned on him. “Do not turn this into wisdom.”

“I would never.”

“You would. You do. Constantly.”

“I try to ration it.”

“You fail.”

His mouth almost smiled, but his eyes did not.

“The chamber answered you,” he said. “Then the sound bent away. Not because you lacked power. Because it could not receive healing from where you stood.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

I looked at the map, at the marks I had almost memorized. I thought of my lute lying beyond rubble and woundwood, and wondered if the one string trembled still.

I thought of Áthir somewhere near the Threshold, and Elreth, trapped from the side I could not reach.

I thought of Velroth’s hand behind the decay. Then I thought of Falcon’s Perch. The Watcher’s House. It had accepted me, trusted me. And now I had to leave it.

“All right,” I said.

The room breathed again.

“When?” Bran asked.

“Tomorrow,” Thalen said. “If the pass holds.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Rhyden asked.

“Then we leave before it has time to decide.”

“Excellent. Nothing encourages travel like a road developing an opinion.”

Mhira reached for the basket. “You’ll need food. Warm clothes. Bandages. The inn, at least the kitchen and loft, is no longer safe for packing. Then there’s dried herbs for fever and panic.”

“For whose panic?” Bran asked.

I swallowed, but did not answer. My aunt knew me well.

The others began moving because tasks are merciful.

Bran helped Mhira. Rhyden and Sira bent over the map, dividing the valley into watch routes with bits of thread because more charcoal marks would make the thing look even more cursed than it already did.

Veylan stood near the hearth, studying the mine line with his marked hand clenched at his side. My aunt packed with a ferocity that suggested any dried apple foolish enough to resist would be punished.

I stood beside the table, feeling useless in a room full of motion. “We’ll need a copy of the map. And…”

My hand drifted toward my back again.

Thalen noticed. Of course he did.

“You need an instrument,” he said softly.

The room quieted too quickly.

I looked at him. “My lute is—”

“I know where it is.”

I flinched.

“I’m sorry,” he added, which made it worse.

I looked down. “I can sing.”

“Yes,” he said. “But the journey will ask more of you than your voice. And you should not have to walk toward Venrathil carrying only grief.”

“I have plenty. It travels well.”

“Unfortunately.”

Mhira set down a packet of dried mint. “There is Áthir’s harp.”

I turned slowly.

Mhira said, “The small harp. The travel harp. He kept it wrapped in the study after your grandmother died. I haven’t heard him play it in years.”

“I saw it in his study,” I said. “It was on a shelf by his bed.”

Bran returned with a sack of winter apples and stopped in the doorway. “The harp?”

I nodded. “Yes, Áthir’s harp.”

His face changed.

For a moment, I saw not Bran of the tavern, gruff and practical and always suspicious of sentiment. I saw a younger man by the fire, listening to my grandfather play while snow pressed against the shutters.

“He played it when Lírael died,” Bran said quietly.

My grandmother’s name sounded strange in his mouth. Unexpected. Like finding a flower pressed in a ledger. I had forgotten that he knew her.

“He played it three nights,” Bran continued. “He sat in that secret room and played until the snow stopped.”

The Watcher’s House.

“I can’t take his harp,” I said.

Mhira looked at me then. “He no longer needs it.”

“It was his.”

“And you are his.”

The words struck so sharply I had to grip the table.

His line.

His unfinished work.

His stubbornness, perhaps. His mistakes. His songs.

His love for a valley and a people who did not understand what had been sacrificed for them.

“I left my lute below,” I said. “I couldn’t even hold on to that.”

Nerion rose from beside the hearth and crossed to me. His blue eyes held mine.

“We’ll stop for the harp before we leave,” Thalen said. “I’ll need my gear as well.”

Rhyden looked at Nerion. “He’ll remind you.”

Nerion had gone very still. His eyes were silver now. Remembering his son, Ethárion.

I thought of my lute below the stone. I thought grief might rise and swallow me. Instead, something quieter came.

Permission. Nerion knew Ethárion better than anyone. He held his father’s spirit. And he gave his permission.

The harp did not feel like mine, and maybe that was merciful.

My lute had known my hands too well. It had answered habit, fear, defiance, and longing. It had followed me through taverns, roads, grief, and foolish songs sung for coins and supper. It had been my voice when I did not want to speak plainly.

The harp was Áthir’s. Precious. Loved. His.

Bran cleared his throat. “Will you be able to play it?”

“Yes.”

The inn stood damaged but holding. Kaldora watched with frightened eyes. Beneath it, a wound that could not be healed from this side. Somewhere in the deeper woods, an ancient gate stood closed because the paths beneath the world no longer remembered one another.

Beyond that, Venrathil waited with answers I was not ready to hear.

I had lost my lute beneath Falcon’s Perch.

I would carry Áthir’s harp toward the land of first songs.

Nerion would remain behind to hold the hearth.

Kynami would fly with me.

Thalen would be by my side.

It was not enough to make me brave, but it was enough to make me go.

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Note:

I will be taking a week (or so) off from Substack and writing in order to handle some things in real life.

Nothing monumental, but things that will make our lives better and easier.

I may send a Note or two, but I won’t be pushing myself to meet any writing or posting deadlines.

I know I may lose some followers and even subscribers. If so, I hope they will come back.

I will finish Songborne when I return.

I will begin posting a new story soon after I return.

Tuesday, June 9th, we find out about the next step for my husband’s back. This is a big day, and I would appreciate prayer.

I am so close to 600 followers. This may be bad timing on my part, but I am hoping to be in a better place mentally and physically at the end of this.

One of my goals is a better workspace - including a large brainstorming whiteboard. Maybe even a functioning printer, and enough open desk space to start drawing again.

We will be freeing ourselves from the boxes and filth that have taken over our lives, perhaps mirroring all of the deaths and losses in our family.

We will be creating healthier spaces for living - including places we can hang out with each other and play Switch games.

I think it is time to free ourselves from this oppressive darkness and weight that we have been living under.

Time to embrace life again.

And definitely, time to install air conditioning! At least window units.

If I have any energy at the end of the day, I will provide updates and goat reports.

I will be back before you know it.

Thank you for understanding.

Happy reading and writing to all!

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Reaching Out

We sat in the middle of an open field, huddled in a circle, where no one could hear our words or approach us without being seen. A Guatemalan missionary/pastor told us (15 U.S. students and one professor) of his struggle to minister in rural Guatemala.

“I formed Bible study and discipleship groups – only to have them disbanded by the threats of the government troops. Any private gatherings in homes, any work which might be considered Marxist—like, showing concern for the poor, helping the refugees, the sick, the hungry—might incur the misinterpretation and wrath of the military intelligence and death squads. Many of the men and boys of my congregation fled to the mountains. They were labeled as Marxist guerillas because they responded to the gospel…. The government targeted indigenous—I’m going to change subjects now—the children enjoy the songs and stories we teach them…”

He did not vary the pace or rhythm of his words. In my peripheral vision, I saw a man slowly circle our group and head back toward the street. When the intruder was well beyond hearing range, the pastor apologized, saying, “Some men have been following me recently. I have received several threats on my life… That man is one of the ones watching me—if he had overheard our conversation, your group would have fallen under suspicion and they would have “questioned” me—please, be careful who you talk to and what you say…as visitors, you should be safe, but those you associate with may not be…”

Prior to our arrival in Guatemala, we had read accounts of priests and lay workers being tortured and killed, but with the “democratic” election of a civilian President, there had been hope that the ravaging of the population and countryside by the death squads and soldiers would cease. The pastor’s words indicated the continued prevalence of the “disappearances” (kidnappings and murders).

We talked with several other missionaries that day, some who had experienced no danger, some who had attempts made on their lives and friends martyred. As we walked home late that afternoon, several of us were followed. We never felt completely safe again. When we ventured out, we varied our paths and watched what we said to whom.

There have been major political changes in Central America since my return to the United States, but the fundamental situation is still the same. The impression that the recent “democratization” of the region achieved peace is misleading, for while the names and parties have changed, the underlying, historic, cultural, political, and socio-economic causes of the turmoil and violence remain entrenched.

While it is impossible to address the full spectrum of the complex problems of the region, the Central Americans themselves modeled the solution to one of the most basic factors, that of dehumanization. Long years of poverty, dependency, military upheaval, political corruption, outside intervention and exploitation have served to undermine their sense of the inherent value of humanity. The process of dehumanization affects all socio-economic levels, from the homeless to political and military leaders.

A village snapshot

Roberto, an eight-year-old Guatemalan orphan, spent most of this time in the streets selling his services as a tour guide and storyteller. One day, I asked him about himself. He was born in an Indigenous village on a mountain, where his father and brothers farmed plots of land far up the slopes. In words almost too soft to distinguish he told me that his parents and brothers were dead.

Guerrilla forces took refuge in the woods and uncultivated land at the top of the mountain. The government soldiers, in order to inhibit the resupply of the rebel forces, gathered the villagers into the local church, then shelled and burned the church, machine gunning those who escaped. Roberto, only six-years-old at the time, survived the purge by hiding in the woods. Church workers later took him to a local orphanage.

Roberto’s story is not unique. In the late 1970s and early 1980s over 50,000 native people were massacred and another 40,000 were relocated to military “villages.” While the process of genocide has slowed somewhat, its progress has been steady to the present, leaving over 125,000 indigenous children orphaned.

Christians in Central America struggle to bring Christ’s healing to these lives. This calls for creative ministries which help alleviate the immediate suffering through health care, food cooperatives, advocacy, etc. Only then can they focus on restoring some sense of self-worth. In my work with a family in rural Honduras, I found that even a relatively meager knowledge of Jesus Christ empowered them to look beyond their poverty to helping those in greater need.

“How much further?” I wondered. At the top of a rise, we backed into a level spot in front of a small hut. I could see only three other huts in the village. As we walked to a 10-by-12-foot thatch hut, Suyapa, local director of the Christian development organization with which I was temporarily assigned, assured me, “This is a special family.” Peering in the doorway, I saw a rough-hewn table, three hammocks slung from the ceiling and a cook “stove” molded into the dirt floor in a far corner. Chickens, piglets, large cockroaches, and small children mingled freely on the floor.

The village had no warning of my arrival. Suyapa greeted them and asked if I could live and work with them. She made arrangements for meals and a hammock for me to sleep in, then she climbed back into the Land-Cruiser and drove off—leaving the villagers and me staring shyly at one another.

They offered me a small bowl of beans. While I ate, the parents and the eldest son stood watching me. Not realizing that I spoke Spanish, they began talking, “What are we going to do with her? She doesn’t know how we live. She won’t be able to eat our food or sleep in a hammock. She’s a gringa. What are we going to do with her?”

Gradually, I adapted to their daily routine. I lived in the main (20’ by 25’ adobe) hut, where I woke at 4:30 every morning to the sound of Reubenia (8-year-old youngest daughter of the primary family) washing and grinding the corn for the day’s tortillas.

Around 5:00, the older girls and women would rise, collect the dirty clothes and trek down to the natural spring, the villagers only water source. There we knelt in the shallow runoff and kneaded the clothes against the rocks worn flat by years of laundry.

We then bathed ourselves, filled the various containers with water upstream and hiked the mile uphill to the huts. In the still-dark dawn we hung the clean clothes on the tree branches. After a small breakfast of beans and tortillas, we took down the now dry (110 degree sun-baked) laundry, before heading to the hammock weaving hut to join the men of the village for five hours of weaving.

After a brief lunch, we returned to the “factory” for another five or six hours of weaving. In the early evening, we sat on logs in front of the main hut for more tortillas, rice, and beans. We then worked for about three hours weaving the rope apparatus by which the hammocks are hung. At about 10:00 we all adjourned to our hammocks for the night.

Jose, the father, said a prayer, crossed himself, and blew out the make-shift oil lamp. While the hammocks swung gently to capture any tiny cooling of air, we shared openly about our feelings and thoughts.

We spoke of the inaccessibility of education, the war in Nicaragua, the poverty in Honduras and the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in daily life. The only variation to this routine came on Sundays, when we did not work—we ate, talked, and did very little else.

My first Sunday morning in the village, as I walked down the parched path which connected the two huts, I heard Jorge (22-year-old youngest son) singing a chorus which sounded familiar. He stopped singing as I approached.

“What were you singing? I asked.

“’Quien eres tu?’—it is a song they sing in the church,” he answered.

“Where did you learn it? Have you been to church?”

“No, it is too far away to attend, but sometimes we hear Mass on the radio.”

He headed into the hut, still speaking, “I have two books of choruses….”

While he hunted the books, I retrieved my mandolin. For the next hour or so, Jorge taught me his favorite Catholic choruses. The rest of the family gathered around and joined in. They revealed their understanding of God and of the Christian service as they explained the meaning of the various lyrics.

Hungry for the Word

Another Sunday, as we relaxed in our hammocks, I pulled out my Spanish Bible.

After a while, Jorge asked, “What are you reading?”

“The Bible,” I answered.

“In Spanish?”

“Yes.”

Rita perked up and asked excitedly, “Could you read it to us?”

“Yes, any particular passage?”

“Jesus tells a story about a Samaritan….” After paraphrasing the passage she asked, “Could you read it?”

I turned to Luke 10 and read it to them.

“I’ve never read from a Bible before,” Jorge said. “Could I read it?”

I handed him the Bible. He found the parable of the prodigal son and haltingly began to read aloud. When he finished, he asked if he could borrow the Bible for the afternoon. For the next three of four hours he sat in the back corner of the hut on a sack of corn and read the Bible.

Suyapa’s early assurance proved true. They were indeed a special family who loved Christ and served Him according to and beyond their means.

After we completed our projects in Honduras, we flew to Managua, Nicaragua, where we met with other Christians.

In Nicaragua, we experienced the healing power of forgiveness and reconciliation. We learned the value of standing with other Christians in unity.

For the weeks prior to Palm Sunday, we had worked in isolated rural villages in Northern Nicaragua—about five miles from the front lines of the, then active, Contra War. We lived a safe distance away—but the sons and daughters of the people we stayed with did not.

Some of us will never forget the night when the Contras raided the electrical plant north of the village. And the innocent question of a little boy asking for his older brother or the wailing response of his sister “He’s in a box.” We will never forget their short, stocky mother, her hands covering her face, her body shaking with sobs and cries to God. The soldiers had brought her dead son in earlier that morning.

These images haunted our minds as we entered the Nicaraguan Church on Palm Sunday. We were painfully aware of our identity as citizens of the United States. We knew that we were very different from the people of the congregation. White, wealthy (by their standards), English-speaking, Protestant: we represented power and prosperity in the face of their struggle for survival.

The service began with songs or praise and worship. Then came the “Passing of the Peace”—a time to greet one another and to unite in God’s love. We held back, not wanting to invade their peace, but soon tears streamed down our faces as person after person came to us—to hug us, to welcome us, to share their gracious love with us. One by one, the entire congregation came. In their warm welcome, we caught a glimpse of God’s grace and reconciliation.

That evening, in the midst of the Nicaraguan Church, God’s presence was very real, His love very tangible. We could reach out and grasp His hands. We could reach out and hug his peace and joy. God’s love and forgiveness surrounded us as we united with our Nicaraguan brothers and sisters in Christ.

--The Asbury Herald, Fall, 1994