Chapter 3: The Thread That Tangles

The tide erased their path within minutes, silencing the marsh behind them with a sigh, as if the land itself was trying to forget. The girl kept glancing over her shoulder, but the boy never did. Whatever he'd seen in the hut, whatever he'd spoken into the glyphs, had changed the set of his shoulders.

They made camp beneath a leaning willow, its branches trailing into the black water like fingers seeking something lost. No fire. Only the faint green glow of lichen scraped from drowned stones and smeared into a shallow bowl for light.

"Did the jar take anything from you?" she asked as they sat, backs to a mossy rock.

He didn't answer for a while. Then, softly: "Only what I let it."

She turned to him. "And what was that?"

He looked down at his hands. "The name of my brother."

Silence, save for the croak of frogs that had long since learned to mimic weeping.

She didn't ask more. Not that night.

By morning, fog lay heavy across the marshlands like wet cloth, and the willow had wept itself bare. They moved quickly, following a trail of standing stones that curved in a wide arc east of Khaim. The stones bore no markings now, but once they might have edges worn to nothing, as if memory itself had grown too tired to keep them sharp.

At the fifth stone, the boy paused. "This is where the Dreyg won't cross."

"Why?" the girl asked.

He knelt, brushing away the moss. Beneath was a carving. A circle. Thorns. And at its center, an eye.

"Because something older lives on this side," he said. "Something that doesn't forget."

A breeze stirred the reeds, and for a moment, she thought she heard humming high, tuneless, like wind through bone flutes.

They pressed on.

By midday, the fog had lifted enough to reveal the ruins of a shrine, swallowed half by water and vine. A weathered statue stood in its heart headless, arms broken, its belly hollowed out into a basin.

The girl walked to it. "Is this Vyeth-born?"

"No," the boy said. "Older. From the Sūmgar texts. One of the First Witnesses."

She leaned over the basin. Inside were coins some modern, some impossibly old and one scrap of what looked like skin. Not human. Not recent.

The boy turned away. "This is a memory anchor. People came here to leave their griefs."

The girl frowned. "So they wouldn't carry them?"

He nodded. "Or so something else would."

Suddenly, the water around the shrine rippled.

The girl stepped back.

A woman rose from the basin. She was made of water and shadow, her face veiled in strands of wet hair. Where her eyes should've been, twin fish swam in lazy circles. Her mouth did not move, but her voice echoed as if spoken into the back of one's skull.

"You carry a name that stains the air," she said.

The boy stepped forward. "We do not ask for passage. Only knowledge."

"Then offer memory," the figure said. "Or bleed."

The girl opened her mouth to protest, but the boy was already drawing a small knife. Without ceremony, he nicked the edge of his palm and let three drops fall into the basin.

The water woman drank them with her shadow mouth, and the fish in her eye-sockets vanished.

"Ask."

The boy's voice was hard. "Who sent the Mourning Kin?"

The shrine darkened, light swallowed by memory not their own. Visions flickered across the crumbling walls a council of faceless ones robed in moth-skin, seated beneath a ruined sky; a map inked in veins; a crown made of broken oaths.

Then the voice came again.

"Those who would make grief a weapon. The Ashwrights of Vashrun. The ones who sleep in waking bodies."

He staggered.

The girl caught him. "What does that mean?"

But the water woman was gone, the basin now dry as old bone. The statue cracked down its middle, and the shrine exhaled a final breath of fog before falling silent again.

They walked for hours afterward, neither speaking.

Only when they reached the edge of the marsh where dry land began and the black pines of the Kharûl forest loomed did the girl break the silence.

"Who are the Ashwrights?"

He looked out toward the dark trees. "They are what's left of a kingdom that refused to die."

She shivered. "And what do they want?"

He smiled, but it was not kind. "To make sure no one forgets them. Ever."

They stepped beneath the branches, where the air changed colder, stiller. From deep in the woods, a bell rang once.

Not a warning. A welcome.

The forest had been waiting.