> Some truths stay buried for a reason.
But ash does not forget the shape of the flame.
---
The morning broke with a hush.
Mist rolled low over the hills outside Liora's window, and the air carried that rare kind of silence — the kind that followed something violent. Or that waited for something worse.
Kael sat on the edge of the bed, shirtless still, though his wounds had been cleaned and redressed. He moved stiffly, but not with pain — with discipline. Every motion precise. No wasted effort. Like a soldier who no longer had a war but couldn't stop marching anyway.
Liora handed him a small bowl of porridge.
He stared at it.
"Don't worry," she said dryly. "I didn't poison it."
He said nothing.
She sighed, sitting across from him again, just like the night before.
"I don't usually take in strangers," she admitted. "But I figured the woods weren't the kind of place to die."
Kael glanced out the window. "You shouldn't live so close to them."
"Why?"
He didn't answer.
"Right," she murmured, "secrets and silence."
Kael took a spoonful of the porridge. He chewed like a man who had forgotten how to enjoy food.
"You talk in your sleep," she said softly.
That made him pause.
Liora leaned forward just slightly. "Last night. You kept saying one name."
He met her eyes.
She didn't look afraid — just curious. Almost… concerned.
"Is she someone you lost?" she asked.
Kael looked down at the porridge again. "She's someone I let burn."
---
Outside, the village of Eiran Hollow was already waking.
Blacksmiths hammered steel. Children darted through alleyways. Bakers lit fires under iron stoves. But no one noticed the mark in the trees — a blackened ring, almost invisible, where the mist curled inward unnaturally.
Liora did.
She was gathering herbs from the edge of the forest when she saw it.
A perfect circle. Burnt into the grass. Just where Kael had been lying.
She stepped closer, knelt.
The ground felt… wrong. Cold, but not like shade — like something had drained the warmth from it. She reached out, touched the edge of the circle, and her skin prickled.
"You shouldn't be near that."
Liora turned. Kael stood in the path, wearing the spare cloak she'd given him. He looked different in the daylight — not quite human, but not monstrous either. Just… dimmed, like a painting left out in the rain.
"You made this?" she asked.
He didn't deny it.
"What are you?"
A pause.
Kael took a step closer. Then another.
"I don't know anymore."
---
That night, Liora found an old journal hidden beneath the hearthstone. Her mother's handwriting.
She hadn't opened it in years.
But something about Kael — the circle, the burn in the earth, the way he'd looked at her when she asked his name — it stirred something deeper.
As she flipped through the pages, one entry caught her eye:
> There are names that shouldn't be spoken aloud.
Some still listen.
Some still answer.
And one wears a face of ash and fire, with a voice like smoke and stone…
Liora's hands shook.
She closed the book.
And in the silence of her cottage, she finally let herself whisper the thought she'd been holding back since she dragged him from the woods.
> "What have I brought into my home