Chapter Two: The Ones Who Bury Fire
Part Three — "The Last Time We Spoke Her Name"
The sky didn't cry. It never did when it should've.
Even as the royal ship roared overhead and pulled its shadow back toward Celestis Veil, the heavens above the cliffs remained painfully blue—too clean, too open, too cruel. Kaelen and Yolti stood alone again, the grave they'd made already half-faded beneath windblown ash.
They didn't speak.
Not yet. Not while the silence still echoed with her voice.
A scorched plank of Solara's hut had fallen into the sea hours ago. It still drifted just off the rocks below, smoldering like a floating cinder in a memory that wouldn't die.
Kaelen knelt.
He pressed two fingers to the edge of the broken scarf—Solara's scarf—now tied around a crooked stick they had shoved into the ground as a makeshift grave marker. He didn't know the proper rites. They hadn't taught that in the Lyceum yet. But he remembered how she laughed when she wore it. He remembered how Zephryn blushed when she wrapped it around him.
So he did the only thing he could.
He tore it in two.
Half for the grave. Half for himself.
"…You think she saw us?" Yolti whispered.
Kaelen didn't answer.
"She used to say the stars could remember," she went on, her voice brittle. "That even if no one said your name, the hum would hold it. Somewhere. In the folds between the world."
Kaelen nodded, but his eyes stayed locked on the horizon.
"Then maybe," he said slowly, "she won't be erased."
They sat beside the grave until the wind began to carry dusk across the water. The cliffs changed color. The birds stopped circling. The smoke vanished. But the weight didn't.
Eventually, Kaelen stood.
"We have to go."
"Back to the Lyceum?"
He shook his head. "To the other grave."
Yolti's face tensed.
They hadn't spoken of his name aloud since the fire.
Zephryn.
The boy who was never found.
The pulse that should've never been silenced.
They left the cliff edge in silence and walked the coastline until the terrain curved into a narrow grove of embergrass and rootstone. Hidden between two jutting ridges was the place Solara had once called "the edge of the hum"—a quiet bluff where she said the world felt thinner. Lighter.
Zephryn used to train here. Alone. He didn't talk much when he did. Just cast sparks into the air, again and again, trying to make something beautiful happen. The glyphs never stuck. But the way he moved—it always felt like a song struggling to be remembered.
Now, only a few burn marks remained on the rock.
Kaelen knelt again. Yolti helped him shape a second grave.
No body.
No ash.
Just a grave of stone and memory.
When they were done, Kaelen took the other half of Solara's scarf and tied it around the base of the center rock.
Then he whispered, "I swear…"
Yolti watched his hands tremble.
"I swear I won't forget you," he said, voice cracking. "And I swear I won't let the Choir take this from us. From me. I don't care what they remember or erase. I know what I saw. I know what I lost."
He stood suddenly, anger pulsing in his steps as he faced the rising wind.
"They want to act like she never existed? Like he never existed? Like this place was just some empty ruin? Fine. Let them lie. But I'm gonna become strong enough that they'll never silence me again."
Yolti wiped at her eyes. "And if you forget?"
Kaelen smiled bitterly. "You'll remind me."
She nodded. "Every day."
They started to walk back toward the bikes—but Kaelen paused.
Something shimmered faintly near the rock they had just left. A flicker in the wind. Almost like a pulse—too faint to track, but not entirely gone.
He turned his head fast—but the shimmer was gone.
"What is it?" Yolti asked.
"…Nothing," Kaelen murmured. "Just… wind tricks."
He turned again, this time without hesitation.
They both climbed onto the pulsebike.
And just before they rode away, the last ray of sunlight caught the edge of the rock they'd carved for Zephryn—revealing something Kaelen hadn't seen before.
Etched in faint, half-burned glyph lines:
"When the hum breaks again…
Tell the silence I'm coming."
But they were already gone.