The year after Thomas's death was colder than the last, and not because of the weather. Though spring
returned to the valley and the sheep bleated as they always had, the air inside Jack's home never warmed. It
settled in the walls—quiet, bitter, unspoken.
Jack moved through the days like a guest in his own body. He completed his chores, but slowly. He
answered his mother, but faintly. His father barely spoke. After Thomas, the man had become something
else—a working statue. Tools were fixed, fences mended, wool bundled and bagged, but Jack could tell that
the man behind the hands had vanished. When he looked at Jack, it was with the same emptiness he gave
the stones in the field.
Their mother fared no better. She clung to routine like a widow clings to mourning cloth. Every morning she
cleaned. Every evening she prayed. Her mutterings now included fragments of old words—the kind only
spoken by grandmothers or whispered behind closed shutters. Sometimes Jack caught names he didn't
recognize, woven in with invocations to saints. At night, she placed sprigs of dried herbs along the
windowsills and scratched little chalk markings on the hearthstone.
Jack didn't ask what they meant. He just watched.
He spent more time outdoors than in. The house felt too small now, its walls heavy with memory. Outside,
the sky at least still moved. The grass did not remember. The creek, though quieter now without Thomas
splashing through it, still ran. Jack followed it downstream many mornings, walking with no destination, just
to hear something that didn't blame him.
But the woods—those were different.
The trees were older than the village. They whispered in ways the wind shouldn't allow, bending their limbs
toward Jack as if trying to speak. He'd sit near the roots of the yew trees, sketching shapes in the dirt—
circles, lines, runes he didn't fully understand. He never learned them. They simply came. His fingers itched
to draw them.
That was where Eluna came most often.
She never called out to him. Never asked him to follow. She would simply appear—at the edge of the grove
or beneath a crooked tree, watching. She looked no older than Jack, though there was something ancient in
her stillness. She smiled sometimes, but rarely. He trusted her. Not because of any word she'd said, but
because when she stood nearby, the ache in his chest lessened.
Sometimes they sat together for hours. She would hum soft melodies, wordless and haunting. Jack would
listen, head tilted toward her like a flower to the sun. Once, he reached for her hand, and when their fingers
touched, the warmth that spread through him nearly made him cry.
He asked her once, "Are you a spirit?"
She blinked slowly. "No."