The sun over Lera rose slow and golden, pouring honeyed light along the cobbled paths and warming thatch until the last thin breaths of night loosened and fled. In the weeks after Silas's birth, the village seemed to let out a long-held breath. Stiff shoulders softened. Quiet prayers became easy laughter. The memory of that lightning-split night dulled at the edges, retold by hearths and over fences until it sat lighter in the mouth, a story people could carry without flinching.
Mara, hollowed by pain and fear, filled back in. Her smile returned shyly at first, as if it might crack if rushed, and then, by slow degrees, it stayed. She wore her exhaustion like a crown—proof, not burden. Daren hardly left her side. He moved around her like a shield, always watchful even when his hands were soft, as if the same shadows that had leaned toward their son's first cry might lean again if he dared blink. Yet when he held the boy, something guarded in him gave way. People saw it—how his eyes went tender, unfamiliar, as if a door in him had opened and would not shut.
The villagers came.
They came with bread still warm, steam curling off the crust like breath on cold air. With hand-stitched cloths that carried a faint whisper of lavender and mothroot. With toys smoothed by careful hands, with broth in clay bowls passed palm to palm so no one bore the heat alone. They called Silas a sign. A gift. A quiet promise that even after hard winters, light remembered the way back.
They passed him from arm to arm, the wool of his swaddling rough against calloused palms, his warmth a small, living coal. He watched faces calmly, cooing up at strangers with a patience that made them blink. His eyes—Black caught in still water—held, unblinking. Some whispered about them—too still, too sharp, too knowing. But doubt weakened when he smiled, and the room felt as if frost had melted off branches all at once.
"Like frost-kissed mirrors," the midwife murmured, the boy tucked against her thin chest. "But warm. Strange, yes. Not cursed."
No one argued.
Time went on. Days slid into months with the clean certainty of a river finding its bed. The winter that followed was kind. Spring came fat and green. Wolves stayed far in the deep trees. The river sang loud with meltwater. Harvests filled cellars. Lera breathed—not loudly, but steady.
By his third year, Silas was a blur of bare feet and laughter. He chased butterflies in zigzags through the fields and hurled himself into puddles until mud clung to him like another skin. His laughter—high and bright—flit through the hedges and up the trunks of trees, skipping like stones across the stream.
The children loved him.
Tomas, the baker's boy, handed over hot bread ends and showed him how to teeter on one foot atop fence rails until the two of them toppled backwards into the grass. Linna—with wild curls and knees always grass-stained—announced between giggles that she would marry him someday, and if anyone laughed, she threatened them with a stick-sword. They made forts from wet earth and poor plans, shouted nonsense spells that sent sparrows exploding from hedges, and fought with sticks until their arms ached and the world tasted of iron and breath.
Even older children let him trail them—not because they pitied him, but because he listened like a secret was being told. When Kael, the miller's son, whispered about the Ghost Tree that only appeared in dreams, Silas didn't scoff. He leaned in, eyes wide and still, capturing each word as if words could slip away if not held carefully. In Hunters and Beasts, he always chose the beast. He threw himself into it—growling, bounding, rolling in dirt until even the bravest flinched and birds lifted in a sudden, startled wave.
His imagination burned bright. Others came close for the heat.
Evenings, when the sun bled behind the hills and shadows unrolled across rooftops, Mara called him home. He returned streaked with soil and nettle welts, burrs caught in his curls, arms swinging with stories that tumbled out before he could get them all lined up.
As she picked leaves from his hair, fingers gentle, she asked, "Did the beast win today?"
"Almost," he said, grinning, cheeks flushed. "But Linna's sword was faster."
She laughed low and set a basin steaming, sage and soaproot turning the water soft on the skin. She scrubbed behind his ears and hummed lullabies that had outlived the mouths that made them. Lavender brushed his temples. Wool wrapped him deep. He fell asleep with one hand stretched toward the slice of sky through the window, breath slowing, steady.
Daren often stood in the doorway, quiet as a carving. He worked with a knife in those hours—shaving, smoothing. He made Silas a wooden horse, a slingshot he could only use with his father near, and on his fifth birthday, a knife. The blade was dull; the handle fit to small fingers and etched with their family mark—a crescent moon above a jagged ridge. Silas wore it like truth. Pride lifted his chest whenever other boys' eyes went to it.
Those were years of peace.
The woods went lush in spring; the stream flashed silver with trout. Bread rose in steady loaves. Lanterns glowed against early dark. Silas fitted himself to that rhythm as if he had been made to match it. He learned to milk a goat with patient hands, to patch a net so fish could not laugh at holes, to spot a nest without sending the mother panicked into the air. He carried baskets twice his size for old Ferra and climbed trees taller than the granary. Once, he fell. Bone snapped. Pain sang up his arm like a struck wire. He wore the splint like a band of honor. That night, Daren sat beside him in the dark, head bowed, tears slipping silent onto hot skin, as if some old, tight thing in him couldn't bear the thought of what else might break.
By firelight, Mara told him stories: kings who set down crowns to follow stubborn stars; wolves who loved the moon too much to bite it; shepherds who found gods by accident in caves and had to pretend it was on purpose. Silas drank them like broth in winter, eyes wide.
"Do stars remember who they were?" he asked, the words heavy with sleep.
"Maybe they do," she whispered, brushing his hair back. "Maybe remembering is what keeps them burning."
People started calling him sun-boy. Golden child. He warmed rooms by stepping into them. Even sour elders softened in his wake, unsure why.
At Spring Festival he wore a blue tunic Mara had sewn with neat stitches and ribbons that chased him when he danced. Flour dusted his nose as he helped Tomas knead dough for sweetcakes. He rode Daren's shoulders while fiddlers played and waved like a prince who belonged to everyone.
No one spoke, then, of the windless night he was born. Of fire that gave light without heat. Time had smoothed those edges. Light was what remained.
The summer after his seventh name-day, a trader came from the east, his stall a bright confusion—dyed scarves bright as berries, bronze trinkets that caught the sun, a box of small animals polished by time and thumbs.
Silas stood beside that box for a long while, hands behind his back, eyes moving slow over each shape as if naming them inside. When the trader asked which he liked best, Silas touched one without hesitating—the fox mid-leap, sleek, its bead eyes quick.
He kept it close. He whispered to it when he thought no one heard. It sat on the table by his bed each night, still as if listening.
---
Then came the dream.
Autumn had only just bit the edges of leaves, turning orchards red and gold. The air held a thin knife of cold that made apples taste sharper.
Silas woke screaming.
Not the quick, startle kind. A long, torn sound, too big for his chest, that snapped Daren upright before his mind could catch up. He was at the door with his hand on the latch before he knew he had moved.
Silas sat upright, eyes pale with fear, too wide. He clutched the fox so hard its tail cracked with a small splintering pop. His body shook. Breath came fast and thin. Heat rolled off him under Mara's palms like iron left in noon sun.
She dropped to her knees by the bed, smoothing sweat-plastered curls from his forehead. "Silas," she whispered, voice low so as not to break the air. "What did you see?"
He didn't answer at once. His eyes were fixed past her, unfocused, as if something still stood there in the wall he could see and they could not. When he spoke, the words were thin, brittle. "Cold," he said. "Just… cold."
She gathered him in, his heart hammering hard against her ribs, his skin damp beneath her hands.
From the doorway, Daren watched the corners of the room, the stretch of shadow drawn long by the hearth. Not the boy.
The dark.
Silas slept into late morning, curled around the fox. One of its bead eyes gleamed in the pale light as if it, too, remembered and could not speak.
His laughter came back in the following days, but it had changed. Softer. Slower. As if something in him held a little back. He still ran, still built forts and made bird-scarers from sticks and string, but sometimes he would stop mid-game, mid-smile, head cocked, listening.
"Do you hear something?" Linna asked, bare feet cold on the dirt beside him.
"Not sound," he said. "Stillness. Loud."
He set the fox in his palm and walked away until even the silence let him go.
Mara found new marks on the fox in the lamplight—tiny, fine lines: small moons in their phases, scattered dots, threads like roads without names. One night, fingers tracing them, she asked, "What are these?"
"Places," Silas said. "From dreams."
"You remember them?"
"Not always." He frowned, as if the effort hurt. "Sometimes my hands do."
Later, when the house was quiet and Silas lay breathing slow, Daren set his palm on the fox and whispered a blessing he had learned for battlefields. Old words meant to ease the going after a fight, bent now toward keeping what he loved in place.
Life in Lera kept on.
Lanterns burned. Bread rose. Winters came kind. Wolves kept to their far places. But at dusk, now and then, when shadows reached long over the hills and wind went still, someone would pause at their doorway and feel it—a hush, a small, careful gap in sound.
As if something unseen were passing through and the world chose not to startle it.
Silas sometimes stood alone in a field at those hours, the fox in his hand, looking up. Not with wonder.
With recognition.
The fox was always with him. It rode in the crook of his elbow, sat beside his plate, kept its place at his pillow. It seemed a simple thing, polished wood and beads and care. And yet at times, its small curves looked like they had been carved from more than wood, as if someone had found a piece of night and given it shape to keep within reach.