Night fell like a slow curtain over Moonshard Ridge, not the sudden snap of a city shutter but a careful, deliberate lowering. The sun bled away behind the silver pines in a soft, private manner; the ridgeline kept the last streaks of gold as if hoarding a small, consoling secret. The village settled: shutters clicked, smoke columns thinned, and the distant bell of the branch sanctuary rang thrice, a sound that drifted in the chest like a remembered lullaby.
The orphanage glowed in scattered pools. Lanterns hung from eaves and beams, their paper skins trembling with a mild, steady breath. The courtyard's flagstones were warm from the day; the mango tree's leaves at the back whispered with a faint, dry rustle. The Echo Stone at the small altar in the chapel sent up a soft, contented hum—only a whisper of Aether tonight, like a sleeping thing turning in its nest. The hum threaded through the walls and into the rooms, lending the entire house the feeling of being breathed into by something larger than grief or joy.
Inside the boys' dormitory, the air sat heavy with the kinds of things that only happen the night before a change. There was a pile of wrapped bundles by the door—Madam Lin had put together the tidy, careful packet of clothes and small comforts he would be allowed to take to the Academy: a coarse grey robe with a clever hidden pocket, a strip of cloth for a headband, a small oil lamp with its glass snug and safe. The parcels smelled of lavender, soap, and the faint tang of mended seams—scented proof that someone had stitched hope into cloth.
By custom the orphanage was quiet during the hour before the evening meal, but tonight the quiet had an electricity. The room hummed not with Aether but with small talk held together by the thread of impending parting: children trading small jokes like talismans, voices pitched soft to keep the moment from cracking into something loud and irretrievable.
Bai Yinfeng sat cross-legged on his thin pallet, his Echo Crystal shard cupped in one hand like an ordinary pebble. His skeletons lay arrayed on the floor like a scatter of odd toys—the largest propped against the pallet's leg, two smaller ones reclining like bored sentinels. The primary skeleton's jaw clicked softly whenever Bai tapped the shard, as if the bones themselves enjoyed the sound. Bai watched the silence of the room the way one watches waves: careful for sudden turns.
Gao shuffled near the door, barefoot and fidgety. His freckles were a mottled map in the lantern light; his hands never stopped, eager and awkward. Mei sat on the floor, her long hair loose tonight, the braid she usually kept in place undone so that its weight made her shoulders slope. She had spent the afternoon helping Madam Lin with the pots, and now the smudge of flour on her cheek glowed like a badge of industrious courage. The other children clustered in small groups, each face sharpened by the amber light: small faces in which the worry and the eager shine mixed to form a kind of fierce tenderness.
Madam Lin moved between them like a slow, efficient warmth. Her hair was pulled into a loose knot; her hands smelled of tea and mending thread. She had arranged the supper with care: steaming bowls of millet porridge, a small plate of preserved plums, a few dumplings browned at the edges by the iron pan. She placed the food on a low table and looked over the faces. Her eyes were soft but clear, flattened by a kindness that had nothing to dramatize itself with.
"Eat," she said in that voice of hers that could both chide and soothe. "You will need your strength tomorrow. And mind you, Bai Yinfeng, do not go teaching the skeletons to frighten the Academy masters—"
Bai grinned and raised a hand in mock solemnity. "Madam Lin," he said, "I promise only tasteful mischief. No ruined reputations—only temporary reputations."
Two of the older matrons—Auntie Rui and Auntie Shan—sat near the hearth sewing lantern covers and mending sleeves in a practiced rhythm. They exchanged looks that were part amusement, part a maternal grief that had no sharpened edges. Auntie Rui reached out to smooth Mei's hair and then, with an almost conspiratorial softness, tucked a dumpling within reach. "Take two," she murmured. "You'll need them to keep your strength."
The first bowl moved silently—careful hands passing plates, quiet thanks. There was a ritual to this evening: not the ceremony of the temple but the private rites of the household. Each child had a small moment to say something aloud if they wished; Madam Lin wanted them to speak, not to make a speech required, but to let the small things out before the doorway closed for a long time.
Gao, who could be loud when he wished, sat with his head bent and his fists clenched beneath the table. For a moment he said nothing. Then, abruptly, like a gust from the ridge, he flung his head up.
"You'll write to us," he said, voice rougher than jokes ever made it. "You'll send the Academy scraps—tell about the roofs, the fights, if their dumplings have extra grease. Don't you dare forget us."
Bai leaned back and let out a theatrical gasp. "Gao, I would never—" then he was smiling, softening the edge of the jest. "You'll have first dibs on any Academy gossip, yes? I will personally ensure their most embarrassing secrets are embroidered into the school banners."
Gao half-laughed, half-snatched a dumpling and bit hard. The sound that came from him was in between a laugh and a snarl—affection disguised as anger. He shoved a dumpling at Mei with the blunt generosity of someone who did not know how else to be kind.
Mei took it, fingers trembling a little, and set it aside. "You be careful," she said, quiet and plain. "Don't—don't try to make them laugh if it will be dangerous. Promise me."
Bai looked at her—at the long curve of her cheek, at the way her eyes dimmed with worry—and for a brief second the lantern's light showed something like a grown thought in his face. He had no illusions of being a hero. He had a skeleton and a tongue and a terrible talent for making mischief. Danger was a word for other people; his life had been the long improvisation of days where laughter filled the gaps. But it was possible that the Academy wanted something else from him. Perhaps they would ask him to rip the hearts out of beasts and glue courage into his ribs. He tasted that possibility in the air like copper and decided, as children sometimes decide, that he would face what came with his grin undulled.
"I promise," he heard himself say. It was both a promise and a small bargaining with a fear he refused to name.
Madam Lin's hand came to his shoulder. It rested there as if to remind him that promises made in warmth could be held to. "You be sensible," she said, and there was no scold in it—only the weather-worn counsel of someone who had seen good boys go and return altered. "And listen to your masters. There are kind ones. There are hard ones. Learn from both. But do not lose what you are."
"What I am?" Bai echoed, immediately making an exaggerated bow. "A joke-wielder and skeleton whisperer?"
Madam Lin's mouth twitched. "A child who can make a room warm."
That was all. It was everything.
When the bowls were light and the last crumbs cleared away, the children drew closer. This was the hour for small things: secret games, a recital of bravado, the telling of stories that had no interest in being true in the way of legends—only true in the way of being remembered. The boys whispered dares. Mei produced an old, frayed embroidered handkerchief and dared Bai to perform a dramatic farewell to it. He obliged by delivering an impromptu eulogy for the handkerchief as though it were a fallen general, complete with clumsy military gestures that made everyone laugh until there were tears in their eyes.
Then, as the laughter settled, a quieter game began: each person spoke the smallest, truest thing they wanted the others to remember—one line, not to be broken into speeches. It was a child's liturgy: brief, resistant to grandness, honest because it had to be.
Mei said first. "Remember my braid," she said simply. "One day I will braid your hair if you ask."
Gao's entry was a prickly thing, "Don't take my boots," and a squeeze of the arm that read, underneath the sudden roughness, as love.
A shy boy at the far mattress—Tian, whom no one often noticed—mumbled, "Look for stars on the way, Bai. If you see a broken one, think of us." It was the kind of thing that made the room press close together to hear.
At last they turned to Bai. He could have made a grand thing out of it, a proclamation of intent, an acrobatic promise. The funny flicker in his eyes steadied. He looked at the small circle of faces, at the flicker in the matron's hand as she fitted the lamp with a new wick, at the skeletons who watched with patient, hollow eyes.
"Remember," he said, and his voice had the quiet smallness of footprints on a tile, "that you should always leave the last dumpling for a friend who forgot to eat." Then he grinned wide, made a dramatic bow, and finished less solemnly, "And—if you ever meet a skeleton who insists on hugging you, be sure to offer it pie. Pie is an excellent bribe."
There was the softest of chuckles. Mei rolled her eyes but the crease of her mouth was a smile that matched the whole of her face. Even Gao's posture eased into something like peace.
After the small confessions, Madam Lin gathered the children for a final ritual not unlike a blessing: she held the Echo Crystal shard for a moment to the small altar's hum and murmured a few words that were part prayer, part household benediction. The phrasing was not ornate but hung with a steady human faith: may roads be mild, may hunger be curable, may bones be light in winter. She touched each forehead with the cool of the shard, and each child felt the tiny tickle of Aether at their temples—a benediction that was practical and quiet.
When she reached Bai, she hesitated, then pressed the shard to his brow and said nothing that could not be said in a simple way. "Be brave," she whispered. "Return."
"Return," Bai echoed, and there it was again: the small, solemn business of promising to be met.
The evening grew even quieter. The matrons began to tidy; utensils clinked, footsteps softened. Lights dimmed except for the one lantern left burning near Bai's pallet—the one Auntie Rui had insisted on, muttering that a boy traveling the next dawn must not stumble on his way out of the world. The skeletons clustered near the pallet as if they understood the night's gravity and offered their quiet company in the fashion they knew best: immovable and reliable in their brittle way.
Bai lay back and stared at the plastered ceiling. In the glow from the lantern, the house's rafters carved slow shadows. He thought of the Academy like a place with its own seasons and rules. He imagined teachers with eyes that measured and weighed, students whose faces were taut with ambition. He imagined being smaller there, one boy among many, and he relished the notion in the way a swimmer might relish the challenge of colder water—sharp, clean, terrifying.
But he was not swept by melancholy. Children are sometimes like that: the heart folds itself in around fear and still finds space for a joke. He imagined the skeleton learning to march like a soldier; he imagined Gao composing an ode to a fallen shoe he would one day find in a courtyard, and Mei—Mei braiding someone else's hair in a dim dormitory by starlight. The images were small, domestic, stubbornly human.
When the others began to breathe in the rhythm of sleep, Bai slipped quietly from his bed. He picked up the Echo Crystal shard and the loose skull of the skeleton, which had been set on the small shelf as a joke and a token. For a moment he held the skull to his chest. It was cold in his hands—bone and all—yet somehow it felt like an emblem of the household's humor. He smiled and whispered, "We'll make them remember.… We'll make them laugh."
He placed the skull carefully back on the shelf, atop a scrap of cloth Auntie Shan had embroidered with a clumsy, kindly moon. Then he wrapped his coat about his shoulders and, with a careful, child's stealth, opened the dormitory's side window.
The courtyard air was cool and smelled of mango and woodsmoke. The Moon Goddess' bell chimed again—three clear notes that went out across the ridge. Bai leaned on the sill for a moment and let the night roll over him: the distant, slow breath of the Echo Stone, the soft breathing of his sleeping friends, the village's steady, small music. He thought of the promises and the pie and the tiny liturgy of dumplings and braids. He thought of the Academy door, and the way leaving lived like a slow ache, not a jagged pain.
He took one small thing from the windowsill: a strip of ribbon Auntie Rui had tied to the branch of the mango tree for luck. It was frayed, its color gone dull with handling, but he tied it to the rib of the skeleton that leaned nearest the window. It looked absurd, but he approved. A ridiculous charm suited him.
When he slipped back inside and lay down, the world felt like the softest of rooms. Bones clicked gently as the skeletons rearranged themselves into a protective little ring. He listened to Madam Lin's steady breathing, to the muffled scrape of a matron tidying outside, to the far whisper of the Echo Stone. He did not feel alone.
Sleep did not come instantly. He let his small anxieties move like slow-swirling dust in the lantern's light. He thought of the morning when the cart would come and the academy masters would check names and tie cords. He pictured all those days ahead as a long, blank scroll—unread, unmarked, waiting. He imagined what he would send back: not proclamations of glory, but small, ridiculous postcards that smelled of iron and stew, notes about which teacher had the worst scowl and which corridor had the best acoustics for skeleton theatrics.
Finally, his breathing evened. The skeleton by his pallet gave a soft, dry click that might have been a promise. The moon slid behind a thin cloud, the bells of the temple hushed, and the orphanage, for one last night before the change, held together in the ordinary, miraculous way of small houses: with food shared, jokes traded like currency, and a thousand tiny, stubborn pledges to one another.
Outside, Moonshard Ridge kept its watch, indifferent in its permanence and yet oddly protective. Tomorrow the road would begin; today the children rested in the warm, human gravity of one another. Bai's last waking thought, as the world pulled its breath and set it down carefully like a bowl, was not of greatness or fame—but of a plan, absurd and simple: when he returned from the Academy, he would bring with him a trick so clever and impossible that the courtyard would never again be able to speak of him without a laugh. And with that silly promise, the orphanage folded him into sleep like a hand folding a letter into a pocket—kept, small, and sure.