A month passed.
Not quickly. Not quietly. But it passed.
Bravhessa didn't change, but we did. A little. Enough to walk its streets without flinching.
Sel found a rhythm first. She made friends with the tanner's boy who worked behind The Fiddler's End, shared jokes with the blind widow who sang to her dead husband's grave three times a week, and bartered favors with a quiet woman who sold old herbs from a creaking cart and never asked names.
I followed slower. Talked less. Watched more.
Some mornings, we ran. Just to move. Just to feel our feet under us. Other days, I stayed in the room and tried to warm water without spilling the Weave sideways. Nareva's voice had faded by then, like a half-remembered lullaby. But the feeling of her lingered. I held on to that.
The Fiddler's End became a kind of anchor. The sheets were still rough. The water still bit at the skin. But there was bread in the morning, broth in the evening, and no one asked about the sword under my bed.
Sel made me eat. She also made me sleep. Sometimes beside her, sometimes not, but always near enough to hear her breathing.
We didn't speak about Tharionne. Or the fire. Or the screaming I still sometimes heard in my sleep.
We spoke about little things.
Clouds. Smells. Street songs. Once, she asked what my favorite color was. I didn't know how to answer. So she told me hers instead—riverbone blue, she called it. The exact hue of sky trapped between leaves just before dusk.
I told her that was a stupid name.
She kissed my cheek.
And I didn't flinch.
⟡
It was Marketday when everything cracked.
Bravhessa overflowed on Marketday. Stalls bloomed like weeds on every corner, children wove between wheels and legs, and the air smelled of hot stone, cheap spice, and the river's slow rot. Street preachers barked at drunks. Dogs chased shadows. Someone in a square near the churchsteps played a harp with missing strings.
I held Sel's hand, more out of habit than fear. She had traded half a ribbon and a smile for a pouch of dried lemonroot. I didn't ask why.
Then—midstep, midsentence, midbreath—I heard a voice.
Not near.
Not aloud.
A memory, but louder.
"What use is a body that breaks before its worth is proven?"
I stopped.
Sel didn't notice at first. She tugged gently, kept walking.
I didn't move.
The air was too hot. The light too sharp. The world was too loud.
A man brushed my shoulder.
Something cracked.
Flash— stone halls. Red banners. Screaming. Steel.
Flash— Veyr's eyes. Calden's silence. A boy kneeling in ash.
Flash— Nareva's face burning.
I clutched my chest.
Sel turned fast. "Kael?"
Too late.
The Weave surged.
I didn't pull from it. I shoved—or maybe it shoved through me. A roar built behind my ribs and broke like a wave. Light burst from my hands, thick and white, but not clean. Tainted. It shimmered in the wrong way, like oil on water. Like something bleeding light that wasn't supposed to bleed.
The crowd screamed.
Someone fell.
Children scattered.
A fruit stand shattered in a snap of heatless force, sending pears rolling into the gutter. A woman sobbed as her prayer ribbons caught fire without flame. A nearby preacher dropped to his knees and began chanting something fast and furious.
And at the center of it all, I stood.
Shaking. Burning. Screaming without sound.
Sel's hands found my face. "Kaelen," she whispered. "Kaelen, look at me."
The Tainted White aura writhed. It had grown thicker since the last time. Now it bent the air around me. I saw people staring—terrified, confused, horrified. Someone shouted for the guards. Someone else for the Church.
Sel pressed her forehead to mine. "You're here," she said. "You're with me. Come back."
I wanted to.
Gods, I wanted to.
But the Weave was a storm in my blood, and I didn't remember the words Nareva taught me to still it. Only the feeling. Only the sound of her voice, curling around my name like a lullaby wrapped in frost.
I dropped to my knees.
Sel caught me before I hit the stones.
I breathed once. Twice.
Then the aura collapsed in on itself, vanishing with a flicker and a hiss.
The silence after was worse than the noise.
People stared.
No one came closer.
Even the guards paused at the edge of the street, gripping weapons but not stepping in.
Sel helped me stand. I tasted copper and shame.
"We need to go," she said softly.
I nodded.
⟡
We took the long way back. Not running. Just... gone. Sel held my hand tight and didn't speak until the inn door closed behind us.
Then she turned.
Her eyes were dark.
"Tell me what that was."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it again.
She didn't ask twice.
Instead, she walked over, grabbed the basin, and filled it with cold water. When she handed me a cloth, her hands were still steady.
"Next time," she said, "don't wait until it explodes."
"I didn't mean to—"
"I know."
That hurt more than anything.
We sat in silence while the city murmured below.
Outside, the whispers had already started. I could feel them spiraling through Bravhessa like smoke:
The ghostborn boy. The white fire. The noble's son.
And somewhere, I was certain, a message was already being written.
To the Church.
To the Academy.
To the woman who burned cities with her smile.
⟡
That night, Sel didn't leave my side.
She didn't ask for the bed.
She just curled next to me and whispered a single word before sleep took her:
"Mine."
And I didn't argue.
Because I didn't feel like I belonged to myself anymore.
But somehow, in that room, in that breath, in her arms—
I still felt real.
⟡
We stayed hidden for two days.
Sel wouldn't let me leave the room.
The innkeeper, bless her, said nothing. She slid bread and soup through the door without knocking, eyes averted, mouth tight. I heard her whisper to someone once—"Too young to be that dangerous."
She was wrong.
I felt it in my bones. In the hollows where the Weave had surged and then vanished, like smoke pulled back into a sealed jar. My chest ached from it. My head too. But it was the silence from the Waeve itself that made my teeth itch. Like it had... blinked. Like something behind the veil had seen me, then turned away.
Sel trimmed my hair on the third morning. Said I looked like a drowned thistle. Said it without smiling.
She hadn't smiled since the square.
"Will they come?" I asked her once. Just once.
"The Church?" she said.
I nodded.
She didn't answer. But she didn't lie, either.
⟡
By the fifth day, the whispers had grown claws. I caught pieces of them in the tavern below—
"White spark. Demonborn. The ghostchild's back. The son of flame."
On the sixth, a parchment was nailed to the noticeboard outside the grain exchange. A bounty.
Not mine. Not yet. But close.
A call for any "unlicensed practitioners of The Waeve."
A reward for those who reported them.
A symbol stamped in red wax at the bottom: the Inquisitorial Sun.
Sel spat when she saw it.
I didn't say anything.
⟡
That night, I dreamt of fire. But not the kind that destroys.
I stood in a hall I did not know but somehow remembered. Columns carved from bone and glass. Banners I couldn't read. Shadows with too many eyes.
A voice echoed from above.
"You pulled from it. The fracture."
I turned.
No one was there.
"You are not broken. You are what breaks."
When I woke, I was already sitting upright.
Sel stirred beside me. Reached without opening her eyes. Her hand found my wrist.
Warm. Firm. Still here.
"You were glowing," she mumbled.
"Sorry."
She didn't answer. Just squeezed.
⟡
On the ninth day, a woman arrived at the inn. She didn't look like a Church agent. Didn't dress like an Academy handler. No silver runes, no gold thread, no veils. Just plain cloak, dull boots, and a single iron ring on her left hand.
She asked for "the boy who screamed white."
The innkeeper didn't answer.
But I felt her watching us that night.
⟡
Sel didn't sleep. She sharpened a knife she hadn't used in weeks.
I sat on the bed, turning Calden's sword in my hands. I still didn't know what it was made of. Why it never dulled. Why it was warm sometimes, and cold at others.
But that night, it felt like it was listening.
Sel finally looked up.
"She's not alone."
"Who?"
"The plain woman. I smelled three others."
"Smelled?"
Her eyes gleamed. "Don't ask stupid questions."
I almost smiled.
Almost.
"Should we run?" I asked.
She considered. Then shook her head.
"Not yet."
A beat of silence.
Then—
"When we do," she added, "we burn the road behind us."
I nodded.
⟡
It came on the tenth morning. Folded into the crust of a loaf of barley bread, the kind Sel always said tasted like graveyard dust.
She was out fetching water. I broke the loaf open and something inside crinkled.
Paper.
No seal. No markings.
Just… folded parchment, brittle at the edges, warm from the oven.
My breath caught. I unfolded it slowly, hands trembling.
Ink. Familiar. Slanted. Careful. Written with a brush, not a quill.
Not a message. Not a warning. Not a command.
A letter.
Kaelen,
I don't know if this will reach you. I don't know if you're alive. But I choose to believe you are.
I can't say your name aloud anymore. Not in this city. Not with who listens. But I remember it. I remember you. I remember the boy who asked me what the wind felt like when you cut through it. I remember your eyes the first time you saw flame and tried to hold it like a secret.
You were never meant to stay in that place. That estate. That life. You were always meant to fall upward.
The Waeve stirs wrong now. More than it used to. Your thread shines too bright. It pulls the attention of things that were meant to stay sleeping. So be careful. They are not gods. They are worse.
You are not a mistake. You are not broken. You are a blade that remembers every hand that held it. Even mine.
I'm still here. In the shadows. Watching. Praying. Still listening.
And when it's time, I will find you.
— N.
I didn't cry right away.
I read it three times. Then a fourth, mouthing each word like it might disappear if I said it too loudly.
The paper smelled faintly of ink, ash, and peppermint. I pressed it to my chest and let the tears fall silently. No sobs. No sound. Just tears, warm and ugly, soaking into the tunic I'd worn since the fire.
The ache I'd buried cracked open again.
Nareva hadn't saved me from the burning.
But she had been the first to see me before I was ash.
Before I was a weapon.
And now, she still saw me.
Still remembered.
The flood came then—memory and grief all twisted together. Her quiet lessons by candlelight. Her hand guiding mine across sigils I couldn't yet pronounce. The lullaby in a language no one else knew. Her shadow by my door on nights I couldn't sleep. Her silence, full of care.
Sel found me like that.
Curled on the floor, letter in hand, eyes red.
She didn't ask. Just knelt beside me and pulled my head to her shoulder.
I cried harder.
She didn't flinch.
Didn't speak.
Just held me like it mattered.
Like I mattered.
And in that moment, I let myself believe I did.
That maybe—somehow—I still had a place.
Not just in the world.
But between them.
The woman who shaped me.
And the girl who refused to let me fall apart.
⟡
Later, Sel read the letter too.
Said nothing. Gave it back.
But before she did, I saw something in her eyes.
Not jealousy.
Not fear.
But understanding.
Maybe even… respect.
"She'll come," Sel said.
I looked at her.
"She said she'd find you," she added. "I believe her."
I nodded.
Then I hid the letter under the bed. Next to the sword. Where the things that mattered most lived now.
⟡
That night, for the first time in weeks, I slept without dreaming.
And when I woke—
The Waeve was humming again.
Soft.
Unsteady.
But alive.
Like it, too, had read her words.
And remembered.