The air still trembled with the aftertaste of light. Elara's eyes burned from the glow of the Lanterns, the phantom flames still licking at the edges of her vision as if imprinted there, unable to fade. She carried their memory with her as she slipped through the square, though the crowd had long dissolved into alleys and doorways, leaving only the scent of wax and smoke hanging in the hollow dusk.
Her feet ached, her breath was shallow, but she could not still herself. Not yet. Something in the gaunt stranger's words had set her in motion — a gravity beyond reason. The Lanterns do not merely remember. They call. And if they called, she wondered, who was listening?
The streets narrowed as she walked. Stones grew older beneath her boots, seams widened, ivy clung like veins to walls that leaned inward as though conspiring to shut her in. She thought of Kieran, far away yet impossibly near, the drawer between them a mouth pressed shut since the night before. She had not dared to write him, not with the stranger's warning scalding her mind. What message could she send when the world itself seemed poised to answer?
She came at last to a place she did not recall having seen before. An archway, its keystone carved with a symbol half-worn by time: a circle cleft by a vertical line, like a mirror broken. The doorway yawned, black as the seam itself, and beyond it a chapel waited — though it had long been forgotten by prayer or blessing.
Elara stepped inside.
The chapel was not ruined, yet neither was it whole. Pews leaned at angles, warped by damp, their varnish gone to dust. The altar was cracked across its face, like a smile split by grief. Stained glass still clung to the high windows, but the colors were dulled, their saints blurred into facelessness. Only the shadows retained sharpness, gathering in corners where the eye dared not linger.
And yet, within that ruin, sound unfurled.
A low hum, weaving through the rafters like smoke. Not a human voice, not at first — rather a vibration, deep and thrumming, the kind that lives in the marrow before it is heard by the ear. But as she stilled herself, Elara realized it was a hymn. A song built from fragments, sung not by mouths but by something that dwelled between breath and silence.
Her skin prickled. She had always thought of hymns as ascent — words rising like smoke to a listening sky. But this… this song sank. It coiled downward, folding into the earth, as though the chapel floor were no floor at all, but a membrane stretched thin, resonant with each note.
Elara moved between the pews, her hand brushing their splintered edges. The hymn grew clearer, a layering of tones like multiple throats singing slightly out of step, a choir of voices nearly aligned but never fully meeting. She could not tell if they came from above or below.
At the altar, she paused. Ash lay scattered across its surface, gray and fine, as though something had been burned there not hours ago but centuries — ash that never scattered, never thinned, no matter how long the wind might pass through the broken glass.
She touched it with trembling fingers. The ash clung like soot, staining her skin. And in that moment, the hymn wavered, as if the choir had noticed her.
"Elara."
The voice was not her own thought. It was not Kieran's either, though it carried the same cadence of intimacy, the sound of someone who had spoken her name in secret for a long time. It rose within the hymn, threading through the chords like a knife through cloth.
Her knees buckled. She caught herself against the altar, heart pounding.
"I know you," she whispered hoarsely. "But I do not know you."
The hymn thickened, words emerging from within it — syllables half-formed, older than her tongue. She strained to grasp them, yet they broke apart each time like surf retreating through sand. But one refrain coalesced, sung not once but again and again:
What is remembered may rise.
The ash on her fingers warmed. She stared at the altar, horrified and entranced, as the gray dust began to glow faintly, each grain lit from within as though it contained a cinder yet unspent. Slowly, deliberately, the ash shifted, stirred by no wind, arranging itself into a pattern: the same symbol carved on the chapel's archway. The broken circle, the dividing line.
Her breath snagged in her throat.
"Elara." The voice again — this time nearer, almost behind her ear. She spun, but the pews lay empty, the aisle bare. Shadows stretched long but did not stir.
Her heart beat like a drum against her ribs. "Who are you?"
But the hymn gave no answer, only its endless refrain. What is remembered may rise. What is remembered may rise.
She thought of the Lanterns, of the flames that burned with the names of the lost. She thought of the gaunt stranger's warning, of voices crossing when worlds lean too close. And she realized, with a horror sharp and luminous: the hymn was not a song to the vanished. It was a song by them.
Her knees weakened further. She clutched the altar, trying to breathe. The ash on her skin continued to glow, and in the glow she saw faces flicker — indistinct but aching with familiarity, as though she should know them but did not.
One face lingered longer than the rest. A young woman, eyes wide with sorrow, lips moving though no sound escaped. Elara leaned closer, desperate to hear, and caught only the shape of one word.
Run.
The hymn collapsed.
All at once, the voices fell away, leaving silence vast and merciless. The ash cooled instantly, its glow extinguished. The chapel felt emptier than any space she had ever entered — as though it had not merely been abandoned but had never been touched by life at all.
Elara staggered back. Her breath rasped in the void. She did not realize she was crying until her cheeks burned with salt.
And yet, through the tears, a fierce clarity broke. The hymn was a summons. And the summons had not been for her alone.
Somewhere beyond the chapel, beyond the seam, Kieran would hear it too.
She fled.
The streets outside seemed narrower still, houses bent toward her, doors shuttered as though they, too, had heard the hymn and barred themselves against its memory. Her boots struck sparks on the stones. She longed to run until the air itself tore, until she could step across the breach and find him waiting.
But when at last she reached her room, chest heaving, drawer trembling under her hand, she froze. For the first time, she hesitated to open it.
What would she send? What could she possibly write that would not betray the depth of what she had seen? To tell him of the hymn was to invite it nearer. To stay silent was to leave him defenseless.
She pressed her palm flat against the wood. On the other side, perhaps at this very moment, Kieran's hand mirrored hers.
And between them, like a chord sustained but never resolved, the hymn lingered still — quiet, but waiting.