The night did not arrive; it seeped. It pooled into corners, pressed against windowpanes, and slid along the seams of Kieran's apartment like water finding cracks in stone. He had grown used to the strangeness of his midnight vigils, waiting with pen poised or token clasped, but this night was different. The air already hummed with a tension that reminded him of the stillness before storms — when every leaf holds its breath, every bird vanishes from sight, as though the world itself braces.
On his desk, the drawer gleamed faintly. It had no right to gleam — it was only wood, scarred by years, its edges dull. And yet, as the clock neared twelve, it seemed to pulse with a sheen that was not light but attention. As if the seam itself had tilted its gaze upon him.
He had wanted to write Elara that day. Had even dipped his pen, its nib shivering over the page. But no words came. He had dreamt all afternoon — not sleep-dreams, but waking ones, scenes that slid across his eyes unbidden. Ash drifting over stone altars. Windows bleeding light that would not bend to glass. Voices singing from beneath the floor. None of it was his memory, yet it had arrived with the clarity of recall.
And threaded through it all, her name.
Elara.
He whispered it now, as though it might steady him. Instead it only deepened the weight in his chest. Because he knew — without proof, without logic — that she had heard what he had seen. That whatever pressed against his waking mind had been closer to her body, her breath, her ears.
The clock struck.
The drawer rattled faintly, then stilled. He reached with a hand that trembled more than he wanted to admit, and slid it open.
Inside lay no note, no trinket, no sprig or map-fragment. Only ash.
He froze. The ash shimmered faintly, as if lit by coals beneath. His first thought was that it might be hers, something she had placed deliberately, but the thought collapsed almost instantly. No hand could have gathered this, no container carried it across. This was not given — it was left behind.
The ash shifted.
Kieran jerked back, knocking his chair. A shape formed in the gray, curling lines arranging into something between symbol and script. Not English, not anything he recognized, yet the pattern struck him with the same ache as an old lullaby — words he did not know but almost remembered.
His lips moved before he could stop them. He began to hum.
The sound slipped from his throat as though borrowed, not chosen. Low at first, then rising, a melody so spare it seemed made of absence as much as note. He tried to silence himself, clapping a hand over his mouth, but the tune continued beneath his palm, vibrating from somewhere deeper than his lungs.
And in the vibration, he felt her.
Elara.
Not a vision this time, not a half-formed dream. A pulse. Her pulse, layered within his own. As if the seam had braided them together in one cadence, one fragile song.
His knees weakened. He gripped the desk to steady himself, breath ragged, and as he did the ash stilled once more. For a long moment, silence reigned.
Then came the lullaby.
It did not rise from him this time. It rose from the seam.
The drawer hummed, its wood shivering like a struck string, and from its hollow space issued a sound at once tender and terrifying. It was the kind of tune mothers might murmur to infants — soft, circular, meant to coax sleep. But beneath the sweetness lay something else, something vast and cavernous. A patience too large for human throats, a weight too heavy for cradle-songs.
Kieran staggered back. Yet even retreat could not free him. The song clung to the air, wrapped itself around the walls, seeped into his marrow. He clutched his ears, but his bones still heard it.
And then — impossibly — he heard her voice.
"Elara?" he gasped.
Not her voice precisely. Not spoken. But carried in the weave, braided into the lullaby itself. Her breath between notes, her heartbeat stitched into rhythm. She was there.
"Elara!"
He fell to his knees beside the drawer, desperation choking him. If he could have torn the wood apart with his hands, he would have, simply to reach her. But before he could move again, the drawer yawned wider of its own accord. Ash spilled across the floor, trailing a line toward him.
And within the ash, faint as breath on glass, her words appeared:
I heard it too.
Across the breach, Elara sat slumped over her own desk, her fingers blistered from gripping a candle stub that had burned too low. Her eyes stung with sleeplessness, her ears with silence too full of echoes. She had written those words with hands that trembled, uncertain if they would arrive as words or dissolve into soot.
When the drawer tugged at her again, she nearly wept with relief. Inside, in Kieran's familiar, slanted hand, was a reply:
It sings through me. It wants us quiet. But if we sleep, it will come closer.
Her body tightened, throat raw. She whispered his name aloud — not sure if the seam would carry it, not sure if it mattered. The lullaby lingered even here, beneath her skin, coaxing her lids to heavy half-closure.
She forced herself upright, biting the inside of her cheek until blood rose. The sting steadied her. She dipped her pen.
Do not sleep. Write me. Keep me awake.
So began the longest night.
They wrote feverishly, not in tidy messages but in fragments, bursts of thought tossed like sparks into the seam before drowsiness could smother them. She told him of the hymn in the chapel, the voices that had sung from ash. He told her of the dreams that had intruded upon his waking. She confessed her fear of silence, how it seemed no longer empty but occupied. He confessed the terror of his own body becoming an instrument, his mouth spilling music not his own.
Back and forth, words scrawled and traded, their ink smudged with urgency. At times their handwriting overlapped, lines pressed against lines, as if their letters could not wait their turn.
But the lullaby remained. Always beneath them, like the tide beneath waves. It shifted in tone as hours passed, now soothing, now menacing, but never gone. More than once, one of them nearly faltered — ink trailing as their hand slowed, head bowing toward the desk. And each time, the other's words came like a strike of flint, sparking them back into wakefulness.
Toward dawn, the lullaby thinned. Not silenced — never silenced — but softened, receding like a predator sated or biding its hour.
Kieran's last note of the night was shaky but resolute:
If it wants our silence, then our voices are resistance.
And Elara, hand trembling, wrote the only word she could still believe in:
Together.
But when the first sunbeam touched the drawer, ash spilled again — not gray this time, but black as coal. And within it, a new refrain carved itself in strokes too sharp for trembling hands:
What sings is not alone.