Chapter 9: The Smell of Oaths Long Broken

  There is a man who tends the graves.

  Not because it is his duty — the vilge never asked.

  Not because he knew the dead — most of them were buried before he arrived.

  He tends them because once, long ago, he made a promise that outlived the person he made it to. And in the absence of that person, he tends the closest thing he can find.

  The man is called Yao.

  He is neither young nor old, but he walks with the softness of someone used to pces where noise is fatal.

  His home is a hut beside the hill of stone tablets. He eats sparingly, speaks rarely, and burns incense that never smells the same twice.

  On the morning after Shen Liang returned from the forest, Yao woke early.

  Before the crows. Before the dogs.

  Something had changed in the air.

  Not a scent.

  A weight.

  He stepped outside.

  Listened.

  The wind moved wrong.

  It wasn’t faster. Or louder.

  Just… wrong.

  Like it had forgotten how to pass through this vilge quietly.

  He knelt by a grave. Touched the stone. Whispered in a nguage that no longer had verbs.

  Then, without haste, he walked to the edge of the vilge and sat on a ft rock. The one that faced the forest path.

  He waited.

  He had waited for worse.

  *****

  When Shen Liang emerged from the trees, his eyes were different.

  Not glowing. Not wild.

  Just aware — as if he had seen something that did not belong to this part of the world.

  Yao said nothing.

  But as Shen Liang passed, he stopped.

  Looked at the older man.

  Then bowed — not deeply, not out of politeness. But like a memory.

  Yao returned the bow.

  Still silent.

  But once Shen Liang had gone, the gravekeeper murmured something under his breath.

  Not quite a name. Not quite a curse.

  “So you’ve begun again, have you…”

  Then he looked at the sky.

  The clouds were thinning, and in their pce, lines of silver light stretched unnaturally — not sunlight, but something older trying to imitate it.

  Yao closed his eyes and sighed.

  “Fifty-seven years of silence,” he muttered.

  “It was always too much to hope for fifty-eight.”

  He stood.

  And began sweeping the graves a little faster.

  As if they, too, needed to prepare.

  (End of chapter)