Some things age with grace. The Nestvaults did not.

  They were not meant to be beautiful. Their walls were choked in root-vein and damp moss, their air thick with silence, old wax, and ancestral ash. Even the light we used felt wrong — oil soaked in memoryroot that flickered in colors no one named.

  But it was here we kept our dead.

  Not their bodies — we were not undertakers. But their names, their echoes, their truths.

  That was our burden.

  That was Morrinar.

  My first day in the Vault, I remember tripping on a loose stone. I didn’t cry. Not because I was brave, but because the walls wouldn’t let me. They absorbed sound like they were always listening, and they didn’t like noise unless it came in the form of song, chant, or whisper.

  “You walk too loud, little crow,” said Elder Cierne, not unkindly. She had hair like fog and eyes like the sky before mourning. “Memory is delicate. It bruises.”

  I learned quickly.

  My name was never called aloud. Not in the Vault. We were not permitted to speak the names of the living — only the dead. Only the remembered.

  I became Voix-in-training. A memory-speaker. One who listens, composes, seals.

  It was a lonely path.

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  Others practiced their rites through feathers, song, steel, or ink. I had words. And words are dangerous.

  In my sixth year, they let me hold a real feather — white-veined, from a dusk-crow that had never flown above the tree line. Bound in silver thread, it pulsed faintly with echo. I was to write my first name into it.

  Not my name. Hers.

  Alenra Vey.

  A matron.

  She had taken her life, quietly, beneath the orchard roots after her children vanished during a void-tide. No one found her until the blossoms fell red.

  I wasn’t there when she died.

  But I listened to her husband speak her name into the binding circle.

  I listened as he wept and called her “the fire that warmed a dying home.”

  And I wrote.

  Not with ink, but with breath. With tone. With silence. It took me six hours. My hands shook the entire time.

  When I finished, the feather glowed. Just for a moment. And then it stilled.

  Elder Cierne placed it into the Vault of the Rooted Flame.

  “You’ve done well, Grim Moissonneuse,” she said softly.

  It was the first time anyone had spoken my full name aloud in years.

  It echoed. I remember thinking: that’s how a name should sound. Like it belongs to more than one mouth.

  I returned to my bunk that night and stared at the ceiling. I did not sleep. I simply repeated the name, over and over again in my head:

  Alenra Vey. Alenra Vey. Alenra Vey.

  I don’t know when I stopped whispering it.

  I only know that I still remember her.

  Because if I forget — if I, who bound her, forget — she vanishes a second time.

  And the Morrinar had a rule.

  No one dies twice.