The ruins of the Nestvaults still smoldered behind me.

  I wandered for days.

  Each step was aimless, but I told myself I was searching. For shelter. For direction. For a voice that might explain why the scythe on my back didn’t burn me to ash. I did not speak aloud. The silence was too thick, like mourning turned physical.

  The land beyond the Morrinar Hollow was shifting. The ley-lines had frayed. Even the birdsong sounded wrong — bent, flattened, like a tune hummed by someone who’d forgotten the words.

  I spoke no prayers. I marked no trails. Just walked, until twilight bled into twilight again.

  It was in this place — some half-remembered pocket of the outer Twelveswood — that I first felt the pull.

  Not from the Reaper. But from something… else.

  Older than war. Wilder than memory.

  I followed it to a stone well long overgrown. Moss clung to the mouth like a secret. Thorns coiled across the lip like sleeping serpents. Vines stitched the stone together like a wound slowly healing.

  I shouldn’t have gone near it. But the air buzzed — faint, aetheric — like a name wanted to be heard. Not spoken. Heard.

  As I crouched beside the well, I found something curious:

  A carving.

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  Foxes. Stylized. Dancing. Beneath them: a sun and a silver bloom. The marks were old, not of our style — rougher, wilder. The glyph beside them wasn’t from our tongue, but it tugged at something in me regardless.

  An ancestral itch. A name that had yet to be spoken.

  I placed my hand over it.

  And heard laughter.

  Not cruel. Not ghostly.

  Real laughter. Full of teeth and lightness.

  A girl’s voice. Or perhaps a woman. Or perhaps something in-between, laughing like it had never been caged.

  It faded before I could place it. But it warmed the air around me. Like a memory not my own.

  I stayed by that well longer than I should have. Slept beside it, dreaming of eyes the color of stormlight and a voice too quick to be caught.

  In one dream, I chased a blur of movement across the canopy — red fabric fluttering between branches, silver streaks trailing like dancing light. I never caught up. But when I awoke, a fox pawprint was etched in the dirt beside my bedroll.

  Fresh.

  Too small to be a beast. Too perfect to be imagined.

  No tracks led away from it.

  I told myself it was a trick of the wind. That the silence of the woods had begun to play with my thoughts.

  But Serre-du-Vide was warm that morning. Humming softly, as if pleased.

  And when I returned to the carving one last time before leaving, I noticed a detail I’d missed:

  A second glyph — almost hidden.

  Not a name.

  A warning.

  A tail of starlight. A crescent moon. And a heart pierced by thorn and thread.

  I didn’t know it then.

  But it was her.

  The fox.

  The girl I’d one day follow into rebellion and ruin. The one who would make me laugh again, despite everything. She was not ready. Nor was I.

  And yet, even then, our paths crossed.

  She was a whisper.

  And I was a silence that had not yet learned how to listen.