Sky's POV:
The road south is older, like there's no more people walking here.
I know this because the stars remember it.
Not in prophecy—not in fate-marked inevitability—but in quiet repetition. Footsteps layered over centuries. Traders. Refugees. Soldiers who never came home. Children who grew up into people who forgot why the road once mattered.
The land doesn’t care about wars.
It only remembers how often it was walked.
Crisha and I move at a slow moving pace, our cloaks stirring softly in the wind that comes off the sea long before it’s visible. The air smells different here—salt and iron and old wood. Even damaged places carry familiarity if you let them.
Neither of us speaks at first.
There’s no need.
Crisha walks with the easy confidence of someone whose light no longer ha
