Chapter 11 – Whispers Between Pages
832 Words
The rain had followed Elias for days.
It whispered against his cloak, a ceaseless murmur that blurred road and thought alike. When at last he reached the old monastery, it stood like a skeleton against the storm — arches hollowed, walls eaten by ivy, its spire leaning as though in prayer to a god long gone.
He tied his horse beneath a dying oak and stepped through the broken gate. The air inside the ruin was still and heavy, filled with the scent of damp stone and something faintly sweet — lilies, wilted long ago. His boots echoed down the corridor until he found the library.
Books slept in heaps, their spines cracked, pages curled like the edges of forgotten dreams. Dust hung thick as fog. Yet, as his gloved fingers brushed one desk, he felt the faintest warmth — impossible, in this dead place.
He pulled free a journal, its cover soft with decay, and opened it carefully. The ink had bled into the paper, but words still lived beneath the stains.
“To heal the heart is to touch the soul — but what happens when the soul resists?”
The name signed below the entry made his breath still.
Mira Valenor.
The cursed healer.
The name that had followed him across villages, through stories spoken like warnings.
He turned another page. Diagrams of herbs, veins, and eyes — each sketch more frantic than the last. Between them, lines written in a trembling hand:
“Sorrow is a living thing. It listens.”
“The cure is not in light, but in knowing the darkness.”
Elias frowned. The ink shimmered faintly, like oil on water. When he tilted the page, he caught a faint scent — lilies again, sharper now, layered with something human: tears.
Then he heard it.
A voice.
Soft, distant, a hum threading through the silence — not quite song, not quite sigh. It wound through the corridors, through broken shelves and fallen beams, pulling him deeper.
He rose slowly, the journal still open in his hand.
“Who’s there?”
Only the drip of rain answered.
He followed the sound anyway.
Between rows of half-collapsed bookcases, he saw movement — the edge of a white gown disappearing around a corner. He quickened his steps. The humming grew clearer, sorrowful yet strangely tender. It reminded him of a lullaby he had heard once as a child, though he could not recall where or when.
When he turned the corner — nothing. Only a single candle burning on the floor, its flame trembling though there was no wind.
He knelt. The candle sat beside another journal, newer than the others. Its cover was dark leather, embossed with a crescent moon. He opened it — blank pages. But the scent was unmistakable now: lilies, and blood.
The flame flickered.
Words began to bleed through the first page, slow as breath.
“Do not follow me.”
Elias froze.
He looked around. Shadows shifted at the edges of his sight, like wings brushing the air. The candle sputtered out, plunging the room into silence. In the dark, he heard a whisper close to his ear — a woman’s voice, barely more than breath.
“You shouldn’t have found me.”
He spun, drawing his blade — silver flashing briefly in the gloom. Nothing. Only the smell of lilies, fading now, replaced by dust and damp stone.
He stepped back toward the desk, the journal still clutched in his hand — but it was open to a new page. He hadn’t turned it. And yet, words were there.
“He reads my sorrow as if it were a map.”
“Will he follow it to my heart, or to my curse?”
The handwriting was delicate — Mira’s, the same he had seen before in the other letters.
Elias closed the book, slowly, reverently. His pulse beat hard in his throat.
He should have left. He knew that.
But the echo of her voice lingered like warmth in his chest — a sound too alive to be a ghost, too mournful to be a dream.
He placed the journal back upon the table. Yet when he stepped toward the door, something brushed his sleeve.
He turned.
One of the other books had fallen open on its own. A page fluttered despite the still air, revealing a single pressed lily, brittle but intact. Beneath it, written in fading ink:
“If you ever hear me, remember — sorrow is not your enemy. It is what binds us.”
Elias stood there for a long moment, listening. The rain outside softened to a whisper, the same rhythm as her humming.
He left the monastery as dawn bled gray across the horizon, the scent of lilies following him into the mist.
Behind him, deep in the library, the candle flickered back to life.
And though no hand touched it, the journal turned one more page.
“He has begun to listen.”
- Writer
