Ashes Of The Bound

The Things Left Unsaid

The rain arrived by morning.

Not a heavy, drumming storm—just a cold, steady drizzle that blurred the edges of the world and made everything feel softer, heavier, slower. It painted the trees in deeper greens, turned the dirt paths into winding ribbons of mud, and soaked the wool of Seren’s cloak before she’d made it to the garden gate.

Ashveil Hollow always fell quieter in the rain. Voices dropped. Tools rested. Even the animals seemed to step lighter, as if the sky were scolding them all into silence.

Seren didn’t mind.

The drizzle settled into her hair, dampened her hood, clung to her lashes. She tilted her head up for a moment, letting it kiss her face. Cold. Cleansing. Grounding.

She pulled her cloak tighter and walked toward the herbalist’s shop.

It was one of the oldest buildings in the village—its roof sagged on one side and moss clung greedily to the stone walls, but it smelled like life inside. Dry herbs and wild honey, chalk and mint, the faint trace of ash that never fully faded from the old hearth.

The door creaked open.

“Back again, girl?” croaked Wrenna, her voice papery, like dry leaves underfoot.

“You always know,” Seren murmured.

“I always hear.” The woman tapped one of her ears. “Rain makes the village louder, not softer. Footsteps travel. Secrets do too.”

Seren stepped inside and pulled her hood down. Her braid clung to her neck.

“I need tea for Maela,” she said, brushing rain from her cloak. “And something… something for dreams.”

Wrenna paused.

Not with suspicion, but with that slow, owl-like attention she reserved for things she found curious. Her white eyes, filmed by time, fixed somewhere just past Seren’s shoulder.

“Dreams, is it? The kind that wake you, or the kind that follow you after?”

Seren hesitated. “Both.”

Wrenna grunted softly and moved through the crowded shop. She never asked questions she didn’t want answers to, and Seren had learned long ago not to offer more than what was asked.

The old woman worked in silence, her fingers nimble despite their gnarled shape. She plucked jars and bundles from high shelves, weighed dried roots, then returned with a cloth-wrapped bundle laced with silver thread.

“This one, you burn. Near your bed. Window open. Don’t drink it, don’t breathe it in too deep. And don’t let your thoughts wander while it burns.”

“Why not?”

Wrenna gave her a long look. “Because sometimes dreams aren’t just yours.”

Seren stared at the bundle in her hands. It smelled faintly of sage and something sweeter—something that made her think of rain-soaked stone and warm skin.

She didn’t ask more. Some things in Ashveil were better left unexplained.

She reached for her coin pouch, but Wrenna waved her off.

“Tell Maela she owes me a story. From the old days. One with blood and thunder.”

“I don’t think Maela remembers those.”

“Oh, she does. She just pretends not to.”

Seren tucked the bundle inside her cloak. “Thank you.”

The rain had deepened into a cold mist by the time she stepped outside. Her boots squelched as she walked, the mud sucking at the soles like it wanted her to stay. Fog drifted low over the fields, swallowing fence posts and blurring the tree line into a watercolor smudge.

She should’ve gone home.

But her feet didn’t turn toward the healer’s cottage. Not right away.

Instead, she took the long path, past the stone well and the crooked oak at the edge of the village, down the trail that led toward the old glade. A place few villagers visited unless they had a reason—and Seren wasn’t sure if she did.

The mist thickened as she walked, curling around her legs like curious fingers. The trees here grew tall and thin, their trunks pale as bone, bark flaking in paper-thin curls. She’d always thought they looked half-dead, like ghosts pretending to be trees.

At the center of the glade sat a stone circle. Old. Cracked. Covered in moss.

Seren knelt beside it and placed the dream bundle on one of the stones. She didn’t light it. Just stared at it, her fingers trembling where they brushed the edges.

She thought of the man in her dreams—the faceless one, the one who whispered her name like it meant something, like he knew her better than she knew herself.

She thought of the fire. The one that didn’t burn. The one that welcomed her.

“I don’t want you,” she whispered aloud, to the dream, to the voice, to whatever part of her kept reaching toward the wrong thing.

The wind stirred. Just a little. Just enough to pull at her braid and nudge the bundle off the stone.

She flinched.

And stood.

By the time she returned to the village, the mist had begun to lift, and smoke curled from chimneys once again. People moved along the paths, hoods up, heads down, all with somewhere to be. No one noticed her passing.

She liked it that way.

When she stepped inside the cottage, Maela was dozing near the fire, a blanket draped over her knees and a half-finished mug of tea cooling beside her.

Seren quietly brewed another pot. She added the right herbs, stirred the warmth into the room, and placed the unused dream bundle beneath her pillow without lighting it.

Just in case.

That night, she lay in bed with her back to the fire, staring at the faint lines in the ceiling.

Thirteen cracks.

The rain tapped against the windows, soft and relentless.

And when her eyes drifted closed, the dreams came not as fire or a hall of stone—but as wind moving through trees. As a voice just beyond her hearing. As footsteps that echoed in her bones.

She turned over, restless.

Sleep didn’t find her easily.

But something else did.