Tyla’s POV
The world does not announce its endings.
It folds them into mornings.
I realize this while standing at the basin, rinsing ash from my hands after helping sift the remains of a workshop lost to the fire. The water runs gray, then clear. Someone laughs nearby—too loudly, too soon—and someone else snaps at them for it. They apologize. They keep working.
No one looks for me.
No one waits.
The absence settles—not like grief, not like relief.
Like completion.
I walk home alone.
The city carries the fire’s memory in small ways: scorched stone scrubbed clean but not forgotten, the smell of smoke braided into bread and wool, the carefulness with which people pass the ruined quarter as if it might still bite.
They will rebuild.
They always do.
The question is not whether anymo
