WHISPERS IN THE ASH
The Emberreach Sky
The sky above Emberreach shimmered like cooled glass, vast and unbroken, freckled with the quiet pulse of dying stars. It was the season of Waning Fire, when the flames in the hearths burned lower and the air clung to the bones like forgotten ash. Lyra stood barefoot on the rooftop of her mentor’s observatory, a quilted shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders, her gaze fixed on the constellations that no longer aligned.
She counted them, as she always did: Varrin’s Bow, broken by a missing star. The Thrice-Braided Crown, now a crooked curve. And worst of all, the Emberlight itself—once the heart of the night sky, now flickering like a candle in a storm.
"Three gone," she whispered. "Maybe four."
Below her, the village slumbered. Stone chimneys trickled smoke into the dark, and the silverbell trees rustled in the frostbitten wind. There were no songs tonight. No fires in the central square. Only silence, thick and taut.
Lyra had always felt something stir in that silence—an ache behind the world. A hum beneath her feet. As a child, she called it “the underneath.” Now, seventeen and apprenticed to the village stargazer, she dared not name it aloud.
“Lyra!” came a hoarse whisper from below. “Off that roof, now!”
She rolled her eyes and climbed down the iron ladder, the rungs cold as river stones. Master Edran stood at the base, wrapped in his moth-eaten coat, his craggy face scowling in the lantern light.
“You’ll catch your death up there,” he grumbled, but his tone held no real heat. “And there’s a storm whispering over the Spine. You know what that means.”
“Salt in the wind,” Lyra said softly. “Ash in the trees. Something moves.”
Edran’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t say such things. Not tonight.”
But the wind did taste of salt. And in the trees beyond the village wall, something crackled—not leaves, not frost. Something else.
Back inside the observatory, Lyra poured over the star charts while Edran prepared the ink for his sky-marks. Their ceiling was domed and painted in constellations, lined with tiny fragments of celestial glass that glowed when the night was clear. But lately, the glass had dimmed. The stars they mirrored had gone dark.
“Why do they vanish?” Lyra asked, not for the first time.
Edran dabbed ink along the spiral grooves of a quartz compass. “Some say the gods grow weary. Others that the Emberlight’s song is fading. Me? I think the stars are not dying, but hiding.”
“Hiding from what?”
He didn’t answer.
Outside, the wind moaned through the chimneys. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once, then fell silent. Lyra leaned over a cracked scroll bearing the Prophecies of the First Flame—a relic the Elders forbade them from studying.
But she had read it in secret. Many times.
She traced the old script with her finger, mouthing the words in silence:
“When the sky forgets its fire, and echoes stir the ash, one born of starless ember shall awaken the last light.”
Her breath caught. A low rumble echoed in the floorboards.
Edran’s ink pot trembled. The compass spun.
From the northern window, a dull red glow bled across the horizon. Not firelight. Not moonlight. Something colder, hungrier.
Edran cursed under his breath. “Seal the windows. Fetch the relic from the hidden shelf.”
“What is it?” Lyra asked, fear lacing her words.
“The Echo stirs,” he said. “And it calls your name.”
