The forest was healing in strange, stubborn ways—flowers pushing through burned soil as if refusing to remember what came before, shoots of silver moss crawling up blackened roots.
I built a small fire every night. Thorn was still gone, and after the second night, I stopped calling his name; the silence that followed felt like punishment.
Mira came once, maybe twice, but never close enough to touch, never long enough to ask the things that burned on my tongue, and she would leave food, a scrap of cloth, and a few words like: The river's rising again.
They’re rebuilding the packhouse.
You should come back.
But I couldn’t. Not yet.
There was too much quiet between my ribs, too many ghosts pressed against the edges of my heart. The Cradle was silent for the first time in my life, and I
