Chapter Three - Ash Between Us
999 Words
The sky hung low as the village gathered.
No horn had sounded. No messenger sent word. But the Hollow Ways moved like something ancient and rehearsed. Feet padded across cold ash. Children were pulled close. Doors were left open behind them, as if some part of them expected not to return. They formed a wide circle in the central clearing, where the main fire sat cold and unlit. Even the embers had been left to die. Kaelen stood alone at the center. The god stood beside him, or behind him, it was hard to tell. The villagers avoided looking at that space too long. Eyes slid off the figure like rain off slate. But the unease lingered, coiled and tight. At the far side of the ring, the Elders stood beneath a bent canopy of bone and stone. Seven of them. Hooded. Pale. None remembered their own childhoods. Only fragments. Each carried a different staff. Each staff was carved with the same symbol, burned halfway through.
A broken circle.
Kaelen stared at those staffs and wondered if they even knew what it meant.
“Kaelen,” said the first Elder, her voice raw like cracked wood, “you brought something back from the edge.”
“I did.”
“You say it healed Drel.”
“I don’t say it. You saw it.”
“We saw a sickness pause. That is not healing. That is not trust.”
A second Elder stepped forward. Male, or once male, his face was half-mask, half scar. “You were seen walking with it. You stood with it at the well. You spoke to it inside the sick hut.”
The third Elder said nothing, but pointed. At Kaelen. Then at the blur beside him. Her hand trembled.
“It walks with you,” she whispered. “And it remembers.”
A ripple moved through the gathered Yren.
The god remained silent. His presence hung like a veil over the circle. Some turned away. Some whispered. A few wept without knowing why.
Kaelen’s throat tightened. He had no speech prepared. No defense.
He looked toward Drel, who stood at the edge of the crowd now. Alive. Whole. But silent. He looked at Kaelen not with gratitude, but guilt.
“He would be dead,” Kaelen said, louder than he meant to. “You all know that. You’ve seen it before. The shaking. The stare. The loss. But he came back.”
“So did others,” one Elder said quietly, “and what they brought with them cost more than it gave.”
Another stepped forward. “Do you know its name?”
Kaelen looked at the god, whose face remained veiled, silent, waiting.
“No,” Kaelen said.
“Then how do you know it will not devour what little we still remember?”
Silence fell like stone.
The villagers watched. Not with malice. With fear. And something worse.
Hope.
Flickering. Dangerous.
The kind that could tear a tribe apart if it chose wrong.
Kaelen stepped forward, and the motion alone made several villagers draw back.
He saw it, the widening of eyes, the subtle shift of feet, the way people clutched at old charms with shaking fingers. He had not changed. But now they looked at him like something dangerous might grow from his skin.
And still, he stepped forward.
"You ask me if I know his name," Kaelen said, voice steady now, "and I don’t. But he walks beside me, when no one else did."
The circle held its breath.
"I didn’t call him. I didn’t summon him with blood or bone or bargain. I remembered. That’s all. I remembered something the rest of you were too afraid to look at. And he came."
The second Elder scowled. "That is not trust. That is recklessness."
"Is it?" Kaelen's voice rose. "You speak of memory like it’s a curse, yet you sit on staffs carved with a mark none of you remember the meaning of. You fear forgetting, and you fear remembering. Which is it?"
The crowd stirred. Uncomfortable. Moved.
Kaelen turned slowly in the circle, facing the tribe. "He’s not asking to be worshipped. He hasn’t demanded anything. He healed Drel when none of us could. That’s not a curse. That’s not a threat. That’s mercy."
He turned to the Elders. "And if mercy frightens you more than silence, then maybe it's not him we should be afraid of."
The god remained still, but something about the air shifted. Subtle. As if the earth itself leaned closer to listen.
The Elders did not speak after that. They conferred without words. An old signal passed between them, and one stepped forward, raising her staff to point not at Kaelen, but at the cold firepit in the village center.
"You have bound yourself to it. You have spoken for it. Then you will bear the weight of it."
Another Elder added, "If it brings warmth, then let it light our hearth again. If it brings death, let the flames show us."
A third said nothing, only dropped a stone token at Kaelen’s feet. It was marked with the spiral. The same one carved at the cairn.
Kaelen looked at the token. Then at the firepit. Then at the blurred figure beside him.
He said nothing.
He stepped forward.
He knelt at the pit, gathered dry moss, kindling, old ash. His hands moved from memory. The fire had not been lit in two moons. Not since the last naming ceremony.
He reached toward the flame with shaking hands.
Before his fingers touched flint to stone, he paused. Looked back once more. The villagers stood still, eyes wide.
The god moved.
Only slightly.
His hand hovered just above Kaelen’s shoulder, and something passed between them. Not power. Not instruction.
Permission.
Kaelen struck.
The spark caught.
The flame rose.
It was not red or orange. It was pale gold, edged in silver. It
burned slow, and quiet, and the smoke curled like memory.
- Writer
