(Page 11) Chapter 1 – The Celestial Thread | Return to the Woods

The memory released her as softly as a sigh. Elira was back in the ring of firs, the fallen beech, the damp leaf-moss clinging to her boots. The scent of oak char was stronger here, threaded with hot iron and something sour beneath. Kieran had moved around the fallen trunk and now stood very still, shoulders squared—a boy doing a man’s work without complaint.

“What do you see?” Elira asked.

Kieran didn’t answer at once. He touched the splintered heartwood the way he had touched the ground: finger to grain, skin to story. “Not a camp,” he said. “No ash drift. No cook-stone. Something burned in the wood, not on it.”

Myla circled wide, careful not to disturb prints that might not look like prints. She stopped, half-turned, then knelt. “Here,” she said, voice small in the quiet. “On the trunk.”

They came to her. There, just above the split, someone—or something—had carved a symbol into the beech with slow, deliberate strokes. A circle thinned into an oval, lines crossing through like threads pulled tight, and at the center a small star with four long points and two short—as if it had been drawn by a hand that remembered the Sunring and mocked it with a needle.

Myla touched the edge and hissed. “It’s warm.”

Kieran drew his mother’s blade with a sound like breath returning to lungs. The metal, old and plain, took the last light and gave it back without glitter. He did not brandish it; he held it the way Maera had taught him—like an answer, not a threat.

Elira studied the mark. The old sword at her hip felt heavier, as if it recognized the cut. “This was in the council hall,” she said. “Scratched into stone near the hearth, hidden under soot. The same hand, or the same hatred.”

“Echoes,” Myla whispered. “The woods are remembering.”

The air seemed to listen to them. Far off, in the direction of the ravine, the wind rose and then fell in a long, even exhale—as though the world itself were preparing speech.

Kieran turned his head. “Hear that?”

Elira heard only the ache of silence and the small, steady thrum in her blood that came when the Thread ran near. She glanced at Myla. The girl’s eyes were unfocused for a heartbeat, as if a page had been turned inside her. When she blinked, they cleared.

“What did you see?” Elira asked.

“Not see,” Myla said carefully. “Remembered something I haven’t read yet.” She shook her head, embarrassed by the shape of the truth. “I know that makes no sense.”

“It makes the only kind of sense that ever saves anyone,” Elira said. “Hold fast to it.”

A leaf spiraled down, touched the carved symbol, and smoldered as if a coal had kissed it. The tiny flame made no smoke. It burned in a quiet yellow tongue and went out.

Kieran exhaled. “We’re being invited.”

“Or measured,” Elira said.

Myla swallowed. “What do we do?”

Elira pulled her hood up again. When she answered, her voice was steady, and in it ran a thread of something older than fear. “What we were charged to do. We keep to the Spire before the Ring goes dark.”

“And if the thing that carved that follows us?” Myla asked.

Elira eased her hand to the old sword. “Then it follows us up holy ground. That is a mercy to us, and a mistake for it.”

Kieran nodded once, as if some quiet doubt had been addressed. He slid the blade back into its sheath; even the soft click of guard to leather sounded like a promise.

They moved on through the dimming wood. Behind them, the carved symbol held its faint heat like a prayer unattended. Ahead, the trees drew closer, and the path became a narrow thought through a mind that had begun to change.

As they reached the grove’s far edge, the wind returned—not with a shout, but with a low, patient tone that made the hairs rise on their arms. It carried no words, only shape. And in that shape, each of them understood the same terrible kindness:

Not a warning.

A welcome.

The last light slid from the leaves. Somewhere, not far enough, metal touched stone again, and chains decided to move.