They buried the neighbor's boy in a shallow grave behind the barley field.
No ceremony. No priest. Just three adults with calloused hands and tired eyes, lowering the bundle into the soil before the sun crested the wall. The boy had been sick for days. Fever took him fast. By morning, he was still, and his mother wouldn't let go until the village headman came.
I watched from a distance. Elna did too, arms crossed, silent as the frost that clung to the fence rails.
Fenn didn't understand yet. He chased a beetle near the doorway, giggling. But I knew.
Death didn't knock here. It just came through the back door.
That night, I asked Elna, "Do you remember his name?"
She glanced at me, then looked away. "Tarrin. I think."
I tried repeating it. "Tarrin."
It didn't feel right on my tongue. Not because I misremembered, but because it felt so easy to forget. Like the name itself didn't want to be held.
Elna didn't reply. She picked at the corner of her blanket.
We lay in silence for a long while. Then, just before sleep, she whispered, "Don't let them forget you too."
Dustwall was a place of names, but not of memory.
Children were named by sound or rhythm, not meaning. There were no written records here. No gravestones. No scrolls. Only what you remembered and what you passed on in story.
And even stories died if no one bothered to tell them.
The morning after Tarrin was buried, I found a stick and scratched his name in the dirt by the fence. It didn't last. By midday, wind and footsteps had wiped it away. But I kept doing it. Every day. Same spot. Same letters.
T
A
R
R
I
N
A habit. A ritual. Maybe a quiet promise.
It was around that time I started dreaming more often.
They weren't normal dreams. I never saw faces or places. Just sound.
A slow rhythm, like a heartbeat through water.
And a voice—sometimes clear, sometimes blurred—murmuring in that same forgotten tongue.
"...Ren tal'mek... Isen yu'val…"
I'd wake with the words clinging to my lips, half-sure they meant something, but never able to hold the meaning. Like trying to cup water in my hands. The tighter I squeezed, the less remained.
One dream, though, stayed with me.
A staircase. Endless. Carved into stone.
Each step glowed faintly. Pale blue. Cold. The walls around it pulsed like a living thing, and the air shimmered with voices—not loud, but constant.
And then a phrase—burned into the silence like a brand.
"The veil does not lift. It thins."
I told Elna about it once. She didn't laugh.
"Maybe it's the gods," she said, half-joking, half-wondering. "Or maybe you hit your head when you were little."
"I think it's real."
"You always think that."
"But this time, I heard the same voice from the Red Moon night."
That made her pause. She looked at me for a long moment, then pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. "Then don't follow it. Just listen."
A week later, I found a scrap of parchment near the market. Torn, dirt-stained, and faded with time. But the script—oh, the script—was the same as the glowing marks I'd seen in my dream staircase.
I stared at it for hours.
I didn't understand the words. Not yet.
But I traced the lines again and again until I could draw them in the air with my eyes closed.
My first real key.
One evening, I brought the parchment to the river bend where the weeds grew high.
There, away from eyes and ears, I pressed the scrap to the earth and whispered the syllables I remembered. Not loud. Just enough for the air to hear.
"Ka'therin… Yul… tu'ar eth ni…"
The wind shifted.
I felt it before I saw anything. A pressure. Like someone had pressed a palm gently to my back. Not pushing. Just reminding me they were there.
The grass swayed, though no wind touched my face.
Then came the echo—soft, deep, distant.
"...Ni'seren... ashta..."
I didn't know what it meant.
But the river knew. The stones knew. And a part of me, buried deep in the dust of a forgotten self, knew too.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
The air was too still. Even the crickets had gone quiet.
I stepped outside and stood barefoot in the dirt.
Above, the stars blinked between clouds like they too were hiding.
And then, faint as breath against glass, I heard it.
A single word.
"Closer."
No thunder. No lightning. Just that.
I stood there a long time, afraid to move. Not from fear, but from awe. From the heavy truth settling over my shoulders like a second skin.
I wasn't meant to stay in Dustwall forever.
And something—someone—was calling me toward the veil.