The bricks still held warmth.
Even though the fire had long devoured everything inside — the walls, the beams, the bodies — the hearth where Mael crouched hummed with something older than ash. His knees scraped soot, his nails black from clawing under scorched stones, where the smell was thickest. Sweet, bitter, iron-rich. Like memory dried and sealed into coal.
He didn't cry. He hadn't since the morning they found his father's apron — not on a corpse, but fluttering nailed above the town bakery. A warning. The buttons had melted.
The Ministry had called it treason.
> "Refusing to bake peace is an act of war."
But Mael knew better. His father hadn't refused peace. He had refused forgetting.
And now, beneath the cracked heart of the oven, Mael's hand touched something that didn't crumble.
Wrapped in lambskin. Charred at the edges. Bound not with string but fused crust.
He unwrapped it. Inside — no pages. Only soot-stained vellum, thick with fingerprint smears and written not in ink, but in grease.
He opened to the first sheet.
> "We do not write recipes. We breathe them.
The bread remembers. The fire reveals.
But only if the baker is willing to burn."
He didn't understand.
Not at first.
Each page bore no steps. No measurements.
Only instructions of loss.
"Fold in the silence after her name disappeared."
"Knead with both hands — one that loved, and one that lied."
"Use salt drawn from tears you pretended not to cry."
"Rise with grief.
Bake with shame.
Cool in the mouth of someone who betrayed."
This wasn't food.
This was confession.
Mael touched the paper. His fingertips left no smudge — but something moved between the words.
A heat, not from coals.
From remnants.
---
He looked around. The oven's stones were cracked but stable.
Above him, the chimney moaned softly, like a throat learning to remember breath. It wasn't just a place of death. It was a mouth.
He unwrapped the cloth he'd hidden in his coat — the last crust his father had made.
Burnt. Uneven. Unlabeled.
He'd never tasted it. No one had.
He bit.
It tasted like burnt apples. And dirt. And metal.
And then—
It tasted like home.
His father's voice in a tone Mael didn't know he remembered:
> "Bake only what you're willing to eat in front of the dead."
Mael dropped the crust.
Then picked it back up.
He knew what he had to do.
This time, the fire would not take his father.
It would carry him.
---
He scavenged what he could from the wreckage — a copper bowl warped by heat, a stone plate still stained with the outline of a forgotten loaf, and the last unbroken scoop once used for flour. There was no wheat left. No yeast. No oil.
But he wasn't baking for the body.
He was baking for the dead.
He tore linen from the curtain that had once hung in the bakery window. His mother had embroidered it with stars. Now it was soot-streaked and stiff with dried vapor. He folded it into a makeshift mask. Not for safety — for ritual.
Mael ground charcoal into powder.
Mixed it with the ash scraped from the oven walls.
Added crushed bark and slivers of bone — the burnt fragments of wooden spoons and cutting boards, all of which had once known his father's hands.
Then, finally, he took what little salt he had: crystals harvested from the corners of his eyes.
---
The dough came together slowly.
It fought him.
Stuck to the bowl, refused to rise.
It trembled under his fists, as if resisting remembrance.
He whispered to it as he kneaded:
> "He used to sing when the loaves baked.
Not songs. Just breath.
Like the oven answered him back."
The mixture did not soften.
It hardened.
Like resolve.
Like pain when you stop pretending it's gone.
He shaped it into a round — uneven, dense.
Then he made the fire.
Not with wood.
But with the last page of the Smoke Ledger.
The one that read:
> "If you cannot write truth,
let flame read it for you."
---
The hearth flared like it remembered him.
Orange licked the stone. Blue curled in the center.
He placed the dough inside.
Waited.
No smell.
No crackle.
Just a deep, low thrum — as if the loaf wasn't baking, but listening.
The crust blackened.
Then split.
And from the fracture rose not smoke…
…but steam laced with a single voice:
> "You finally heard me."
His father's voice.
Not sad.
Not angry.
Just there.
Mael didn't cry.
He inhaled.
And for the first time since the fire—
he felt full.
---
He let the bread cool in his palms.
Then he broke it.
The inside was raw.
Uneven.
Impossible to chew.
But it bore letters.
Formed not by hands, but by heat and memory:
> "Go.
They sing now.
And you are part of the song."
---
At dawn, Mael packed the cooled halves of the loaf into a satchel.
He tied it shut with the burnt curtain thread.
Took the ash mask.
Pressed it to his face.
Then he walked.
North.
Toward the rhythm.
Toward the breath that echoed across France like a second sun.
Not to bring justice.
But to return a voice.
---
He walked for two days without speaking.
Villages passed him like ghosts too polite to whisper.
The road cracked beneath his boots — not from wear, but from the weight of what he carried.
At night, he slept beside the loaf.
Never ate it.
Only held it, palm to crust, and waited for it to breathe again.
It did.
Not with words.
But with heat.
A pulse, faint and regular, like the memory of a heartbeat still echoing in stone.
---
On the third day, he reached a town that had no name.
At least, not anymore.
The signs had been torn down.
The people — quiet, pale, blinking through fog that never lifted.
They offered him food.
A bowl of thin white porridge.
A slice of bread that was soft, tasteless, compliant.
He bit once.
And tasted absence.
Nothing of childhood.
Nothing of fear.
Nothing of breath.
He looked up at the woman who had served him.
> "Do you remember your daughter's first word?"
She frowned. Smiled gently.
> "She was always quiet."
He leaned in.
> "No.
She used to scream your name in her sleep.
The neighbors would knock at night and ask you to hush her."
The woman's hand trembled.
The bowl fell.
> "Who told you that?"
He didn't answer.
He opened his satchel.
Removed half the loaf.
Broke it.
Offered her a piece.
> "This will hurt," he said.
> "But it will be yours."
---
She bit.
Her knees buckled.
She sobbed without sound.
Then with sound.
Then with name after name after name.
Not all hers.
But all known.
---
By evening, thirty people had eaten.
By midnight, a bonfire burned at the square's center — not for warmth, but to signal the breath had returned.
And Mael?
He sat alone at the edge of town.
He did not sing.
But his chest moved with a rhythm that matched the fire's crackle.
As if something inside him was learning the tune of grief.
He pressed the loaf to his ribs.
It no longer pulsed.
But it steamed once more — and released a single curl of breath.
Inside it:
a whisper not in words, but in understanding.
> "You've become the oven."
And he wept.
Not from sorrow.
But from becoming.
---
By dawn, the village baked again.
Not the Ministry's loaves.
Not the mute crusts wrapped in silence and honey.
But black bread.
Heavy. Uneven.
Laced with ash, cracked in memory.
They didn't sell it.
They left it on windowsills.
On grave markers.
On the church steps that had forgotten how to bless.
And every loaf sang a little differently.
Some with longing.
Some with names.
Some with only the echo of the breath that had made them.
---
Mael stayed until the third morning.
He didn't ask to lead.
But the villagers followed him anyway.
Not for miracles.
Not for healing.
But because they wanted to breathe with someone who remembered how.
Twelve of them left with him.
Each carried a half-loaf, wrapped in their own fabric.
Each wore a mask not from fear — but from ritual.
They called themselves nothing.
But others would come to call them Emberwalkers.
---
The road turned darker.
Not with clouds.
But with rumors.
Whispers of Ministry "cleansings."
Whole towns declared "overripe with distortion."
Bread confiscated.
Air declared suspect.
And somewhere beyond the river, it was said—
The Ministry had begun burning ovens that sang on their own.
---
On the fourth night, Mael stopped at a fork in the road.
He felt it before he saw it.
A scent.
Not of smoke.
Not of fire.
But of sweetness.
Too sweet.
Familiar.
False.
He followed it to a lone cart left overturned beside a stream.
Inside: Mute Loaves. Stacked like bricks.
All untouched.
All pristine.
But one had split.
And from its center spilled rot.
Not of food.
Of memory suppressed too long.
He picked it up.
Bit once.
Fell to his knees.
And saw—
> His father.
Strapped to a chair.
Hands broken.
Forced to eat his own crust until he stopped weeping.
He vomited into the stream.
The villagers behind him said nothing.
But each one stepped forward,
bit into a loaf,
and listened.
One by one, they cried.
Then stood straighter.
---
Mael gathered the loaves.
Built a small pyre.
Did not bless it.
Only said:
> "You fed us silence.
We fed it fire."
---
As they walked on, the wind shifted.
And far ahead—
on the horizon—
a plume of smoke rose.
Dark. Slow.
Not a fire.
A baking.
And beneath it—
a song.