The ruins did not sleep.
Even by daylight, when the mists receded just enough to make paths visible, the stones hummed with a silence so taut it felt like a scream caught between breaths. Nerin didn't come at dawn, or even early morning—he waited until the sun was a pale coin high in the sky, casting no warmth, and then slipped from Edenrock without telling Dorrin or leaving his usual coded note.
He brought only his satchel, the journal, and a bone-handled blade that had never touched meat.
The journey was quiet—too quiet. No birdsong. No rustling in the underbrush. The trees along the ridge bent away from the ruins as if resisting the very idea of them. When he reached the first archway—cracked stone, veined with rust-orange moss—he paused. In the corner of the wall, right where lichen clung thickest, someone had drawn a spiral.
No paint. No tool. The moss itself had curled that way.
She remembers you.
He passed beneath the arch.
---
The ruins weren't as empty as they had seemed from a distance. Strange knotted roots had burst through the floor, forming raised ridges and crisscrossing veins of soil. Pale birds nested in corners, blind and soft-feathered, their heads twitching in sync with some unseen rhythm.
Nerin followed the map.
Past the second hall—a long corridor of broken pillars and weathered stone benches. Here, he found a discarded satchel, waterlogged and torn. Inside: glass bottles with traces of crimson tonic, a leather-bound sketchbook (pages blank), and a single silver ring too large for any finger.
No name. No sign of its owner.
He left it untouched.
---
It was the third hall that held the mural.
He stopped at the threshold, breath fogging in the air. Not from cold—but pressure. The room resisted entry like a held breath.
He stepped forward.
The mural stretched along the curved wall: a figure cloaked in folds of paint too faded to decipher, her eyes blank and lidless, mouth stitched shut with vines. Around her, smaller figures bowed or broke apart—some weeping petals, others burning where they stood. Symbols ran along the edges, looping like thorny vines: a language that wasn't written, but grown.
Nerin reached into his satchel and took out a lens—fractured, tinted green—and peered through.
Under the lens, the mural shimmered.
The blind queen's mouth moved.
Only one word, endlessly repeating:
> "Return."
A sound behind him—stone scraping.
He spun, blade out, but found only a figure standing in the shadow of a collapsed column.
It was Leyra.
She was barefoot, clothes streaked in soil, eyes unfocused.
"How did you find me?" Nerin asked, voice low.
She didn't answer. Instead, she reached into her satchel—he hadn't noticed she was carrying one—and pulled out a twisted bundle of reeds and feathers, bound with black string.
"This was by my bed," she said. "After the fire. I think I dreamt it, but it was wet when I woke. Do you know what it is?"
Nerin took it carefully. Turned it over.
A warding charm—but inverted. It wasn't to keep things out.
It was to invite something in.
"You shouldn't be here," he said. "This place remembers too much."
Leyra laughed, but it was hollow. "Funny. You're the one who looked like it knew your name."
He didn't argue. Couldn't.
The journal in his bag pulsed faintly—warm, like blood through old paper.
Suddenly, a tremor passed through the floor. Not large. Barely a quake. But it sounded like a breath. The mural flickered—just once. A single frame of something else: the queen's eyes open, pitch black, and weeping spores.
Leyra grabbed Nerin's arm. "We should leave."
He didn't argue.
---
Back in Edenrock, the mood had changed.
The festival booths had been packed down in a rush. Banners torn, dishes unwashed. A sense of haste hung over the village like a cold mist. Something had happened while they were gone.
They arrived at the square just as the bell rang—not once, but three times. A call not heard since winter of the flood year.
Villagers gathered in silence.
At the center of the crowd, the steward from the next village—Borran, the lemon-faced man—stood on a makeshift platform.
"We found her body near the marsh's edge," he said. "Face down. No wounds. No blood."
He didn't have to say the name. Everyone already knew.
Sela.
The herbalist.
Someone gasped. Someone else cursed under their breath.
"She was… drained," Borran continued. "Dry as old bark. No signs of violence. But no sign of Essence either. Whatever she had… it's gone now."
Leyra tightened her grip on Nerin's sleeve.
He could barely hear the words over the pulse of blood in his ears. Over the sound of the mural's voice in his mind, repeating that single word—return—until it no longer sounded like a command, but a homecoming.
---
That night, he opened the journal again.
A new page had appeared.
Drawn in ink he'd never owned. A face. Sela's. But not dead. Not quite. Her eyes were glazed, staring toward something behind the page itself.
And beneath her face, scrawled in ink and ash:
"The blind do not see. But they remember."