(Edenrock, three days before the Festival of Stonefruit)
The church bell didn't ring in Edenrock. It groaned.
Hung from a frayed hemp rope above the old grain chapel, the iron bell let out a reluctant yawn every third morning—long enough to remind the villagers it still worked, short enough not to wake the crows. No one had used it for worship in years, not since the chapel's last priest had wandered into the marsh one night and never returned.
Still, someone lit incense there each morning. And today, that someone was Lette Darnell, whose husband had drowned planting plum trees seven springs ago.
She arranged four thistle bundles on the altar, straightened the faded tapestry of the orchard gods, and hummed under her breath: an old tune, reedy and low, the kind once taught to infants who wouldn't sleep. Outside, fog bled across the chapel's cracked windowpanes like steam on glass.
From the road, you could hear the morning market setting up—soft clinks of jars, the sharp rustle of burlap, hooves on wet stone.
---
Nerin watched from a crooked bench beside the flour mill, a notebook balanced on his knee. The charcoal pencil he used moved lightly, without pressure, as if afraid to leave a mark. He wasn't sketching the scenery or even writing a language. Instead, he recorded rhythms—the pace of foot traffic, the timing of call and response between vendor and buyer, the short gaps in conversation when wind disrupted speech. Not sound exactly. Patterns.
The baker's son, Tamar, leaned against the doorframe nearby, chewing on a burnt crust. He was too polite to ask outright what Nerin was doing, but he stared in that persistent village way that made silence louder than words.
"You writing a play?" Tamar asked eventually.
"No."
"War letters?"
"No."
"Poetry?"
Nerin stopped writing. "Not the kind you read out loud."
Tamar nodded, looking satisfied. "That's the worst kind."
---
At the edge of the green, the town's only glassworker, Enric, was arguing with a goat.
This was not unusual.
The goat—white, one-horned, named Gulliver—had become something of a fixture in Edenrock, stubbornly convinced that the village's glassblowing shed was his territory. This morning, he had already broken two tongs and knocked over a crate of sand meant for the kiln.
Enric, hands blackened with ash and palms blistered from the forge, waved a towel in the goat's face. "You horned little bastard! I'll roast you like a red potato!"
Gulliver responded by headbutting the shed's door and toppling over backward.
The bystanders—mostly apprentices hauling firewood—didn't intervene. They were placing bets.
A short woman with a lute slung across her back walked past the commotion, tossing a coin into the dirt beside Enric.
"For the funeral," she said dryly. "Of either you or the goat. I've got a song for both."
---
By midmorning, the clouds had thinned just enough for the stone altar at the river's bend to catch a little light. Not sunshine—sunshine rarely visited Thornepass—but a vague brightness that passed for it. Three elders gathered there, laying bundles of fruit, bark, and coins at the moss-covered base.
The Festival of Stonefruit was nearly here, and the altar had to be fed.
Nerin stood at a respectful distance, watching as Marda muttered prayers over a tiny carved pear made of bone. The other two elders, Herlan and Tey, kept glancing over at him, speaking softly behind their sleeves. He couldn't hear the words, but he caught the rhythm—same as the others he'd recorded that morning.
Three measures. Two short, one long. The same rhythm Lette Darnell had hummed in the chapel.
The same rhythm that kept showing up in his notes.
Nerin frowned.
---
Meanwhile, the miller's widow, Anwen, was elbow-deep in goose feathers, plucking dinner beside her son Dorrin, who watched her hands rather than helping. The boy's silence wasn't unusual, but the tension in his shoulders was.
"Something wrong?" Anwen asked without looking up.
Dorrin nodded. Then shook his head. Then paused.
"I… had a dream," he said finally. "There were stairs, going down into water. And a bird with no eyes."
Anwen didn't stop plucking. "Did it speak?"
"No. But it sang."
This gave her pause. "What kind of song?"
Dorrin hesitated. "It's hard to describe."
She nodded and returned to the goose. "Don't tell Marda," she said flatly. "She'll have you scrubbing shrine floors for a month."
---
That evening, a letter arrived at the inn. No one saw who delivered it—only that it was tucked under the ale barrel near the hearth, sealed with green wax bearing a symbol no one could place: a circle of thorns wrapped around a stylized eye.
The innkeeper, a bald man named Kev with hands the size of pans, left it on the bar untouched. "Not addressed to anyone," he grunted. "Not mine."
Nerin, who had come in for boiled turnips and weak cider, stared at it as if he recognized the seal. He didn't touch it either.
Instead, he listened. Outside, the wind had picked up, whistling through the alley behind the glassworks. For the briefest moment, he thought he heard that rhythm again. Two short, one long.
And behind it… humming.
---
Back at the shrine, Marda was sweeping again. She always swept before dark, even when there was nothing left to sweep. Her broom had gone nearly bald, but she wouldn't trade it for a new one. New things didn't hold prayers properly.
She paused when she saw something near the altar. A child's drawing, smudged in charcoal. A spindly figure with antlers and empty hands, standing under the stone arch.
Marda frowned.
She had burned that drawing yesterday.