The Kharûl forest did not whisper. It listened.
Every footstep the boy and the girl took sank into the moss as though the earth itself wanted to muffle their presence. No birds called. No wind stirred the branches. Even the will-o'-wisps had vanished behind them, unwilling to cross into this old green silence.
They followed a narrow path that had not been a path in a very long time. The trees bowed inward, and lichen clung to bark like mold clings to forgotten bread. Roots rose like ribs. The girl touched one of them it was warm.
"What is this place?" she asked.
The boy didn't answer immediately. He was watching the way the moss curled away from his boots, then slowly crept back, as if unsure whether he was meant to be here.
Finally, he said, "This is where the Sūmgar walked. Where their voices still sleep in the soil."
The girl paused. "You speak of them like they're not gone."
"They're not," he said. "Just quiet. And quiet things are never harmless."
She frowned. "What even were they?"
"The first griefbinders. The memory-keepers. They lived in circles, not towers. Raised temples with no roofs so even the sky could listen. And when kingdoms rose and burned, they remained. Watching. Writing. Weaving remembrance into rune and song."
"And now?"
"Now they're called myths. But myths don't bleed, and I've seen their blood."
The path ended at a stone. Not a cairn, but a flat slab jutting out of the forest floor like a tongue. Symbols were carved deep into it old Kashmiri script twisted into circular forms, inked not with paint but with something darker.
The girl approached it.
Suddenly the symbols flared a dim blue shimmer and the stone sang.
Low. Wordless. Like a voice heard underwater.
She staggered, clutching her head. "What is this?"
The boy knelt beside her, wide-eyed. "It knows you."
Her breathing slowed. "How?"
He looked at her. "Maybe it remembers what you forgot."
And then, softly, the stone spoke a name.
"Zooni."
The girl blinked. "That's... my name."
She'd never said it aloud before. Not to him. Maybe not even to herself.
"I think I forgot," she whispered.
"Not forgot," he said. "You were made to forget."
The stone pulsed again.
Images flickered in her mind: a room of snow colored walls, voices chanting in a language she almost understood, a blade made of salt, dipped in tears. And a woman's voice, distant, saying:
"She is the last thread. If she remembers, the veil will burn."
Zooni gasped. "I was in a Sūmgar sanctuary."
The boy helped her to her feet. "Not just in one. Of one."
She looked at him, confused.
"You carry their blood. That's why the shrine answered you. Why the Mourning Kin didn't speak your name. It feared what you might become."
The forest light changed. A sickly gold bled through the canopy as if dusk had arrived too early. The trees began to groan not in wind, but in memory. Long, drawn-out creaks like the cries of things trying to rise from centuries of sleep.
"Someone else is here," the boy said.
A figure stepped from between two ancient firs, not tall, not cloaked in threat, but robed in brown and green, hands bare, face covered by a mask of bark. Where its eyes should have been, were polished stones.
It raised a hand in greeting.
Zooni stepped forward, still dizzy from the memory.
"Who are you?"
The figure tilted its head. Then, in a voice both male and female, it said, "We are the Remnant of Sūmgar. We are what lingers."
The boy gripped his hilt.
"We mean no harm," the voice said, reading his stance. "She was left to us. Hidden. Buried beneath a name that was not hers."
Zooni stepped closer. "Why me?"
"Because grief walks best in silence. And you are the last child born into the true silence."
Behind the bark-mask, the stones shimmered.
"Your name was the lock. Now it has opened. The Ashwrights will come. The river will whisper again. You must choose what to remember."
Zooni clenched her fists. "And if I don't?"
The figure's head tilted further. "Then the Vyeth will speak in your place."
Suddenly the forest trembled.
From the earth behind the Remnant, something vast stirred roots shuddered, and from beneath the stone slab, a tree rose that wasn't a tree at all.
Its trunk was made of skulls. Its leaves wept ink. Its branches curled into runes that flickered like fireflies.
The boy stepped between Zooni and it.
"What is that?"
The Remnant bowed. "A memory vault. Sealed by the First Witnesses. It can show you the truth. Or consume you in it."
Zooni looked to the boy.
He nodded once.
She stepped forward, placed a hand to the bark, and whispered her name once more.
"Zooni."
The tree responded.
A dozen voices screamed. A hundred eyes opened in its trunk. A river of silver light spilled from its roots, and in it swam memories hers, not hers, all tangled.
She saw the Ashwrights burning villages with bottled grief.
She saw herself as a child, eyes covered with mourning veils, singing the names of the dead in a tongue that hadn't been spoken in five hundred years.
She saw the Vyethbound break its chains.
She saw herself cutting them.
And then darkness.
She fell.
The boy caught her.
When she woke, it was night.
The Remnant was gone.
But carved into the stone slab, fresh and still warm, were new words.
"The Thread Remembers. The War Rekindles."
The forest behind them was no longer quiet.
They rose.
And walked deeper in.