Fog sat low over Kevarith like a hand pressed to the city's mouth.
It rolled in from the canals every few weeks, thick with salt and memory. Most stayed indoors when it came — not because of danger, but because the city became something else in the mist. Smaller. Softer. Less sure of itself.
Nehra liked it.
The fog made people quiet.
And she could think better when the world was too uncertain to argue.
---
She laid the woven offering cloth over her window — a patchwork of fiber-glass thread, swamp-stem, and dry-root burlap. Not beautiful. Not clean. But woven with care.
This morning was for the Weave Between — the name her mother used for what others called "luck" or "fate" or "why the wind shifts before a scream."
She scattered her herbs on the windowsill: star-clove, oil-dried citrus leaf, and whitestring root. Each one placed with a word that didn't exist anymore in Common, but meant something like "come gently, not loud."
As the final leaf hit the cloth, the fog shifted.
And someone walked past her door.
---
She hadn't seen the child before.
But she knew them.
Not in the neighborhood sense. In the weaving sense.
She saw the glow around their silhouette — not light, but distortion. Like a thread woven in reverse.
The child paused near her window.
Looked directly at her.
And Nehra — who had spent sixty years not fearing the strange — forgot how to breathe.
---
Kael stared for three heartbeats.
Then turned and walked toward the canal.
Nehra followed.
---
Tarren didn't notice Kael slip out. Mira was at the market, and Kael moved softly when they wanted to.
They didn't run. Didn't hide. Just walked.
As if the fog itself had invited them.
---
At the canal's edge, they sat on the stone lip beside the water and let their legs dangle.
Nehra caught up a moment later, winded but curious. She stood ten feet away.
Kael spoke without looking.
"You were chanting in the old tongue."
"You understood me?" Nehra asked, startled.
Kael nodded. "I think I always have."
Nehra's voice dropped. "You were born with it?"
Kael's face didn't change. "No. I remember it. From before I was born."
---
She sat down, slowly, leaving a respectful gap between them.
"That's not how memory works," she said gently.
"Not in this world," Kael agreed.
---
Nehra shivered.
Not from cold.
From truth.
She took out a thread — plain gray. Dull and scratchy.
She held it between her fingers and murmured: "Thread is only useful when it's in tension."
Kael watched her.
Then whispered, "That's why I'm here, isn't it?"
Nehra flinched.
"You're not supposed to know that," she whispered.
Kael turned to her now. "I know a lot of things I'm not supposed to."
---
Mira found them half an hour later, alarmed but trying not to show it.
Kael rose without protest and returned home with her.
Nehra didn't stop them.
She just watched the ripples on the water and murmured a prayer.
---
That night, Nehra lit a single black flame.
No oil. No wick. Just a pinch of whisper powder pressed into the hollow behind her old shrine's eye-socket idol.
The flame flickered green at first, then dimmed to blue.
That meant someone had seen her offering.
And whoever it was… hadn't refused it.
She hadn't lit the shrine in years. Not since her last dreamwalking went wrong and she'd seen too far into someone else's death.
But tonight, she needed answers.
---
She whispered old verses. The kind spoken in cracked tones, like bleeding wind through ruined cloth. Not spells. Not prayers.
Just phrases the world used to understand.
> "Reveal to me the thread, and I will not pull."
"Let me name the shape, and I will not draw it."
The air thickened. The blue flame swirled.
And Nehra saw a single image in her mind:
A mirror, cracked from the inside.
Behind the reflection — not a face.
But a void shaped like possibility.
She gasped.
Then smiled, weakly.
> "So that's what you are," she whispered. "You're a seam left open too long."
---
Elsewhere, in the little flat above the tannery, Mira tucked Kael into bed.
They had said little after returning from the canal.
But Mira had watched them all evening.
She'd noticed things.
How they whispered to themselves — not childishly, but rhythmically.
How they watched other people like they were trying to figure out a puzzle already solved once.
And when she handed Kael their carved trinket for comfort, they looked at it with too much familiarity.
Not "my toy."
More like: "my artifact."
---
"You were quiet today," Mira said softly.
Kael looked at her.
"I'm always quiet," they answered.
"You didn't used to be."
Kael didn't reply.
She knelt beside them. Brushed a strand of hair from their face.
"Is there something you want to tell me?"
A pause.
Then, very gently: "Yes. But not yet."
Mira's hand froze.
Not at the words — but the way they were spoken.
Measured. Deliberate. Kind.
Not a child's voice.
Not exactly.
---
Later that night, Mira sat on the rooftop, blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and stared at the stars.
Tarren joined her after a while.
"She's different," she said without turning.
"He," Tarren corrected again, calmly. "Today."
Mira smiled faintly. "Right. He."
Tarren sat beside her, letting the silence stretch.
Then Mira said something she hadn't said out loud before:
> "What if he's not ours?"
Tarren didn't respond right away.
Then: "You mean not by blood?"
"No. I mean… what if he belongs to something else? Something older?"
Tarren sighed. "Then we raise him like he is ours. Until someone proves otherwise."
They sat in silence a while longer.
Beneath them, Kael dreamed.
Not of this life.
But of threads pulling taut.