When the strange boy reached the center of the village, all movement paused.
The charms dropped from the children's hands. Water spirits dissolved into mist. Elders turned their faces—not in disdain, but instinct. The way prey avoids the gaze of something not yet a predator… but not far.
Casamir did not bow. He did not speak.
He stood at the threshold of Thornmere—rain-damp, threadworn—like something carved from the ruin of another world, dusted in ash it had never earned.
One child began to weep. A woman hushed her quickly.
An old man crossed his heart.
A dog howled once, then backed into shadow.
The Hermit raised a hand—not to silence, but to still.
"He is not to be touched," the Hermit said. "And not to be feared."
But fear does not leave by command.
It coils in bone.
It listens to the breath between words.
So they obeyed—but they did not welcome.
—
The Hermit gave him a hut by the southern ring—where the stones whispered, and the trees still breathed freely. A place just beyond welcome.
The hut was round. Low. Earth-scented. The walls were veiled in thread-maps and decaying weavings—sigils of magic long since silenced. At night, some pulsed faintly.
Not with power.
With memory.
"This place doesn't belong to you," the Hermit said. "But it may keep you. Until something does."
Casamir nodded. He did not ask to stay. And yet, that first night, lying on the mat and listening to the forest breathe through the slatted window—he didn't dream of escape.
He dreamt only of stillness.
And the unfamiliar weight of surviving it.
—
The next day, Casamir awoke.
Not entirely foreign—but far from familiar.
Light filtered through the hut like stone exhaling a long-held breath.
The air was sweet. In smell. In taste.
He sat silently and took it all in.
His thoughts wandered—unbidden—back to Karnox. The war-torn world. The steel. The silence. The burning. The eyes of those he—
A knock interrupted him.
Soft. Rhythmic. Like a question given shape.
Casamir stood and opened the door.
The Hermit entered without word or ceremony. He carried a bowl of tea that steamed like breath left out in winter.
He set it down.
Then sat, folding long legs beneath him, staff resting across his knees.
"I do not know what you are," the Hermit said, "but I have known long enough to ask."
Casamir tilted his head.
"Where do you come from, child?"
He hesitated. Then:
"Karnox."
The name was heavy. Not just in syllables. In meaning.
The Hermit blinked slowly. The tea rippled once in the bowl. A strand of woven moss on the wall curled inward.
"I have never heard that name," the Hermit murmured. "And yet the silence around it is too loud."
He regarded Casamir again—not as a guest, but as a question unspoken by the world.
"What is Karnox?" he asked gently.
Casamir breathed out.
"A world of steel. Of hunger and fight. Skyless. Faithless. Gone."
The Hermit closed his eyes. His face did not change. But something in the room did.
"I thought as much."
"You've heard of it?"
"No," said the Hermit. "But I've seen others who carry that weight. A sound beneath their step. Like something that remembers a war… even when they do not speak of it."
He leaned forward.
"You are not of this world."
Casamir didn't respond.
"You've fallen through," the Hermit said, voice low. "Not from sky. Not from place. From pattern. You come from a world that no longer touches this one. And yet… here you are."
Casamir frowned. "What do you mean, pattern?"
The Hermit motioned to the weavings on the wall.
"This world is not shaped by stone or sky," he said. "It is shaped by meaning. Memory. Breath. Some call it thread. Some call it music. Some call it dream. But all of it is alive."
Casamir's eyes narrowed. "Magic?"
"If that word helps," the Hermit smiled.
He tapped his staff to the floor once.
The bowl of tea shimmered—then lifted—spinning into a spiral of soft light, silent and slow.
"Here, even stillness remembers," he said. "Even your silence has weight."
Casamir watched the spiral rotate.
For the first time in days, he asked a question.
"Why did it bring me here?"
The Hermit looked out through the slats, to the breathing forest beyond.
"That," he said softly, "is a question the world may not be ready to answer. But I believe… it brought you not because you were prepared."
He met the boy's eyes.
"But because you were unfinished."
Casamir turned the words over. Unfinished.
He had fought to survive, not to become. In Karnox, survival was becoming. There was no becoming past that.
"But I didn't ask to come," he said.
"Very few do," the Hermit replied. "And fewer still arrive whole."
There was a pause.
The Hermit reached for the bowl again and handed it to him. The spiral of light had faded, but the warmth remained.
"You are in a place called Thornmere," he said. "A village on the edge of the Outer Reach. A quiet place, beneath the Empire's breath."
Casamir held the bowl but did not drink.
The Hermit's gaze sharpened slightly.
"And the world itself…" he paused. Then spoke with care. "This realm has a name. But you must not hold it too long."
Casamir looked up.
"Auralis," the Hermit said. "The world you now walk. It is a name like song. A name that was once whispered by gods. Forgotten by tyrants. Remembered only by silence."
The name hummed.
Auralis.
It shimmered in his chest like light trapped beneath water.
"Now," the Hermit said quietly. "Forget it."
Casamir blinked.
"I mean it," the Hermit said, suddenly stern. "Speak it aloud, and it may see you. Remember it, and it may follow you. Forget it—and it may allow you to remain."
Casamir nodded, slowly.
And just like that, the name began to blur at the edge of his memory. As if the act of forgetting was not erasure—but mercy.
"You are like a wrong note played in a familiar song," the Hermit said after a while. "But sometimes, the wrong note teaches the melody where it can go next."
Casamir sipped the tea.
It was bitter at first. Then deep. Then warm.
Like something old
…remembering it had once been sweet.
The warmth of the tea settled in his chest slowly—unrushed, like a memory returning on its own terms. He closed his eyes, just for a moment.
It didn't chase the cold away.
It reminded him he could still feel it.
He opened his eyes again.
The Hermit hadn't moved. He watched Casamir with a gaze that did not prod, did not pry—only waited, like soil waiting for a buried truth to push upward.
Casamir ran his thumb along the edge of the bowl. Rough clay. Hand-shaped. A thread of fire still clung to it, faint but alive.
"Unfinished," he murmured aloud, tasting the word like ash.
He wanted to ask what it meant.
He wanted to deny it.
But the Hermit had already turned back to the window slats, where the trees breathed, and the light dappled the wall like shifting song.
Outside, something moved—barely.
A rustle in the moss. A thread of wind that passed too precisely to be chance.
The world, too, had heard the word.
Casamir set the bowl down carefully. As if afraid it might crack under the weight of meaning.
The Hermit rose.
"You'll feel the difference soon enough," he said. "Between stillness and stagnation. Between silence and forgetting."
Then, quieter:
"Between being lost… and being unfinished."
And with that, he left.
Casamir sat alone.
Rain had started again—soft this time, like memory falling gently instead of grief.
He looked at the weavings on the walls. Some pulsed faintly.
Not with power.
With memory.
He lay back on the mat. Let the warmth in his chest stay.
He didn't know this world.
But for now, it hadn't sent him away.
And that was enough.