Nara did not speak.
She hadn't since the tide took her brother, since the village stopped singing, since the spiral stones grew cold. Her silence was not absence. It was rhythm. A listening that shaped the air around her.
Now the pearl pulsed against her chest.
Soft. Steady. Waiting.
She sat by the tidepool, tracing spirals into the sand with her fingertip. The shell beside her hummed faintly, its broken edge catching moonlight. The elder's gift lay nearby—a second shell, worn smooth, silent.
Nara pressed both shells together.
The pearl flared.
And the tidepool shimmered.
A memory bloomed—not hers. The pearl's.
A child walking the shore, humming to the tide.
A spiral carved into driftwood, glowing faintly.
A voice offered to the sea, not taken.
The child sang a single note.
And the tide answered.
Nara gasped.
The memory faded, but its rhythm remained. She traced it into the sand, into the shells, into the silence between waves. The spiral glowed. The elder watched from the rocks, tears in her eyes.
"You're not voiceless," she whispered. "You're listening."
Nara nodded.
She placed the shells in the tidepool and let the rhythm bloom. The pearl pulsed once, then stilled. And the sea whispered:
"She remembers."