Yuvale was a valley that breathed in red.
Every dusk the flowers lit up, not with fire, but with a quiet pulse that made roofs and faces glow. People called them Yu flowers. Old stories said they came from a promise the sky once made to the earth.
Yuj and Yun grew up under that glow.
They were the two the old woman Miri had carried home on the same rain-split night. No one knew whose blood they had, only that the flowers brightened when the babies cried and gentled when they slept. Miri used to joke that the valley could hear them.
"Then it should hear this," Yun said, cupping a bloom and whispering secrets into its petals.
"What did you tell it?" Yuj asked.
"That you never listen."
He listened to Yun more than anyone.
Their hut smelled of herbs and river wind. Miri sold salves and wove wreaths for spring rites. Yuj split kindling, hauled water, fell out of trees he had no business climbing. Yun learned names—plant names, star names, winds that changed the weather if you asked politely.
On market days they raced to the ridge where the flower sea began. The valley dropped away like a bowl there, filled with crimson waves. Lanterns hung low, as if too tired to float higher.
"Look," Yun said. "They're breathing."
"They're showing off," Yuj said, and tried to make his own breath match the rhythm.
Miri said the flowers did not burn because they were not fire. They were memory."Sometimes memory looks like flame," she added, tucking a ribbon through Yun's hair. "Sometimes it looks like mercy."
"Which am I?" Yuj asked, puffing out his chest.
"Trouble," Miri said, and kissed the top of his head.
They were not rich. They did not need to be. The valley paid in kindness more often than coin. The baker kept crusts for them. The tanner let Yuj hammer nails into useless leather until he learned where not to hit his thumb.
When Miri's cough came in winter, neighbors left smoked fish and boiled pears at the door.
The cough did not leave.
It was the kind of leaving that happens slow. She showed Yun how to grind leaves into paste that pulled heat from the skin. She showed Yuj how to stack wood so it would dry right. She made them swear they would look after each other longer than the valley had words for.
"Where will you go?" Yun asked, trying to smile in the brave way she used for Yuj's sake.
"Nowhere that will not bring me back," Miri said. "The valley keeps what it loves."
After they buried her beneath a ring of Yu blooms, Yuj and Yun did not speak for a day. On the second day they spoke too much. On the third they laughed at a joke neither had finished telling.
The next week Yuj challenged the river to a race.
"Rivers don't race," Yun said, standing on the bank with a basket on her hip.
"They do when they're losing," he said, and leaped in.
He came back with a cut on his shoulder and a grin that hurt his face.
Yun cleaned the cut with water and salt. "You can't keep doing this," she said.
"Doing what?"
"Running toward the red things."
"Some red things are good. Apples. Carp flags. Your ribbon."
She tied off the bandage with a tug. "Some red things are warnings."
He touched the ribbon behind her ear and didn't argue.
That night the valley glowed as usual, but the air felt thicker, as if the flowers were waiting.
End of Chapter 1.