THREE

Chapter Three: Ember of the Child

Wind moves through pine the way breath moves through thought , quiet, recursive, aware of its own leaving. The night’s edge glows with the faint residue of dawn, a light that hasn’t yet committed. Smoke threads upward from a low fire, silver against the dark.

Vael crouches beside it, rubbing his palms near the coals. His hands are rough , earth-stained, cut , but steady. He watches the smoke find patterns above the flames, folding and loosening, never deciding what to be.

Sel: You built a fire before you had words for warmth.

Vael: And still, I can’t name what it gives back.

Sel: It gives shape. You mistake that for comfort.

He stirs the ashes with a stick. A red vein shows beneath the gray, still alive. The scent is sharp , resin, char, something wild and clean. Above, the sky spills one faint line of light across the mountains, silvering the frost on the grass.

He speaks without planning to.

Vael: He’s small. So small.

Sel: That’s how beginnings work.

Vael: I didn’t expect it to feel like this , as if something inside me turned outward, asking to be named again.

Sel: You’ve built another echo.

Vael: A heartbeat, not an echo.

The fire snaps, sending up a brief, perfect spark. It hangs midair longer than it should, then vanishes.

Sel: You’ve started to believe the world listens.

Vael: Maybe it does. Maybe he will.

He leans closer to the flame, the smoke curling into his eyes. It stings; tears gather, uninvited. He blinks and the landscape trembles , earth, fire, and the long dark shape of the forest rising like an old god stretching.

Sel: Tell me what you saw before he came.

Vael: Wolves.

Sel: Of course.

Vael: They came in sleep , not hunting, not hunted. Just walking. Their breath smoked in the cold and didn’t vanish. They looked back once, as if to say, We are not leaving you behind.

Sel: You take omens like a thirsty man drinks salt.

Vael: Maybe. But when I woke, I could still hear them breathing.

The wind shifts. It tastes of pine sap and distance. A thin frost spreads across the stones near his knees.

Sel: You think he will save you from your own forgetting.

Vael: No. I think he’ll teach me what I forgot.

Sel: Which is?

Vael: Wonder. The clean kind. The kind that doesn’t use words like “purpose.”

Sel: And when he learns to speak?

Vael: Then I’ll listen harder.

He picks up a charred branch and presses its black tip against his palm until it leaves a mark. The skin smokes faintly. He doesn’t flinch.

Sel: That’s not a blessing.

Vael: It’s a reminder.

Sel: Of what?

Vael: That warmth costs.

The wind quiets. The first true light breaks over the ridge , a slow gold bleeding into blue. For a moment, the valley looks suspended between worlds: one half shadow, one half flame.

Vael stands. The cold air moves through him and he feels both heavy and emptied.

Sel: What will you tell him?

Vael: When he’s thirty-six, I’ll tell him that the world never explains itself, but it answers in texture. In sound. In the small spaces between breath.

Sel: And if he doesn’t believe you?

Vael: Then he’ll find his own river to listen to.

Sel: You want him to carry you.

Vael: No. I want him to outgrow me.

He kneels again, feeding the fire with one dry branch. The flame licks it slowly, patient, grateful.

Sel: You’ve made him an altar.

Vael: A mirror.

Sel: Same thing, if you stare long enough.

He doesn’t answer. The sky clears another inch. The frost softens and drips from the stones, the sound delicate as whispered laughter. He cups his hands over the flame and inhales the heat , not to own it, but to remember its weight.

Vael: There’s a moment between breath and word , that’s where truth hides.

Sel: Then stay there.

Vael: I can’t. He’ll wake soon.

Sel: Let him. Let him see what silence looks like before he learns its names.

The light climbs higher. The fire burns low, a quiet pulse against the wind. Vael stands in it , the wolf at dawn, the serpent’s voice still coiled around his ribs , and the air itself feels new, as if the world has just remembered to breathe again.

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