The Weight of Forgetting
The fire came for her again, as it always did.
Elara stood at the center of it—not the girl who ground chamomile into powder and swept the floors of Master Bellweather's shop, but someone else, someone taller, someone whose hands moved through the flames like they belonged there. Smoke curled around her ankles in living ropes. Somewhere beyond the wall of orange light, a woman screamed a name that was not Elara, syllables that slid through her mind like water through cupped fingers, impossible to hold. The sound cracked something open in her chest, and pain bloomed white-hot across her sternum, precisely where the silver scar lay hidden beneath her nightclothes.
*Kaelith.* Or something close to it. The shape of the word remained after the sound of it dissolved, the way a shout leaves an echo in an empty hall.
She woke with her fingers clawed into the quilt and her heart hammering against her ribs like something trying to escape.
For a long moment, Elara only breathed. The rafters above her narrow bed came into focus first—old wood, water-stained, hung with bundles of drying lavender and yarrow that Master Bellweather insisted worked better cured in darkness. Then the window,…
