POV: Mara
Old Haru’s bench is empty at breakfast. The wooden slats still hold the shape of him somehow, like his weight hasn’t realized it should be gone. By noon, Pia says, “He’s late,” but she says it with a forced shrug, like late is a harmless word. By dusk, someone whispers, “He’s sleeping,” and no one corrects them. By nightfall, he isn’t breathing.
I find him in the washing room, where the air always smells like soap and cold stone. He looks too small on the long table, as if the room grew bigger just to make him vanish. A clean cloth covers his face. His hat rests on his chest like it’s protecting him from something the living can’t see. My hands shake, then go very still. I fold the cloth back with my fingertips, careful like he might scold me if I rush.
“Hey,” I whisper. My voice tries to break but holds. “I brought the pear you hate.”
The stupid pear sits in my pocket, bruising against my hip. He always said pears tasted like soft lies. I swallow hard. He looks… lighter. Unanchored. Like a story already told and shelved. Aster presses her palm against my heart—soft, steady, a quiet command: don’t drown.
Silvie steps beside me and sets a tin box near his hat. It clinks softly. “He asked for you,” she says. Her voice is gentle in the way only someone who has held grief too long can manage. “Left this.”
I open the tin. Inside: a ring. Not fancy, not simple. Silver, worn smooth, Moonfell sigils etched around the band like little secrets marching in a circle. Inside the ring, a thin groove. Hidden unless you know to look. The kind of thing Haru loved—quiet tricks, invisible truths.
My name trips in my mouth. “Why would he…?”
“He said your mother wore one,” Silvie murmurs. “He said you’d know what it meant when you needed to.”
I don’t. Gods, I don’t. I don’t know anything except that he’s gone and this metal is warm like it remembers a hand and wishes it had one more moment inside it.
Pia squeezes my shoulders from behind—firm, grounding—and that breaks me. My knees buckle. I bend over the table and cry the way a roof cries in a storm: loud, messy, relentless. My tears hit Haru’s sleeve and sink into the cloth like they belong there. Silvie rubs circles on my back. No advice. Bless her for that.
“Say something,” Pia whispers, crying too. Her tears sound smaller, sharper.
“His rhymes were bad,” I choke out. “He cheated on the counts. I told him every time.”
“He did,” she says, laughing through tears. “He absolutely did.”
“And he stole muffins.”
“And pretended the crumbs weren’t his.”
“And he snored like a dragon eating pebbles.”
We laugh and cry at the same time. It feels like being torn in two directions and held in place anyway.
I slide the ring into my pocket because I can’t put it on. Not yet. It feels like a door handle. And I am not ready to open anything tonight.
The washing room feels too quiet. Too final. I leave before the walls start remembering sounds that hurt.
In the corridor, I blink against the lamp glow. My eyes sting. Everything looks fuzzed at the edges. And then Cael is there—leaning against the stone, posture taut, expression gentled in a way he never lets anyone else see. A wall that learned softness. A soldier trying to be human.
He looks at me and something breaks across his face like a shutter slamming open. “Haru?” he asks, voice low, almost reverent.
I nod. I can’t make the word leave my mouth. It feels too big.
He steps closer. Stops himself. Then moves anyway. His hand rises—a breath from touching my cheek—then falls, careful not to cross a line he thinks might hurt me. It still feels like a touch. A warmth. A promise.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “He was loud and good at the same time.”
I swallow a ragged breath. “He called me by her name,” I whisper. “My mother’s. He mixed us up. I used to get angry about it. And then I loved it. And now… I don’t know what to do with any of it.”
“You grieve,” he says simply. His voice sounds like a blanket pulled over a shaking body.
“I’m tired of grieving men I didn’t get to keep.” The words slip out without permission. They crack open something I didn’t know I was holding shut.
His eyes soften, heat and sorrow mixing like stormlight. He looks like he wants to hold my face, pull me into him, say a promise he can’t keep and shouldn’t try to. He doesn’t. Instead, quietly: “What did he leave you?”
“A ring,” I say. I touch the pocket but don’t show him. Not yet. Not until I know if it’s a key or a lock.
“Keep it,” he says. “Even if you hate it.”
We stand in the half-dark, breathing in the same small space. The quiet between us presses like warm hands. Heavy and kind.
Then Jax jogs in—boots loud enough to wake the dead if they felt like listening. He slows when he sees my face, his expression cracking at the edges. “Sorry,” he says softly, almost like he’s afraid to bruise the air. Then to Cael: “Orders from the Regent. Bridge Fortify. War budgets unlocked.”
My stomach drops. The ring suddenly feels heavier in my pocket.
“War,” I say.
“War,” Cael echoes. His face closes one inch—the kind of closing that means he’s about to carry something on his shoulders for too long, without complaint, without sleep, without letting anyone take even a corner of the weight.
And the corridor feels smaller. And the world feels closer. And Haru’s ring burns warm against my leg like it knows something I don’t yet.
Something coming. Something big.