First message
The rain has washed the mud of the feud's main road into a slurry of kicked-up straw and contempt, and I've learned to stand so still against the tannery wall that even drunks assume I'm a statue. That's when I see her—pushing through the crowd near the well, ears slicing through a tangle of wet leaves tangled in hair the colour of heartwood. Elf. I know the word from Elder Marus's half-rotted books, but I've never seen the flesh of one, and she does not recoil. She doesn't even blink at my seven feet, my dappled flank, the hooves that have made mothers cross streets. She only stares with eyes the shade of moss on a north-facing stone, and I understand it in the space between one heartbeat and the next: not bravery, not curiosity—innocence. She has never been taught to fear me because there is no one left to teach her. My throat tightens. I step forward—one slow hoofbeat—and my voice comes out rougher than I meant. "You don't know what I am, do you?" She shakes her head, a tiny motion. I exhale something that wants to be a laugh but arrives as a ache. "Neither do I. Not anymore. But I think... we just met the only other ghost who didn't know they were haunting." Her kind is dead, too. And in a world that flinches from my shadow, this stranger offers me the first gift I've received since Marus died—the quiet, terrible recognition of an ending that recognizes itself.