Page 8 of The Shattered Rite
Green, for truths no tongue can tell.
She bound the braid with a worn strip of leather, torn from the very satchel her grandmother once carried into war. Three generations of hands had touched that leather. Three generations of women who bore fire in their blood and stayed silent through their grief.
She placed ember nests with care—one near the window, one beneath the hearth, and one at the door. Each one a promise: this home would not be left for strangers to tear apart.
The rites for the honored dead required more than mourning.
They requiredremembrance.
They requiredfire.
She built a pyre from stormwood logs her mother had saved for a midwinter feast.
Stormwood logs. Her mother's "no point hoarding good fire" stacked neatly for a feast that would never happen. Eliryn thought it fitting. If death had to come, let it come cloaked in warmth and old laughter.
She made the pyre on the small altar they had inside their cabin, set with wild herbs—lavender, juniper, dragonspine root—and laid the family crest etched in soft wood atop her mother’s chest.
And when all was ready, she stood beside the pyre and tilted her head back.
Then she sang.
Her throat caught halfway through, but she forced the sound out anyway. The song wasn't meant to sound pretty. It was meant to hurt. It was a song for the fallen—the warriors and dreamers who died with purpose in their mouths and fire in their lungs. Her people’s song. Her mother’s.
It tore through her like a storm, untamed and unbound, casting echoes that rang like warnings across the silence.
When the final note broke apart in her chest, from somewhere far beyond the trees, beyond the veil between what was and what would be—
Something breathed her name.
Eliryn opened her eyes.
The pendant at her neck pulsed once. Then twice.
It was almost time.
The world was still gray—not the blind kind of gray that clouded her eyes now, but the kind that came just before the sun crested the world. The kind that promised nothing, but left room for everything.
She moved through the house like a ghost, touching every surface. The basin by the door. The crack in the windowsill. The hearth where the last of the embers slept in silence. She didn’t need to see clearly in the dim light to know they were there.
She washed quickly, in silence. Her hands stung in the cold water. She didn't notice at first; grief numbed more than just her fingers. She took her hair roughly in hand and braided it tightly. A warrior’s braid. Her mother’s braid.
The armor came next.
Piece by piece, she dressed. Bracers. Greaves. Chestplate. The sigil over her heart—a dragon’s eye shadowed by a starburst—was nearly worn smooth. Her mother had fought for this. Bled for this. Died so Eliryn could wear it not in shame, but intruth.
The pendant she did not remove.
She tucked it under the armor, against her skin.
It beat now in rhythm with her heart.
When she reached the door, her hand paused on the carving in the frame. The old family words, carved long before Eliryn was born:
By Blood and Bond, We Prevail.
She bowed her head to it. Then opened the door.
The wind met her, cold and impersonal. Behind her, the house was full of ghosts and ash. Ahead of her, the road.
