Page 82 of Aïdes the Unseen
His gaze lingered on me. With a slow shift in his weight, he leaned slightly forward, both hands folded loosely around his mug. “My turn.”
A subtle shift. Not predatory. But intent.
I swallowed. “All right.”
Graven’s voice dropped, soft but steady. “If you could do anything—beanything—without limits or barriers… What would you do?”
The question landed like thunder in a quiet room. The puppy, lying half-curled at my feet, let out a small whine and leaned gently against my boot again, grounding me. Like hefeltit too.
I blinked. My mouth opened, but no words came.
“I don’t mean in theory,” Graven said, gentler now, almost coaxing. “Not what’s safe. Not what you’ve already settled for. I mean the thing that sits at the back of your mind like a door you’ve never let yourself open.”
My fingers curled slightly around the cup. I didn’t answer right away. BecauseI didn’t know.Or maybe I did. Maybe I always had. But I’d never been brave enough to name it. Something moved in my chest. Like a vine brushing the edge of a memory. Somethingold.Somethingsacred.
“I think…” I began, hesitantly, “I’d build something. Not a company or a brand. Not even a museum. Something alive. A place.”
He didn’t interrupt.
“A sanctuary,” I said, the word trembling on my tongue. “Something part garden, part temple. Part archive. I don’t even know what I’d call it. I just know I’d want it toremember.And I’d want it towelcomepeople who don’t know where they belong and people who don’t have a place to rest.”
I looked at him then, and everything in me was raw and wide open.
“I’d want to make that place real,” I whispered. “Even if no one believed it could be.”
The silence between us split wide—sacred, shimmering, and full of things we didn’t say. For the first time since I met him, Graven looked like he didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t surewhether it was because he didn’t believe it or if it was becausehe did.
Graven hadn’t spoken in over a minute. Yet the silence didn’t feel empty—it feltchargedwith understanding. A stillness that settled over us like dust in a long-undisturbed room.
He knew—reallyknew—that what I’d said wasn’t just personal. It was structural. A hidden beam beneath everything I am, quiet for years, never named aloud.
His eyes never left mine, and in his steady gaze, I felt something shift—not in him, but in me. Like he held up a mirror to a truth I’d almost forgotten was mine.
Then he murmured, almost like a vow, “You could build it, you know. A place like that.”
“Could I?” I asked, half-laughing, half-hollow.
“You already carry the blueprint,” he said softly. “Some places are people first. They just don’t know it yet.”
It shouldn’t have made my heart beat faster. But it did.
I looked down, biting the edge of my lip. The puppy bumped my ankle again, his tail flicking once like approval. I reached down without thinking and ruffled his ears.
“Okay,” I said, voice quieter now. “Another one.”
Graven tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment. His stillness didn’t unsettle me anymore. It felt like safety.
“If you weren’t doing what you do now…” I trailed off, then smiled faintly. “What would you be if you were allowed tojustbe? Not a role. Not a job. Just… Graven.”
His eyes softened, then he dropped his gaze to the table like the answer might be hiding in the grain of the wood.
“I’m not sure I remember how to just be,” he said, a thread of something mournful threading his voice. “But if I could… I’d want to be someone who rememberspeopleinstead of managing them. Someone who helped them stay tethered to the lives they wanted, not the ones they were told to accept.”
A pause.
Then: “I think I’d want to be a lighthouse.”
I blinked. “A what?”
