Ash's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Every morning Ash stood at the tower door with an envelope she could not deliver. The letter had one job: reach the person meant to open it. But the paper was blank on both sides. No name. No mark. Just wax the color of dried blood and her own cold hands holding it. She had waited eleven days. People passed on the forest path. A woodcutter. Two children with baskets. A woman with a limp. Ash studied each face and felt nothing pull. The envelope stayed quiet. It would not tell her who. Today she tried something new. She pressed the letter against the tower's carved door, hoping the old runes might wake it. Nothing. She held it up to the barred window. Nothing. Vines hung from the stone, green and stubborn. She was running out of ideas and time. The wax had begun to crack. Beside the path stood a squat stone lantern, its center hollow, its surface worn soft by rain. Ash had passed it a hundred times. Now she noticed the window in its body framed empty air, like a mouth waiting to be filled. She knelt and set the envelope inside. The stone warmed. A pale light rose in the hollow, and the light did not stay still. It leaned. It pointed, like a finger, toward the dark water beyond the trees. She followed it to a pool at the tower's foot. Something moved under the surface. Then it broke the water — a shark, small and sleek, its grey skin lit with runes that glowed pink and blue. Its eyes were purple and far too knowing. It had guarded her since the beginning. She had felt it watching, but never seen it whole. "You've kept me from harm," Ash said. "Now keep me from wasting. Who opens this?" The shark circled once. Then it rose higher and pressed its snout to the wax seal. The runes on its body flared. On the blank envelope, ink bled up through the paper, slow and dark, forming a single line. Ash read it. Not a name. A trait. "The one who has forgotten their own voice." She sat back on the wet stone. The shark sank away, its light fading under the water. For eleven days she had wanted any clue at all. Now she had one, and it made her stomach tighten. A name she could shout on the path. A trait like this hid inside a person. She could not see forgetting. She could not call it out loud. To find someone who had lost their own voice, she would have to make strangers speak — and listen for the silence where a voice used to be. Ash tucked the envelope into her grey coat. She stood, turned from the tower, and walked into the trees. The search had a shape now. It just wasn't the shape she wanted.