Saoirse the Forgotten's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Saoirse knelt in the sand, fingers brushing a curved piece of bronze half-buried in the tide. The metal sang like Tuesday mornings, that particular shade of loss she remembered from breakfast tables that no longer existed. She lifted it carefully. The bronze fragment locked into place against another piece in her threadbare satchel. Together they formed a wheel. No—a calendar. Sunspear runes blazed golden across its face, marking feast days she'd attended wearing silk the color of summer wheat. She'd danced at the harvest festivals. She'd braided ribbons into children's hair. The statue this wheel had crowned must have stood in the temple courtyard, counting down days until the empire's last dawn. Her hands trembled. She dropped the pieces back into her bag and turned toward the cliffs, where moonlight might show her something—anything—that wasn't ten thousand years of ash. But the moonlight led her inland instead, past tide pools and through sea grass, to a structure she'd walked past three hundred times without seeing. Vines peeled back from white columns as she approached. Golden symbols glowed across the stone face. A sun temple. The same runes from the calendar wheel covered its walls. Inside the shadowed doorway, she saw more bronze pieces scattered across cracked tiles. She could map them. Chart them. Add them to her collection of broken things. Or she could assemble the calendar and learn exactly how many days the Sunspear Empire had left when someone built this temple. When someone still believed time could be measured. When someone still thought counting mattered. She stepped through the doorway.