The other girl shrugged. “Maybe it’s a spell.”
They giggled and darted off, unaware that the spiral would vanish before the hour ended, leaving only damp stone behind.
Whispers spread quickly—posters smudging, bonfire space feeling ‘off’—the kind of small omens townsfolk laughed about, but still carried home in silence.
None of it disrupted the festival. Not really. But beneath every vendor’s stall, every ribbon-laced garland, something else coiled—a tension unspoken, a thread between worlds. And like the thread in Leonarth’s dream, it hummed just below the noise.
The townspeople often recalled how, just last autumn, the river had risen without warning, cutting off entire neighborhoods from aid. The official reports called it a freak natural occurrence, but even then, whispers circulated—had it truly been weather, or something else stirring beneath the surface of the Seine? Father Maurice had noticed the signs before anyone else: subtle tremors in the ground, unusual pull in the current, a strange resonance in the air during evening prayer. Whether it was intuition, deep knowledge, or something more, no one could say.
He had acted swiftly, mobilizing volunteers and transforming the Abbey into a refuge before emergency services could respond. The dining hall, scented with soup and old wax, filled with frightened children and whispered prayers. Maurice never spoke of how he knew, brushing off questions with his usual humor. But Leonarth, then only twelve, remembered how the priest had stood silently at the river’s edge that night, staring into the water long after the danger had passed, as if listening to something only he could hear.
He had returned alone, long after the townspeople had retreated and the last of the frightened families were safe within the Abbey. The rain had slowed to a cold mist, clinging to his coat and silvering the grass like frost. The Seine pulsed below, swollen and dark, its surface an unbroken mirror of the starless sky.