“Leave it,” Ava said again. “The mist will still be here when you have washed, and you have school to attend.”
He did not step over the crescent he had drawn. He backed away from it, as if the mark were a bead of light stretched thin and he did not wish to snap it.
He turned at last and began to follow Ava back toward the Abbey. From here, he could see the rooftops of the city—the charm was the quiet kind—undramatic, but enduring. Rows of ochre-stoned houses leaned toward one another as if sharing secrets over narrow lanes. The bell tower of Saint‑Spire Abbey chimed with a voice older than the town’s oldest baker, echoing across tiled rooftops and washing lines. Sundays brought the smell of brioche and incense; Tuesdays, the murmur of market gossip in three languages. Most days, the town moved in rhythm with the river and its rituals.
Children were taught to count on the swings of the town’s ancient iron gate. Teens marked their growth against the ivy that climbed the eastern Abbey wall. There was a story for every crack in the cobblestones, and no one quite agreed on which stories were true.
Some whispered that the Abbey had once housed a prince in hiding. Others claimed its wine cellar held tunnels carved during wars that no longer appeared in textbooks. And once a year, when winter fog crept too early and stayed too long, old women would murmur that the town “remembered more than it let on.” Most brushed such things off with a shrug. Still, no one walked alone past the bell tower after midnight.
Leonarth raised his head, and saw the Abbey walls looming larger with every step, rising like a tide of stone as he trailed after Ava. He had grown up within those walls, sometimes feeling the weight of both history and memory pressing in, even as he tried to press back. And lately, that same mist, the one he had just left curling at the field’s edge, seemed to linger longer than it should—not just in the air, but in his thoughts, in dreams he couldn’t quite recall, and in the way the wind sometimes whispered his name when no one was around.