He wondered, suddenly, back to the fog, and if it could keep secrets. If maybe it was storing them in the hollows of the field or gardens of the Abbey, waiting for the right morning to let them go.
Ava stopped so suddenly he almost struck her back. He stared after her, heart ticking a little too loudly in his chest. She’d raised him, more than anyone else. Since he was five. She had been constant, kind—distant in ways he didn’t fully understand. But this morning, their walk back to the Abbey in silence felt heavier. Not angry. Just… full. Like she carried too much and didn’t know where to put it.
He pressed his thumb into the edge of the glass shard in his pocket and felt the warmth it collected from being so close to his body. It comforted him, unusually and familiarly at the same time. The dream came back to his mind, but like most days it was already gone. But its feeling—that strange, invisible yearning—remained.
Ava stared back. “You always stare like that,” she muttered.
Leonarth blinked. “Like what?”
“Like you’re waiting for something that forgot you.”
He raised and lowered his shoulders and did not answer. He wanted to tell her about the bell in the mist that had no rust. He wanted to ask if she had ever heard it, if anyone in town had, and whether they were all ignoring it out of practicality, the way people ignore the fact that winter eventually arrives. He wanted to ask her why she had said the word memory the way someone names a ghost without inviting it to sit.
He said none of that.