The old man was already dead when he reached him.
Not cold, but still. Slumped against the roots of a half burnt chinar, his blood curling into the dry mud like ink bleeding through parchment. A crow perched on the man's shoulder, unblinking.
A flick of the wrist. A pebble flew. The crow croaked and lifted off, wings slicing the silence.
He knelt beside the body, eyes scanning the dried blood, the positioning, the unnatural peace on the man's face.
"Throat's cut," he muttered, mostly to himself. "Clean. Ritual. Not bandit work."
A low whimper behind him.
He didn't turn. "You can come out. I heard your breath three hills ago."
From behind a crumbling milestone stepped a girl. Thirteen, perhaps younger, with mud streaked cheeks and knuckles raw from clutching her satchel. Her voice trembled, but her eyes didn't.
"You… you're one of them?" she asked. "A Sūmgar?"
He didn't reply. Instead, he touched the old man's forehead, closing the lids. Then rose slowly, brushing dried petals off his knees petals that had no business blooming this late in Chillai Kalan.
"The Dreyg did this," she insisted.
"No," he said, voice low. "This was done by someone who wanted it to look like the Dreyg."
He moved away from the corpse and scanned the treeline.
They stood on the edges of Vyethra's bend, where the river curled like a sleeping serpent, its surface still as mourning silk. The water was black, reflecting not sky but memory faint flashes of past laughter, screams, fire, and once, a kiss.
The girl stood beside him. "They say the river remembers everything."
He nodded. "It does. But it lies, too."
A silence stretched between them, broken only by the chirr of wind insects and the rustle of distant leaves. Something unseen moved beneath the river's skin not swimming, just shifting. Like a name on the tip of a tongue.
"They called him Maran Lal," the girl said, voice small. "He was a storyteller. He said words could burn down palaces. That's why they killed him."
He tilted his head. "Words do more than fire ever could."
From beneath his cloak, he pulled a small object a carved wooden bead, cracked with age.
"What's that?" the girl asked.
"One of the Ninety Nine."
He laid it gently on the old man's chest. "When you break it, it releases a memory. Doesn't matter whose. Sometimes the river shows you the right one."
The bead shimmered faintly. The river pulsed.
"What happens now?"
"Now," he said, "we walk. If we wait, this place will remember us too well."
They walked in silence, feet crunching over frost-cracked leaves, the trees above bare as bone. A wolf howled somewhere distant, or maybe it was something older.
"You don't speak much," she said after a while.
"I speak when there's something worth saying."
She glanced up at him. "What's your name?"
He didn't answer.
"I mean your real name. Not the one you give to strangers."
Still silence.
"Fine," she muttered. "I'll name you myself."
He didn't smile, but his eyes softened.
At the next rise, they paused. Below, the ruins of an old shrine loomed moss-covered stones, cracked idols, symbols half-erased by time and fire. He knelt there for a moment, fingers brushing the glyphs.
"The Vyeth once flowed through here," he said. "Before the forgetting."
"What forgetting?"
He didn't answer, but the wind did a low groan, like breath through broken flutes.
They moved on.
In the trees, something watched.