The hall smelled of damp stone, beeswax, and wool that never truly dried. Someone had dragged in a charcoal brazier, but the smoke only climbed to the rafters and sulked there, hiding among the beams. Along the back wall, a row of funeral bells lay on wooden cradles, wrapped in black cloth and bound with rope, like sleeping animals the villagers did not dare to pet. The rest was wooden benches, floorboards full of scratches, and the small desperate noises of people pretending not to be afraid.
Mora knelt on the flagstones with a stick of chalk between her fingers. The chalk left a thin, decisive line. Following behind, a farmer with a scar on his cheek poured salt in tidy arcs, glancing toward the door as if dread would be polite enough to knock first. Miri moved in the opposite direction, double-checking each curve so it matched Mora's pattern: an outer bracelet of salt, an inner bracelet of ash, a ring of seven stubby candles on small chipped saucers.
Thimble hopped from bench to bench, leaving tiny wet prints the way only a shadow-raven could. He stole a button from a child's sleeve. The child blinked at the loose thread and felt for it, unsure whether the button had ever existed. Thimble fake-coughed. Mora did not look up.
"Stop collecting currency," she said, her hand still drawing.
"It was loose," said Thimble. "Therefore, morally abandoned."
"Put it back."
He clamped his beak shut. The button reappeared with theatrical reluctance. Miri hid a smile behind her hair.
Outside the latticed windows, the wind scraped the road with a river's patience. A rope on the bell frame outside could be heard, old fibers complaining under their own weight. The bell itself was silent. Not those bells, not yet. The ones wrapped inside the hall were death-bells, the kind you rang once and then heard resound in your skull for the rest of your life.
Warden Pike (a worried man in a coat that was too stiff, his authority like armor not yet fitted to the body) stood near the door, watching Mora's hands. "If… if this works," he said, "the milking will be safe. The cows… last week… some said… their eyes."
"They will be fine," said Mora. Her tone was flat and clipped, not unkind. "Do not answer if it speaks. Do not give it a name. Do not describe what it looks like."
"All right," said Pike. He swallowed. "We gathered what you asked for. Beeswax candles. Ash from the oldest hearth. Fibers from the west bell-rope. And…"
"A confession," said Mora.
Pike flinched as if the word itself had teeth. "That."
Miri's hand paused over a candle. "Why do the candles need a confession again?" she asked, soft enough for Mora, loud enough that three villagers stopped pretending not to listen.
"Because truth burns cleaner than lies," said Mora. "And a cleaner flame leaves fewer places for something to hide."
Miri considered this, then turned her candle until the chip on the saucer's rim faced forward, a small flaw displayed like a face. "Does the truth need to be… big?"
"What matters is that it is true," said Mora.
Pike cleared his throat. "And we may… confess to the candle? Not… I mean, we are not… in front of everyone?"
"To the candle," said Mora. "It does not repeat what it eats."
The scarred farmer whispered thanks to a god he did not truly believe in and kept pouring salt.
Mora closed the circle, tapped the chalk twice against her palm, and stood. The candles looked poor and small on the stone. She checked them anyway: wicks trimmed, saucers steady, each set on the compass points and their in-betweens. Her movements were spare, with no wasted flourish. She had the look of someone who could peel an apple into one unbroken ribbon without glancing at the knife.
Miri drifted a step closer to the wrapped bells. She did not touch the cloth. She was twelve years old, old enough to know her limits, most of the time. "Are these only for the dead?" she asked.
"Mostly," said Maela, the bell-warden, from her bench without lifting her head. Her old hands were wet with soap; tonight she would wash everything. The benches. The door. The ropes. The fear. "Sometimes for the almost-dead. Or the slow-dying that makes you angry. But you do not tell them who is who. Bells do not like to know ahead of time."
Miri nodded as if it were instantly logical. "Do they… hear us?"
"If you ring them," said Maela. "If not, they are dreaming."
Mora gave Miri a look that meant: not now. Miri stored her questions with all the others she had, too many to hold at once, so some fell around her feet at the wrong moments.
"All right," said Mora, straightening. "Listen. We will light the ward. You will feel the room… thicken. That is the boundary settling. If anyone speaks, speak softly. If you must cough, do it into your sleeve. If something knocks, do not answer. If anything asks for your name…"
"We do not," chorused the villagers, bright with the safety of memorized rules. "We do not."
The corner of Mora's mouth lifted. Approval. "Good. Warden, you begin with the confession for the first candle. Maela, the second. We go clockwise. If a candle will not light, we try again. If it still will not, I will light the circle anyway and someone owes me a better truth before morning."
Pike nodded, pale. He approached the first candle with the nervous authority of a groom on the wrong wedding day, knelt, and folded his hands like a man who is sorry, not pious. He looked at Mora.
"Speak," said Mora. "Then breathe on the wick."
Pike wetted his lips. "I, uh… last winter I told my son we could not spare the last flour, but I… I ate bread at Maela's. Two rolls. I told myself I had to keep my strength for…" He wiped his face. "That was a lie. I was hungry and I chose myself."
He leaned in and breathed. The candle caught with a flicker of doubt, like a moth deciding to be born.
One small flame. The room eased by the width of a fingertip.
"Good," Mora said gently. "Next."
Maela's confession was clean and quick, like a bell-stroke. "Sometimes I ring for people who are not dead yet," she told the second candle. "Softly, so they cannot hear, but I do it anyway. Because… because that is how I practice letting go."
The second candle flared as if it had been waiting to be told the obvious. Its shadow fell on the floor like a tame black animal.
They moved around the circle. Some confessed small things: eggs stolen, a miscounted coin returned late, a mean thought kept like a bruise. A woman confessed she did not want the baby she was supposed to want. A boy admitted he was not as brave as he bragged; his father looked at him with something like relief.
The flames formed a quiet ring. Miri stood just inside it, hands laced behind her back so she would not reach for anything.
Mora knelt to check the fifth candle, saw a wick tilted by a hair, and nipped it straight with a thumbnail. She did not look up when she said, "Miri."
Miri blinked. "Me?"
"You live here now," said Mora. "Add your truth."
Several heads turned. Thimble cocked his head as if waiting for a joke. Miri swallowed. Her mouth went dry all at once, as if truth drank the water.
She knelt at the sixth candle. Its saucer had a dark-blue ring at the rim, someone's tea stain, which for some reason calmed her. "Um," she said, hating the smallness of her voice. She tried again. "I… sometimes pretend to be asleep when you come home late, because if I open my eyes you will worry and not drink your tea while it is hot and then you will be tired tomorrow, and that is stupid, and I know you know I am pretending, and I still hate it."
She leaned in and breathed. The wick flowered. The flame settled like a hand finding another hand.
Miri set the saucer down too carefully and stood too fast. The room blurred for an instant. She heard Mora's breath, almost a laugh, not unkind.
"Good," said Mora, and two fingers touched Miri's sleeve, a brief anchor.
Thimble hopped toward the seventh candle with intention. "I ate three keys," he announced.
"Thimble," said Mora.
"All right, two and a half. The third was brass and tasted like old courage."
"It is not my turn, but it is not yours either," said Mora.
Thimble sighed theatrically. "Fine. I love you both, but on Tuesdays I will always deny it."
The seventh candle, accepting a confession it did not understand, stayed lit anyway. People glanced at one another, unsure if they were allowed to smile. Some did. It helped.
Mora moved to the eighth candle (the last). The hall felt heavier now, as if the air had decided to stay. Outside, the wind returned to itself and went away. The wrapped bells seemed to sleep more deeply, as if the ward had tucked them in.
Mora knelt. The muscle in her forearm shifted under ink-stained skin. Her hair had slipped in two places; silver strands caught the beeswax shine. Miri watched her mother more closely than anyone watched anything in that room. Mora was not someone you could stare at without consequence. She belonged to the kind of weather that punishes inconsistency.
Mora set the last candle squarely on its saucer. She had not spoken yet. The waiting in the silence had a taste.
Warden Pike shifted. "Does the witch… I mean. Do you have to be the one to… yourself?"
"Yes," said Mora. The word was a blade laid down carefully. "A boundary answers to the one who draws it. The price clings most to the hand that makes it."
Miri only then noticed her palms were sweating. She wiped them on her trousers and pretended it was for warmth.
Mora drew a slow breath through her nose and opened her mouth.
At the precise moment the first syllable formed, Miri's shadow did not move with her.
It lagged by half a second and then did not catch up. The difference was small and wrong, like a slipping second-hand on a clock. Miri jerked. Her shadow stretched too far, then curled back. Candlelight bent as if a wind with no sound had drawn through.
"Mora," Miri whispered.
Mora's eyes dropped to the floor. She froze into a sliver of silence. The villagers did not notice at once, because nothing loud had happened yet, and people are used to thinking danger must make noise.
Miri stepped back one pace into Mora's salt ring. Her shadow did not follow.
No. Worse. The dark at her feet thickened and slid across the stone as if it had just remembered it was also liquid. It moved with intent. It drew a line just outside Mora's chalk: one curve, one angle, one firm stroke that had nothing to do with light. The motion made a sound that was too high and too low, the pressure of a note that did not use ears.
The wrapped bells twitched.
Perhaps you could call it a twitch. What happened was: the cloth around them pulled tight, the hemp ropes quivered, and the cradle-stands groaned like wood remembering a storm. Maela reached for the nearest bell as if catching a sleeper about to tumble out of bed.
"Do not," said Mora, sharp and still soft. "No one touches the bells!"
No one had been moving until she said it. Then everyone stopped not moving with greater conviction.
The shadow-lines wrote another mark, then another. It was writing. It was plainly writing, a sentence etched with the absence of light. Miri's breath thinned in her nose. She knew her feet were still, but the part of the world that should be hers would not listen tonight. Her chest ached as if cold had come in and built a house there.
"What is it writing?" Warden Pike whispered.
"Nothing you can read," said Mora. Her voice was both soothing and forbidding. "Everyone stays inside the circle. Miri…"
"I am here," said Miri, though she wanted to be anywhere else. Her hands shook; she pressed them to her thighs to stop it.
The dark sentence closed itself with a last hook that felt like an eye shutting. Stillness pooled. For a moment nothing moved. Then the wrapped bells made a sound like breath in an iron lung.
They did not ring. No sound a human ear could name came out. But dust jumped off the cradles in thin lines. Ropes trembled. The cloth sheathing the bells deflated and swelled once, as if listening and now, reluctantly, agreeing.
Maela made a noise in her throat, prayer or curse. One hand covered her chest, the other grabbed at the air.
Thimble sprang to Miri's shoulder and clutched, a weight that said: silence is a bridge. "If it helps," he whispered, "I understand nothing at all."
"Not helping," Miri said through her teeth.
Mora did not move for a count of three. Then she rose in one clean line and put herself between Miri and the shadow-writing, not because it would change the outcome, Miri knew, but because sometimes a body is the thing you place in front of the future. Mora's face was what it always was in such moments: winter-calm, not gentle, not cruel, absolute. Only her eyes betrayed anything, pale flecks sharpening in the gray like ash catching light.
"Miri," said Mora, without turning, "do you feel pulled?"
"Not… pulled." Miri swallowed. Her fear felt physical, a resonance in bone. "Not like a rope. More like something is… humming. Near the ear but inside."
Mora nodded once. "Good."
Warden Pike gathered courage to act official. "This… this is not part of… it is not in…"
"It is all right." Although most true things can also be false if sized wrong. "The ward will hold. We light the last candle, then I will tune from the inside out. The writing will dry."
"What did it say?" asked Maela, hoarse. "I did not hear. I felt it."
"The bells heard it," said Mora, with the prickly annoyance of a professional. "It was for them."
Miri's mouth went dry again. "Is it the Nightspore?"
"Yes." Mora kept her voice even. "And it has moved from a whisper to awareness."
The word awareness landed behind Miri's breastbone like a stone thrown into the center of a pond. Her shadow went still again, obedient, a good dog pretending it had never chewed anything. She did not believe the act for even a second.
"Is that… bad?" Warden Pike asked too quickly, like a child pretending not to interrupt.
"Different," said Mora.
"Bad," Thimble translated helpfully, the way a friend refuses to let you be comforted by the wrong word.
Mora tilted her head just enough to make Thimble reconsider his beak. "We finish the ritual," she said. "Then we drink tea somewhere with a door that can be locked."
She knelt at the last candle. The room held its breath. The village held its breath. Miri pressed her fear into a smaller shape and watched her mother's hands.
Mora had the sort of hands you learn by imitation. She lifted the saucer. She straightened the wick. Then she spoke, not loud, not theatrical, not for the room. For the candle. For the price.
"My confession," she said, steady, "I do not know how to fix this." A brief silence. Her jaw moved once, a small muscle ticking. "I know how to knit what has cracked, to trick a god, to undo a name. Those are parts I can carry. But this one…" She let out a breath. "I draft plans I do not believe in because pretending to believe buys a few hours of quiet. If I could, I would turn the sky into a ledger, because its columns balance. People do not. I do not know how to fix it. There is no map for this, and I am afraid."
Miri felt something loosen behind her ribs, so suddenly it was almost a dizzy spell. Her fear did not leave. Its quality changed. She stopped pretending about the bells.
Mora leaned in and breathed on the wick.
Nothing happened.
The tip of the wick went darker, then lighter, then neither. The room's silence changed shape again. It had teeth now.
"Try again," said Maela, though she said it to the floor.
Mora did not try again. She changed her grip, steadied the saucer. Her next breath trembled, the slightest quiver. Miri saw it. She was not sure anyone else did.
"My confession," said Mora, softer, "every morning I rehearse your death." She did not look at Miri. She stared at the candle as if any other direction would swallow her. "Not because I want it. Not because… anything… I would choose it. Because a day may come when I do not get to choose. I run through the if. The where. By whom. The… so that if the worst happens, I can do the parts you need from me without falling down in front of you. I hate myself for it. I do it anyway. That is the truth."
Something shifted in the hall, subtle and all at once, as if the benches exhaled along with the people. Heat climbed Miri's face. She wanted to speak and could not find words that were both honest and better than silence. She reached for something else, movement, a gesture, and set her hand on Mora's shoulder. Awkward, small, but contact; help that adds up to more than it should.
Mora breathed.
The candle lit.
It did not hop. It opened at once, fierce, a throat finding the song it was meant to sing and doing it on the first try. The flame stood clean and unwavering. It cast a thin, brilliant shadow. Eight candles burned.
The ring of light felt like a door closed from the inside. The boundary settled. The room's temperature altered by a hair of a degree, a fraction, and some shoulders dipped because they did not really know how to relax, and this was close enough.
The shadow-writing on the stone did not move. It did not need to. The ward sat on top of it like snow over ink.
The wrapped bells went quiet. If bells could sigh, that is what they did.
Warden Pike scrubbed his face with both hands and let out a damp, sudden laugh, the laugh of a man eager to claim credit for whatever safety is nearby. "So. That… good. Finished. We… until morning…"
"Until morning," said Mora, getting to her feet. Her eyes were already assessing chalk, soot, the small defects. "Do not break the circle. Do not touch the bells. If anything changes, send Maela or send no one."
"Send no one?" Pike repeated.
"If you cannot find Maela," said Mora, "leave the door shut and pretend to be furniture."
"All right," Pike said weakly.
Mora brushed her palms on her coat and turned to Miri. Up close, her face had the faint creasing that meant she would not be dislodged from practical tasks for the next hour and should not be asked big questions for two hours after that. "Gather the chalk," she said. "We leave before dawn."
Miri nodded. She crouched and picked up chalk fragments, light as bone in her hand. Her shadow followed like a student who had been scolded and would behave nicely until next time. She did not look at it. She watched the candle flames, which trembled at a breath only she could feel.
Maela came over as the hall began to empty. Villagers whispered thanks, skirting the wrapped bells with exaggerated care. Maela's face looked wrung dry. "What did the bells hear?" she asked, low.
Mora considered lying. Miri saw the moment happen and be refused, a small mercy offered to the truth. "A warning," said Mora. "Not for you."
"For whom?" Maela asked.
Mora's mouth made almost a smile and let it go. "For anyone who thinks that giving a name is a one-way road." She glanced toward the wrapped bells. "Let them sleep."
Maela touched the tied cloth, a stroke through fabric. "Always."
Thimble, who had been quiet the way a cat is quiet around bruised dignity, hopped to Mora's satchel and peered in like a thief checking inventory. "Tea?" he hoped.
"Tea," Mora agreed.
They stepped out into the night. The air outside the hall tasted of iron; the damp had teeth; every sound seemed a step too near or too far. The sky above the village showed its usual bruise, dark clouds backlit as thick as old velvet where the Wound elbowed the horizon. Somewhere a dog barked once, remembered its job, and left.
Mora's rooms were two doors down: a square chamber above the cooper's shop, a window never fully shut, a lock that would be funny if it were not going to be spelled six different ways before sleep. The stairs complained at them. Miri counted steps without meaning to. Nine, thirteen, fifteen.
Morwen "Mora" Ash is a forty-two-year-old witch known and feared across the continent, not only for her mastery of Naming and Unmaking magic but also for her reputation as The Ashmother and The Last Blackthorn. Tall and slender, with black hair streaked with silver that is always tied neatly, she carries a cold authority that makes both allies and enemies think twice before approaching. Mora is the biological mother of Mirin, as well as her protector, teacher, and traveling companion who never stops watching over her daughter's every step. Beneath her calm demeanor and almost unshakable emotional control lies a deep fear of losing Miri, whether to death or to the Nightspore infection eating away at her soul. She is known for making swift, precise decisions in dangerous situations, willing to sacrifice anything she owns for Miri's safety, even if it means paying the price of magic with a part of herself. To the world, Mora is a legend shrouded in mystery. To Miri, she is a home that never stops moving, a shield that never cracks, and the reason the two of them are still alive today.
Mirin "Miri" Ash is a twelve-year-old girl who grew up wandering a world filled with cathedral ruins and dark secrets, accompanied by Mora, who is not only her guardian and closest friend but also her biological mother. Small and agile, her black-brown hair shimmers silver under the moonlight, with a single messy braid tied with whatever string she can find. Beneath her mischievous laughter and unending curiosity, Miri carries a heavy burden in the form of the Nightspore infection, an ancient being that lives in her shadow and whispers the true names of things in the world. She adapts quickly, speaks fearlessly to anyone including monsters, yet often struggles to see the boundary between courage and recklessness. Determined to prove she is more than just a burden, Miri searches for a way to overcome the Nightspore without sacrificing Mora, while holding on to her fragile humanity. On their dangerous journey together, she stands as a reminder that even in the heart of darkness, there is still space for curiosity, playfulness, and a loyal heart.
Thimble is a strange crow whose body appears to be stitched from dense shadow and silver thread, its feathers glimmering faintly as if holding moonlight between them. It only lies on Tuesdays, though no one truly knows whether it follows the human calendar or a time of its own making. Its main hobby is eating keys, whether they are made of iron, copper, or magic, and it has a habit of showing up at important moments purely to steal the spotlight, whether through a loud caw, a sudden movement, or birdlike remarks that sound amusing or irritating. To Mora and Miri, Thimble is a mix of troublemaker and bringer of fortune, an uninvited companion who knows more secrets than it ever admits.