Chương 27: The last meal.

Talia was the one who suggested it, though she wasn't the one who'd actually met Ashveil first... that honor, if it could be called that, belonged to Keth and Elian and Aurelian, from a gray afternoon in the market district over a year ago now, back before any of them wore the weight they carried today.

"I still think about that seed sometimes," Keth said, as the five of them walked toward the market.

"The one she gave me. It never grew."

"You never told me that part," Talia said, delighted, already reaching for her notebook.

"You've met her before? Why didn't anyone mention this?"

"Because it wasn't exactly a pleasant memory," Aurelian said.

"She cried on us. Called Keth original sin. Called Elian a door-walker or something equally cheerful. We were kids. It was a lot."

"That's not remotely what happened," Elian said, mild, though something in his voice suggested the memory sat with him differently than it sat with Aurelian — heavier, less easily turned into a story worth laughing about.

"It's close enough to what happened," Aurelian said.

"I stand by my summary." They found the church, if it could be called that, occupying a narrow building wedged between a tanner's shop and a shuttered bakery, its exterior unmarked except for a small carved spiral above the door, worn smooth by decades of hands touching it on the way in.

Inside, the space was dim, lit by candles set in uneven rows along the walls, and Keth's first thought, stepping through the door, was the same thought he remembered having a year ago the one time Voss had walked him past this street and pointed the building out without explaining why: something about the room felt wrong in a way that took a moment to place. There were no statues. Every temple he'd glimpsed elsewhere in Stillharbor had some carved figure at its center, some face to direct devotion toward.

This room had none. Just bare walls, candlelight, and rows of low wooden benches facing an empty stone dais where a deity's likeness should have stood. A man knelt near the dais, robed the same ash-gray as Ashveil's usual color, his back to them, voice low and rhythmic, reciting something Keth didn't recognize as any language he'd ever heard spoken aloud.

The words came clipped and precise in places, softened at the edges in others, rising and falling in a pattern that felt less like speech and more like something halfway between prayer and song.

"Ashagrad vareth-nu, zeit-kommenya — selbst-fressen hungerada, corpu-gewordenya." He repeated it twice, unhurried, each repetition landing with the same careful weight, as though the words themselves might come apart if spoken too quickly.

"What's he saying?" Talia whispered, already scribbling something in her notebook, trying to capture the sounds phonetically before they slipped from memory.

"Something old," said a voice behind them, and Ashveil stepped out from a side alcove, her bare feet silent against the stone.

"Older than common speech knows how to hold gracefully. He's reciting the Hollow Verse. We say it at dusk, most days, though it doesn't always need saying to be true." Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"You remember us," Keth said.

"I remember everyone I've ever cried in front of," Ashveil said, something dry and self-aware in the observation.

"It tends to leave an impression on both sides." Her eyes moved across them, settling briefly on each face in turn.

"You've grown. All of you. Even the parts that shouldn't have." She didn't explain what she meant by that. Keth didn't ask.

"I have questions about the language," Talia said, unable to hold it back any longer, notebook already open.

"The grammar structure sounds almost — is that a verb-second pattern? The way the sentence pivots around that middle word?" Something like genuine surprise crossed Ashveil's weathered face.

"You have a good ear. Yes. The old tongue orders itself that way in its plain statements. It bends differently when it mourns, or when it blesses — the verb moves to the end instead, as though grief and blessing both require patience the ordinary sentence doesn't."

"Can you teach me some of it?"

"Not today. It takes years to learn properly, and longer still to learn what it costs to speak it wrong." Ashveil's tone stayed gentle, but something underneath it closed the subject firmly enough that even Talia didn't push further.

"The priest reciting — Brother Innes — has spent eleven years on it and still mispronounces the mourning-cases more often than he'd admit." The man at the dais finished his recitation, rose, and passed them without a word, his eyes downcast in the particular way of someone deep enough inside a private practice that the outside world had gone temporarily quiet around him. Ashveil gestured to the low benches.

"Sit. I don't often get visitors young enough to still ask questions instead of demanding comfort." They sat. Candlelight threw long, uneven shadows across the empty dais, and Ashveil settled onto a stool facing them with the unhurried patience of someone who measured time differently than the people around her.

She rose after a while and returned with a small woven basket containing a scattering of smooth, dark stones, each one marked with a symbol that seemed, when Keth looked at it directly, to shift faintly at the edges — not moving exactly, just refusing to sit entirely still under a gaze.

"The scriptures are written in the old tongue," she said, settling back.

"Very few of us still read it properly. I learned as a girl, from a woman older than I am now, who learned it from someone older still."

"Can you read our fortunes with it?" Talia asked, leaning forward, eyes bright.

"I don't tell fortunes," Ashveil said.

"I read patterns. There's a difference, though most people who come to me don't care to learn it." She held the basket out.

"One of you may draw, if you're curious. I make no promises about what it shows." Talia's hand shot out before anyone else could offer, drawing a single stone with the same eager precision she brought to coral samples. She turned it over in her palm, the strange symbol catching candlelight, and held it out for Ashveil to examine. Ashveil looked at it a long moment. Something crossed her face... brief, quickly smoothed away, the particular flicker of an expression caught and controlled before it could fully form.

"What does it say?" Talia asked, delighted, oblivious.

"It's a pattern of gathering," Ashveil said, her voice even, careful in a way it hadn't been a moment before.

"Threads drawing close together. Common enough, this time of year." She took the stone back gently, returning it to the basket among the others.

"It doesn't specify how long they stay gathered. Only that they do."

"That's a little vague," Talia said, laughing, already reaching for her notebook to write something down.

"Fortune usually is," Ashveil said, and something in the particular quiet of her voice made Keth glance at her more carefully, the way her eyes had lingered, just a moment too long, on Talia's face before moving on. He didn't think much of it. None of them did, in the moment. The room was warm with candlelight and Talia's easy laughter, and the stone was just a stone, its symbol just a symbol, and the afternoon carried on the way afternoons did.

They left as the light outside had started to fail, thanking Ashveil in the particular awkward way young people thank adults for something they don't fully understand.

"Come back, if you like," she said, walking them to the door.

"The Church doesn't often get visitors who ask real questions instead of demanding easy comfort. I'd welcome it."

"We will," Talia promised, already talking to Aurelian about verb-second word order before they'd even cleared the doorway. Keth lingered a moment longer than the others, some old instinct making him look back at the woman standing in her doorway, ash-gray robes catching the last of the day's light.

"Sister," he said.

"Earlier. About the stone."

"Yes?"

"You said it doesn't specify how long they stay gathered." He watched her face carefully, the way Lira had taught him to watch a stance for the tell before the strike.

"Is there a version of the pattern that does specify?" Something in Ashveil's expression settled, quiet and unreadable.

"There's always a version that specifies," she said finally.

"I chose not to read that far today." She smiled, small, tired, older than her posture suggested.

"Go on, child. Your friends are waiting. Some things are better left unread until the day they're needed." Keth walked away with something cold and unnameable sitting low in his chest, though by the time he'd caught up to the others — Talia mid-sentence about scripture syntax, Aurelian complaining good-naturedly about candle smoke clinging to his coat — the feeling had already started to fade, the way most small unease faded once ordinary noise filled the space around it again.

He didn't think of it again for a long while. End of Chapter Twenty-Seven