Bones of the Silent Accord

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Mira Voss crossed the marsh track at dawn, her satchel heavy and her hands empty. The peat sucked at her heels like the memory of a slow thing, reluctant to let go. Nethershade rose through the fog as if the town had been exhaled by the river, each house a softened silhouette and each street a wet seam. She had not returned since the pact; she had curved away from those roads to study other techniques, to set her hands on the structure of recollection and to learn a language for undoing. Now the summons came, a thin thing folded into an official note, and curiosity, which had not forgiven, drew her hips toward the square. Even from the verge of the road she felt the town's cadence: a tolling that was not wholly bell and not wholly voice, a deep note that made the air seem viscous. Market stalls kept only the outline of wares; shopfronts blinked like closed eyes. Faces passed in the lanes, blank with a practiced neutrality, as if the people had rehearsed contentment until any private ache could be flattened into civic poise.

On the first bridge a child sat with a little wooden thing cupped in her palms. The toy had been made small enough to be lost in a pocket; its outline had been worn smooth by many days of clutching. When Mira slowed, the child looked up with steady calm and gave the object over without ceremony. "It was in the bell's shadow," she said, simply. There was no hot ownership in her tone, no raw pleading; the town had learned to make loss a neutral fact, and facts carried less weight than they once had. Mira turned the toy between her forefinger and thumb. The grain held a shallow carving: a looped curl, childish and familiar. Her nickname hid inside that small mark, inkless but as telling as a pressed leaf. Her chest tightened like a fist and memory rose like a distant tide.