The mage came to Glenraeth in the season when the veilvines began to die.
They came without notice, walking through the silver fog like it was memory made flesh. No one marked their arrival. No guards asked questions. No children stared.
The fog swallowed footprints behind them. Even the wind forgot they had passed.
But the mage was not looking to be remembered.
They were searching.
And in the soft-rotted heart of the vale, in a chapel garden overgrown with ghostgrass and whisperwillows, they found him.
The boy was burying something.
Small hands, covered in soil. A tiny grave was dug beneath the roots of the tree that never bloomed. No priest beside him. No tears on his cheeks. Just a corpse of a dog, broken and wrapped in quiet.
He pressed it into the earth, smoothed the dirt flat, then placed a round a smooth pebble on top, with no name carved into it.
The mage watched from the shadow of the cloister, unseen.
Even so, the boy looked up briefly. As if he'd felt the weight of attention.
Their eyes met.
Then he turned back to his work, and the moment passed.
Later, in the silence of the evening bell, the mage asked the head priest who the child was.
"Hm? Oh, that boy? Good lad, very helpful. Always where you need him. Let me think… his name…"
The old priest frowned. Blinked. Then gave a sheepish laugh.
"Strange. It's just slipped my mind."
They spoke for the first time on the third day.
The mage was setting lanterns along the chapel path—small things, full of dream-light and fractured echo. The boy stood beside them, holding a thread of incense like a candle.
"You're not from here," he said.
The mage looked down. The boy's voice was soft, but not shy. It had the careful tone of someone used to being forgotten midsentence.
"I'm not," the mage replied.
"I'll forget you soon."
"I know."
The boy said it without malice. Without apology. Like naming the color of the sky.
They met again, and again, without ever arranging to. The boy was always there, always working: sweeping the floors no one asked him to clean, lighting candles no one would notice, whispering prayers he didn't believe in to gods that never called him by name.
The mage watched.
The child wasn't unloved. He wasn't mistreated. The world simply failed to grasp him. As if he were air with edges. A shadow mistaken for its absence.
A Fogchild
"Do you know what I think?" the boy said once, during dusk, beneath the hanging limbs of the whisperwillows. "I think I was born with something missing. Something that ties me to the world."
The mage said nothing.
"They look at me, and their eyes slide off. Like I'm just part of the scenery." The boy looked down at his own fingers.
"Does it you?"
"Wouldn't it bother you?" the boy snapped.
And then, softer: "It used to make me angry. Now I just try harder. I help. I remember everyone else. I think maybe if I become useful enough… someone will hold on."
There was no bitterness in his voice. Just weariness. The kind that doesn't come from age, but from repetition.
The mage studied him, this boy with no aura, no echo, no mark of resonance.
No weight.
And yet, the mage could not look away.
"You weren't born broken," they said finally. "You were born unresolved. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?"
"One can't be fixed," said the mage. "The other just hasn't chosen its shape."
The boy blinked. Then laughed—short, breathless.
"Shape? I don't even know if I cast a shadow."
"You do," said the mage. "You just haven't noticed what it's resting on yet."
Years later, when skies would split, when names would burn from the stones, when the child who was no one would become the echo that bent fate.
The mage would remember that grave beneath the blooming-less tree.They would remember the boy who watched the stars and didn't ask for them to remember him back.
And they would whisper, almost reverently:
"Ah. So that was his shape, after all."