They say knowledge is power.
But in Dustwall, knowledge is weight.
Heavy. Dangerous. A burden not meant to be carried by hands like mine.
After the Red Moon night, the voice did not return.
Not for days. Not for weeks.
Its silence gnawed at me more than its whispers ever had. I had grown used to that distant echo, that strange wind through bone, calling my name like it remembered something I didn't.
Now the world was too quiet. I listened for it every night—straining, hoping, dreading.
But all I heard was the creak of beams. The scratch of rats in the wall. The hush of my sister's breath beside me.
Elna had started to worry.
"You're doing it again," she whispered one night, her voice just above the rasp of the wind. "Staring at nothing."
I blinked. "I'm listening."
"To what?"
I didn't answer. She didn't press.
Our days blurred into the rhythm of survival. Wake early. Work until dusk. Eat whatever stew could be stretched that day. Sleep with a prayer that tomorrow wouldn't be colder than today.
Fenn had begun crawling.
He was stubborn about it too—always chasing after stray chickens or trying to sneak under the bench where Mother kept her baskets. Elna watched him like a hawk, scolding and guiding and sometimes laughing despite herself.
She was good with him. Better than I was.
I didn't always have the patience.
There were times I'd rather sit alone with my scrap parchments and fading ink, tracing forgotten letters by firelight, mouthing syllables that tasted wrong in my mouth.
The letters weren't just writing anymore. They were pieces of something else. A gate, maybe. Or a mirror.
One afternoon, I found a new scrap near the eastern gate.
It had been stuffed into the corner of a crate, half-covered in fish scales. The smell was awful, but the ink caught my eye—deep green, sharp strokes curling like vines.
The language wasn't one I knew. Not the common tongue of Dustwall. Not the priest's script either.
It looked closer to the words I'd heard in my head.
I tucked it into my shirt and ran home, heart thudding like I'd stolen a god's secret.
That night, I laid it flat on the dirt and stared.
The page trembled in the firelight. Letters coiled and uncoiled, as if resisting my gaze. I squinted, trying to trace the curves with my finger.
"Kei...sern...ka'tel..."
The words burned in my mouth. Not heat. Not pain. Just pressure.
Like something pushing back.
And then—I saw it.
Not with my eyes. Not quite.
A flicker behind the ink. Shapes moving. A line—then a circle—then a single eye, blinking once.
I fell back, gasping.
Elna rushed over. "What? What happened?"
I couldn't explain. The scrap looked normal again. No glow. No eye.
Just ink.
Later that week, I showed the scrap to a man in the market who sometimes dealt in paper. He squinted at it, rubbed his jaw, then shook his head.
"Looks like temple script," he muttered. "But wrong."
"Wrong how?"
"Temple letters don't curve like this. They're stiff. Clean. This one's too wild."
"Can you read it?"
He chuckled. "Read? Kid, I can barely count copper. I sell scraps. I don't read them."
I thanked him and left, but his words echoed.
Too wild.
That night, the voice returned.
"Ke'ra ul thein...Yul...ka'seren…"
It was softer than before. Less commanding. Almost sad.
I sat upright in the dark, the scrap pressed to my chest.
"What are you?" I whispered. "Why me?"
Silence.
Then, a whisper.
"Find the Hollow."
I didn't sleep after that.
What was the Hollow?
A place? A person? A state of mind?
I whispered the phrase to myself over and over until it lost shape.
A month passed.
Elna turned ten. There was no celebration. No cake. Just an extra piece of bread and a kiss from our mother.
She didn't smile much, but that night, she sat beside me and leaned her head against my shoulder.
"You think we'll ever leave Dustwall?" she asked.
I looked up at the ceiling. Smoke-stained. Leaking at the corner.
"I don't know."
She closed her eyes. "I dream about it sometimes. About crossing the second wall."
"Is it different there?"
"It smells like flowers. And no one's hungry."
I didn't want to break the illusion. So I just nodded.
"Promise me," she said, "that if you find a way out, you'll take us with you."
"I promise."
The next morning, I woke early and walked alone to the dried riverbed that ran near the east edge of Dustwall. It was mostly rocks and bone-dry mud, but sometimes you could find odd things there—dropped coins, lost trinkets, melted glass.
That day, I found a stone.
Flat. Smooth. And carved.
Not with words, but with the same curves as the scrap. Lines that curled in on themselves, forming a spiral.
I touched it—and the voice came again.
Stronger.
"Hollow… lies… beneath."
Then silence.
Beneath?
There were no basements in Dustwall. The ground was too hard, too dry. Digging was rare, dangerous. But the spiral on the stone pulsed in my palm, like it remembered being part of something greater.
I didn't tell anyone.
Not yet.
I hid the stone under my mattress, beside my scraps and broken quill.
And that night, I dreamed of a gate buried in ash.