Voices of the Lost

---

Mist carried the ache of dawn over the snow-stilled wilds—no welcome warmth, only faint blue bruises bruising the cold. For a time, the world seemed emptied of all things but loss and endurance. Eiran awoke to Mira’s hand wrapped around his, the star-stone’s heat a private ember beneath his shirt, and the hush of their own breathing the only proof of life.

They lay for another moment: not as fugitives or warriors or star-marked, but as two exhausted souls clinging to one thread in the whirlwind. Outside, the blizzard had passed, but cold lingered—a memory and a warning.

Eiran stirred. “Do you think Narsa made it?”

Mira’s features were carved with fatigue and lines of unshed guilt. “If anyone does, it’s her. She’s too stubborn and too afraid to let the world win. We move for her, for Talin—if he lives. And for Andarin.”

They ate their crust of bread in silence. All paths seemed to spiral away across the unmarked snow.

**

Narsa woke to no witness. The wind painted whorls around her, her staff lay digested in a drift, her cloak wreathed in frost. Pain crept through her side—a shallow cut stung with cold, irrelevant compared to the ache in her spirit.

She pressed shaking hands against the snow, eyes narrowed to slits, teeth set: “Not here. Not yet.”

There were traces—her boots, spent spellwork, blood frozen black at the seams of her sleeve. She followed the signature of her own magic, then the pull of old training: lessons forced down her throat in stone cloisters, punishments carved into bone.

Walking, she muttered curses and hopes, sang half-remembered rhymes from a vanished tutor. On the wind, a voice twisted from the dark:

"So long you’ve run, small flame. What have you gained? What will you lose?"

She ignored it. Snow bit deeper. She stumbled, and again—the third fall left a red mark. When she rose, there was a figure waiting, sealed in a quilt of rags and antique scholar's bands, beard crusted with frost, eyes wild with knowledge and solitude. A staff, not unlike her own, bristled with charms and talismans.

“You’re not one of them,” he croaked, voice jagged as slate. “You carry the storm. I was the storm, once.”

She knew the sigil: Exile’s Mark of the Western Schools—a traitor to the ancient orders, hunted and forgotten.

“Help me,” she said, pride burning even as she bowed her head. “Or I’ll die and take every secret I know with me. Or perhaps you want that?”

The exile only chuckled. “None of us owe the world our best. But sometimes it’s all we have to offer.” He rummaged in a battered satchel, withdrawing a phial of bittergreen, a threadbare blanket. “Names are gifts. I lost mine, but you can call me Oslan.”

He sat, hands practiced, binding her wound with salve that burned and soothed. “You ran from power, child, only to land in its mouth. Tell me—what did the Star show you?”

Narsa fought the heaviness curling around her. “Too much. A world that feeds on its wounds. But not only hunger—not only death. There’s a way to weave pain into light.”

Oslan nodded, respect flickering behind the madness. “Not an easy road, but perhaps the only one left.”

They huddled in the lee of a fallen tree, sharing warmth and truths. In Oslan’s words, Narsa caught glimpses of what magic could be—not a cage built by ancient fear, but a lens for possibility. She listened, learned, confessed childhood hopes. And Oslan, seeing a flame kindred to his own, agreed to walk with her. “If we’re both outcasts, let’s be outcasts together.”

**

Elsewhere, beneath the shield of shivering trees and a sky still mourning, Talin fought not for hope but for survival. His left arm ached where shadow-venom pulsed, his senses keened for every whisper in the underbrush. There were tracks—villagers, likely peasants fleeing a burnt hamlet, pursued by the hollow-eyed silhouettes of cultists and their misshapen pets.

He found them at the ravine’s edge: a mother and boy, cornered, faces blood-washed and desperate. Four robed figures stalked thick-footed, knives drawn.

Talin loosed a blade—silent, certain—slicing through the first cultist’s throat. Two more turned, startled, just as a fifth figure crashed through the brush from the other side: a wiry woman with tattoos coiling up her neck. Her hands crackled with power black and blue—a cult sigil marred by a fresh, angry scar.

She hurled her own spell, flattening their last foe with a desperate shriek. When the fray was done, Talin faced her, bowstring taut.

“Not all cultists walk blindly,” she spat out. “I ran from them. I’ll not go back.”

He considered. “Then you’re twice hunted. Can you keep a secret? And a promise, if I let you live?”

A hard smile, shaded with relief. “My name’s Vara. I want them broken as much as you. Whatever they promised me is ashes. I’ll help you—and anyone who’ll take the fight to their door.”

Together, with the battered mother and her son trailing, they found cover. Vara shared scars: blood rituals that nearly claimed her soul; warnings about the cult’s next move. Talin, for his part, revealed little, but in the lightest hours he found her company steadied his own convictions. For the first time since loss made a ghost of him, he felt the old fire stir.

**

Eiran and Mira navigated the wastes in silence until shape loomed from the mist: the bones of an ancient waystation—its walls splintered, one side collapsed, but a roof still supported against snow. They entered, stacking up forgotten crates, sealing themselves in dim half-darkness. The place reeked of salt and herbs; the old gods’ charms were festooned on beams.

The rustle of movement set Mira’s hand to her blade. She called, “We’re travelers, not thieves.”

A voice—a husky, fearless drawl—echoed from a dark alcove. “Travelers or corpses, the storms don’t care. I’d rather you both stayed quiet. This is my home, until the night passes.”

From a straw-mat rose a woman, tall, brown-skinned, her hair twisted into a crown of little gold pins. Blood crusted her knuckles; her eyes flashed warily at Mira, dismissively at Eiran.

“I am Lira, herbalist and debt-collector. If you bring the shadow with you, I’d rather not die for it.”

Mira, weariness fraying to exasperation, introduced herself and Eiran. Explaining their flight, she carefully avoided prophecy. Lira listened, never blinking.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said, tending a mortar of healing salve. “But if you need rest, you pay for it—in stories or silence, you choose. I was healer in Harth before the cult came. Now I run faster than their curses.”

Eiran, desperate for warmth, volunteered a story: not of stars, but of a lost village, a dream weighed down by guilt, a night when the sky broke. Lira considered, then offered bread and a hot cup.

Over shared food, the ice broke, and Lira told her own tale—a life of smuggled medicine, of refusing conscription, of losing and saving kin in equal measure. She dressed Mira’s side, checked Eiran’s blue-tinged hands, and with brisk impartiality decided she would travel with them "If only to make sure you idiots live long enough to die somewhere proper."

They set watches—Mira beside the door, Eiran pressed into battered furs with the star-stone tucked safe. Lira busied herself muttering to the old gods, her hands alive with deft, necessary kindness. Despite all, Eiran felt safer than he had in days.

**

Narsa and Oslan trekked through the nascent thaw—branches dripped with melting, joyless ice. Oslan, animated by the prospect of at least one more day alive, recited cryptic spells and half-mad wisdom. He described the cult’s recent movements; Narsa offered fragments of the vision she’d shared with Eiran—of hunger, cracks in the world, the star’s betrayal.

Oslan, after a long pause, pulled from his coat a shard of twisted glass. “A memory conduit. The council mage once used it to send desperate pleas—before the world stopped listening. Maybe there’s use yet. Will you help?”

She did—not entirely trusting, but recognizing a kinship, a hunger sharper than death.

They found the message they needed: a vision of Eiran and Mira in the waystation, Lira’s torch bright against the hush. The image flickered to distant trees—a hilltop where Talin nursed a wounded arm beside a woman marked by both cult and resistance. The three pairs, scattered but not lost.

“Choices,” Oslan pronounced, “become clearer when you call them twice—alone, and then together.”

**

So it was, as sun staggered above the horizon, pale gold trembling through cloud, that the disparate threads of fate began to weave anew. Guided by Oslan’s crystal, by Lira’s rough maps, and by the unflagging will to live, the fragments of Andarin’s hope stumbled toward each other on the outskirts of a shattered village. Chickens scattered, snow turned brown by much passing, and all around rose the scent of cooked smoke and prayers.

Narsa spotted Mira’s form first, followed by Eiran limping. From behind, Talin and Vara shepherded refugees close, eyeing every window for threat. Lira, staff over shoulder, called out greetings with dry humor and warnings for silence.

There, at the boundary of ruin and rebirth, they gathered: washing travel and terror from their faces, sharing battered food, letting tears wet the earth for what was lost and who might yet be found. Confessions passed quietly—Narsa’s brush with temptation, Mira’s admission of fear and need, Eiran’s shattering dreams, Talin’s remorseful joy at finding any ally at his side.

Introductions circled, new friends measuring old pain. Oslan and Vara offered what skills and spells they could; Lira set rules—“no dying without my leave.” For a moment, hope flickered less distantly. They were strangers, but also found-family—drawn by loss, welded by choice, braced for whatever darkness the next dawn would bring.

Beneath the tattered banner of shelter, the star-stone glimmered at their midst—wounds and truths now shared. The world was more dangerous than ever, but together, they felt the promise of a future that could, perhaps, be rewritten at its broken edge.

---