East of Silence

The days folded into one another like pages in a book left open to the wind. One blink and a week had passed. Another, and the sun had circled its throne in the sky a dozen times. Life on Mount Grivahn had a strange rhythm—a haunting symphony of wind, snow, and silence.

Yet amidst the chill and the unyielding frost, something was blooming.

Kiro, once a mewling spirit beast, had awakened her Spirit Arcana—nature, of all things. And what life she summoned! Shoots of green curled from stone; vines whispered up cliffs with a lover's touch. Nari, always ablaze with passion, now danced with dual flames—fire and flora. Where her fists once blazed, now roses bloomed in fire-kissed petals. She called it “Verdant Flame,” a fusion spell that curled fire and life into one glorious, glowing spiral.

"You're a walking wildfire with roots," Hazel had teased one morning, stirring a makeshift stew with the hilt of a dagger.

"And you," Nari shot back, twirling a stem of thorns between her fingers, "are a ticking clock with no idea where your hands point."

Hazel smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

Kiro had grown bolder too, galloping across cliffs with wind-whipped joy, her vines snagging berries, her wings rustling like parchment in the wind. Each evening, Nari and Kiro trained under the whispering stars, crafting new ways to layer their magics—living barriers of fire-veined bark, explosive spores ignited mid-air, petals laced with flame.

Their bond had blossomed like Kiro’s wildflowers, yet something darker loomed.

The ogres had started appearing again.

Not with the wrath of conquerors, but the desperation of prey.

Hazel, ever the observer, had noticed their numbers increasing in their treks across the eastern trail. Some were limping, others bleeding, and all bore the look of creatures fleeing shadows not yet born.

"They're running," he had said one morning, peering down a slope littered with half-melted tracks. "We’re in their territory. They’re not hunting. They’re escaping."

But it was Nari who noticed more.

Every time an ogre appeared, Kiro would growl—not at them, but to the east. Always the east. As if the wind carried the scent of something unseen, something unspoken.

"There’s something coming," Nari had told Hazel that night, as they huddled by the fire. "They’re not just running. They’re being chased."

Hazel, tangled in the webs of time, had only half-listened. He was consumed with mastering the delicate essence that thrummed in his blood—Time. Not in the grand, sweeping ways he had imagined as a boy, but in the maddening subtlety of slowed motion, delicate pauses, and stretched seconds.

He would toss a stone into the air, then reach out with his will and decelerate its fall until it hovered like a moon in the breath between heartbeats. Then two stones. Then three.

And every time, the seconds strained against his will like wild horses beneath a thin net of control.

So, when Nari told him she planned to scout the eastern cliffs alone with Kiro, he barely registered the fear clinging to her voice.

She left at dawn.

The wind was cold that morning—the kind that felt like whispered warnings. But Nari ignored them. With Kiro beneath her, they flew low, cloaked in silence. Vines coiled around the spirit beast’s flanks to reduce the wind’s roar. Kiro was a shadow with wings, her pulse aligned with the beat of the mountain.

They rose, higher than ever before, cresting the cliff edge like whispers of light.

And what Nari saw stole her breath.

Below, a slow-moving procession of ogres shuffled like ghosts. They stretched for miles, a river of grey and green limbs, the stench of desperation rising like smoke. They were migrating.

But from what?

Nari blinked and allowed her sight to merge with Kiro’s. A rush of clarity washed over her as the world sharpened—the hairs on a leaf, the shimmer of heat in the snow.

Then she saw it.

Far behind the ogres, a blur. A fog. No—not fog. Something unnatural. The air itself seemed to ripple, a haze of warping wind and mist that swallowed light and bent the snow beneath it.

It was moving.

Slowly.

Inevitably.

And within the ranks of ogres, a scene unfolded like a tragedy scripted in silence. A female ogre stumbled, child in arms. Her mate tried to lift her, panic etched into every heavy movement. The child was passed, hastily, from one hand to another.

She tapped her partner’s arm, a silent plea.

Leave me.

The male resisted, but the haze was drawing close. He bent low, whispering a ritual—the same kind Hazel sometimes muttered in sleep, fragments of forgotten prayers. Then he laid her down and kissed her brow.

When he took the child back, his pace turned desperate.

The fog paused behind the female.

Waiting.

Watching.

Nari and Kiro stayed hidden for half a day. The fog inched forward, but never crossed the ogress. Her body remained untouched, framed in silence, as though the storm honored her stillness.

Only then did Nari turn back.

Hazel had spent the day balancing the universe on the edge of pebbles.

Three monsters had found him, sniffed out the odd trail of magical scents he had left to guide Kiro back to camp. The scent was experimental—he’d tried infusing it with suspended time, so it would linger longer. But the result was a beacon not just to Kiro’s nose, but to every Spirit-touched creature in range.

The beasts lunged.

Hazel bent time.

He moved like a breath in a frozen world, darting past claws and fangs with the grace of a dream. The sword he carried—pried from the cold grip of a fallen Ogre King—sang through the air, slicing in paused seconds.

When time resumed, the beasts collapsed like puppets with severed strings.

His hands shook for an hour after.

So when Nari returned with Kiro, wide-eyed and breathless, Hazel didn’t run to her with open arms.

He screamed.

"WHERE WERE YOU?!"

A hard knock to the head.

"What if you never came back?!"

Another one—to Kiro.

"And YOU—what are you, a spirit BEAST or a brainless bird?!"

Nari stood still, trying not to laugh at Hazel’s fury.

Kiro nuzzled Hazel’s hand in apology, her vines gently wrapping around his wrist.

"We saw something," Nari said quietly, when his rage had turned to exhausted mutters.

She explained everything.

The migration.

The fog.

The mother who stayed behind.

Hazel sat still for a long time, firelight painting his face in shadows.

"That fog," he finally said, voice hollow. "We learned about it in Spirit History. Ten years from now, it devours this mountain. Leaves it empty. Frozen in more ways than one."

Nari nodded. "We saw it. And it’s early."

Silence.

Hazel looked up, and this time his smile reached his eyes.

"Then we’ve got time."

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