“If the wind sings, close the shutter… for the Nasfan wanders, seeking shelter.”

  They had been on the road for a day. Emily still felt her mother’s gaze as she left, her trembling embrace, and those words that echoed in her chest:

  “Here your father rests, Emi. I cannot leave. There are places that are undeniably part of us, and this one is mine. Perhaps you’ll find yours someday, little one.”

  Emily’s mother knew that day would come, though she never imagined it would be like this—leaving behind a village wrapped in ashes and fleeing from the fear of the Oscillators. It wasn’t an easy decision. It wasn’t just her husband’s grave that held her: she firmly believed the bodies must receive the honor of the Twelve Suns, the full cycle every spirit deserves before being released. To her, leaving before the final sun would break the link between this world and the next.

  Emily understood. And although her heart wanted to stay, she knew her place was no longer in Karakal. Since the night of the attack, something had awakened beneath her skin: the bond pulsed like a contained fire, incomplete. She felt she had to reach Tharellia, the capital, where the Temple of the First Sun guarded the ancient knowledge of the ánimas. There, perhaps, she would find answers. Or confirmation. Or something she didn’t yet know how to name.

  Her mother didn’t stop her. She only looked at her with a mix of pride and sorrow, as if she already knew her daughter was not just a frightened girl, but an inherited one, walking toward her destiny.

  The sun had not yet risen when the caravan started moving again. The horses’ hooves struck the dry earth in a soft cadence, as if the dawn itself whispered that it was time to go.

  Emily walked beside Zimon, both wrapped in cloaks borrowed from the merchants. The air carried that scent left by the earth after rain, though it hadn’t rained in days.

  No one had spoken a word since their departure. The village of Karakal was left behind, small in the distance, but still visible if one looked with the heart. Emily did. She turned her face, and for a moment, thought she saw the silhouette of her father’s stable, the smoke that would no longer rise from the chimney.

  She forced herself not to cry. The wind pushed forward, as if forbidding her to look back for too long.

  “Are you okay?” Zimon asked softly.

  Emily nodded without speaking. At her side, the sleeping presence of her ánima seemed to move with the wind, invisible. The bond burned within her like a quiet, expectant flame.

  The day passed uneventfully. At midday, they stopped beside a stream to rest. There, a hunched old man, his eyes clouded with a milky veil, sat near Emily. He wore a tattered tunic and a charred wooden amulet hung from his neck.

  “I can smell the bond,” he said, without looking at her.

  Emily frowned.

  “What?”

  “Fire has its scent, girl. You carry it with you… just as the Inherited Ones did, in the old times.”

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  Emily breathed in involuntarily. For a moment, she thought she smelled her brother when he spoke of fire.

  “We all have the fire, Emily… just some don’t know how to hear it,” she remembered.

  Zimon stood up, but Emily raised a hand to calm him.

  “What do you know about the Inherited?”

  The old man smiled, revealing more gaps than teeth.

  “Only what remains in the stories. They say there was a time when the ánimas were more than battle spirits… They were memory. Ancient flame. And those who bore them were guides. Not soldiers.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  “The kingdom grew. The wars too. And with them, the ánimas learned to kill.” The old man tilted his head. “But you… you carry a different fire.”

  Emily felt something stir inside her. The old man rose with difficulty and walked away without another word. He only let one phrase fall to the wind:

  “Walk north if you seek truth. But don’t go alone.”

  When evening came, the caravan stopped in a clearing, and the merchants began lighting small fires with dry branches. The murmur of tired voices mingled with the crackling wood, and a faint smell of soup and roots filled the air.

  Emily sat on a flat stone, hugging her knees. She looked at the orange sky, but her thoughts were elsewhere. Zimon approached and dropped beside her, not saying a word for a while.

  “My mother once told me that fire is memory,” Emily murmured, without looking at him. “That if you watch it in silence, you can see things that are no longer there.”

  “And what about the things that haven’t happened yet?” Zimon asked.

  She shrugged.

  “I guess they burn too… but more slowly.”

  Zimon chuckled and tossed a pebble on the ground.

  “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want it to sound important… but I left with you because nothing ties me to Karakal.” He glanced sideways. “No one was waiting for me, no one stopped me.”

  Emily looked at him for a moment, in silence.

  “You left because you’re brave,” she said.

  “I left because, of all the things I could do, going with you made the most sense.”

  There was a pause, then Zimon grinned.

  “Though who knows… maybe I’m your ánima,” he said, with a stifled laugh.

  Emily raised an eyebrow, amused.

  “An ánima with dark circles and an eternal hunger for cheese.”

  “And great style,” he added, pointing to his patched jacket.

  They both laughed. It was a small moment, but real.

  “I don’t know where we’re going,” Emily murmured, “but I feel like I’ve carried it inside me for a long time.”

  Zimon looked at her quietly.

  “Do you know what I’d like to do if we make it to Tharellia?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Be a scribe. In the Temple of the First Sun. Learn the ancient names, the real stories. Write it all.”

  Emily nodded slowly, curious.

  “And what would you write?”

  “This journey. Everything we’ve lived. Even what hasn’t happened yet.” He looked at her again. “Maybe I’ll call it… Daughter of Flame and Wolf.”

  Emily laughed, but something more than humor sparkled in her eyes.

  “It would be a great book,” she said.

  “You’re already writing it,” he replied. “Only, with fire.”

  Silence returned, this time warm. The sky darkened little by little, and the wind carried distant songs from the merchants. A harp broke the air so delicately that Emily, in the midst of everything, felt for a moment that the world made sense. At least that night.

  Night painted the landscape with strokes of shadow. The caravan moved away slowly, leaving behind the still-glowing embers of the camp, flickering like fireflies trapped between earth and memory.

  Emily watched in silence, as one looks at a book fading as the page turns.

  “Maybe I won’t return,” she thought, as her crystal-clear eyes reflected a recent past that already felt so far away. Like stories only the old remember. Like ancestral songs the wind hides among the trees.

  And then, somewhere in the clearing, someone played a small, broken harp, its out-of-tune strings seeming to understand the language of nostalgia.

  They sing from the north — her mind whispered —

  trees with broken branches,

  they sing of heroes and legends,

  of roads without maps and myths without time.

  And my little broken harp… sings too.

  It sings for my father.

  It sings for my brother.

  It sings for me.

  It sings because the flame keeps burning.

  And I walk…

  because something awaits me at the end of the fire.

  And I sing for you.