[c=#2dba69]Elyra's Diary - Part 1
The Awakened Breath[/c]

[c=#e3aaeb][i]3rd of Duskwake, Year 342 of the Era of Remembrance[/i][/c]

Ten years Kael has been dead, and ten years I've refused to bury what he told me before he left.

"There is a knowledge the living should not possess, Elyra. But if there is an exception... it is us."

I never understood that sentence. I turned it over every way I could, in the early years, searching for a hidden meaning behind each word, repeating it under my breath at night the way others repeat a prayer, until the words themselves lost their shape from being worn down so often. I eventually set it aside with everything else - in that part of myself I only open on rare nights, when the silence of the house grows too large for one person alone, when the bed on the other side of the wall has stayed cold for so long I've stopped being surprised by it.

I kept living, as they say. I took up the roads again, the trade in found objects, the small jobs given to someone no longer afraid of crossing an undead on their way. Ten years walking between the same villages, sleeping in the same inns, barely lifting my eyes anymore when some stumbling shape appeared far off on the road. They've become part of the landscape, over time. Like stones, or the brambles that overrun fields no one farms anymore.

Until that night.

I crossed paths with an undead on the road - one more, I hadn't even paid it any attention as it approached, my sword already half-drawn out of habit more than vigilance. But when my weapon struck it, the ankh around my neck began to burn. Not a pleasant warmth, not the reassuring heat of a trinket worn for years. A sharp, precise pain, like a reminder sent to someone who has forgotten an appointment for far too long - the kind of pain that makes you stop mid-motion, hold your breath, search with your eyes for whatever could have caused it.

A bluish light escaped the body as it collapsed, rising slowly above it like smoke refusing to disperse. Faint, flickering, but unmistakable among a thousand others - it was the same color that surrounded Kael, the last time I saw him alive, kneeling in the mud of a field I have never returned to since, his face turned toward me though I didn't yet understand, back then, what that look was trying to tell me.

I stood frozen in place, my sword hanging at my side, watching that glow tremble in the cold night air.

A voice, barely more than a breath in my head, as though it came from within my own skull rather than from the collapsed body before me:

"You came. The bond isn't broken."

I had no time to ask a question, to take a step, to reach my hand toward that light the way my whole body was screaming at me to do. It faded as quickly as it had appeared, leaving me alone on the road, the ankh still warm against my skin, my heart pounding harder than ten years of grief had ever made it pound. I had to sit down on a stone by the roadside, unable to take another step until my legs agreed to carry me again.

But I know now, writing these lines by the light of a candle threatening to go out, that Kael didn't only leave me grief. He left me a trail - scattered, fragmented, hidden inside creatures that shouldn't carry anything of him, and yet do, each one a little, like shards of the same mirror shattered on the day of his death and scattered since across every road I've walked without knowing it.

I don't know how many fragments I'll need to gather. I don't know what I'll find at the end of this road, nor whether I'll have the strength to face it once I do. But I know that other undead, crossed at random along my roads, might carry a little of what Kael wanted to pass on to me before he vanished, before the earth closed over him without my ever getting to say everything I still had left to say that day, in that field, before it was too late.

I will look for them. All of them, if I must. Until his voice tells me it's enough - or until I finally understand why it never quite fell silent, ten years through, in the silence I had come to believe was final.
