He found me before noon.

  I was sitting on a rock by the creek — the same creek from before, the one with the stones and the salamander. The salamander was back. It sat on its stone, unperturbed by the woman who had turned a spirit beast to dust a few hours ago. Salamanders had priorities that did not include existential dread.

  The water was doing what water always did — finding the lowest path, wearing the stones, talking to itself in that ceaseless murmur that meant nothing and somehow never got boring. The sun hit the surface at an angle that turned the creek into a ribbon of broken light. I sat in it. The warmth was good. Simple. The kind of good that required nothing from me.

  The boy emerged from the tree line with all the subtlety of a landslide. Branches cracked. Leaves scattered. He burst into the clearing with the wild, staggering energy of someone who had been running on a bad ankle and the expression of someone who had been afraid I wouldn't be here.

  I was here.

  "I knew it!" He was grinning. Limping, dirty, grinning. "I knew you'd still be around. Nobody just leaves after something like that. You can't turn a spirit beast into powder and then just walk off. That's not how things work!"

  It was, in fact, exactly how that worked. I had been doing it for millennia.

  He sat down. Not near me — a few paces away, as if some instinct told him that proximity needed to be earned. His basket was on his back again. Still empty. The ankle was still swollen, but already less purple; he had wrapped it with a strip of cloth that looked like it had been torn from a shirt.

  "So, okay. You don't talk. That's fine. I can talk enough for both of us. My mother says that's my problem — that I talk too much. But my father says talking is just thinking out loud and thinking is free, so talking should be too."

  He pulled a reed from the bank and began stripping it. His hands moved with the absent-minded ease of someone who had done this a thousand times. Village hands. Working hands.

  "I figured it out, by the way. The mushrooms. You were right — they were wrong. I showed them to Old Chen — he's the closest thing we have to a healer, which isn't very close — and he went pale. Said they were Blushing Caps. That they'd have— well. They were wrong."

  He tossed the stripped reed into the creek. Watched it spin in the current.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "So... thanks. For not telling me. Kind of."

  Something twitched at the corner of my mouth — a reflex, gone before it fully formed, like a match struck in the rain. I turned my face toward the creek so he wouldn't see it. Not that he was looking. He was already talking again.

  He kept talking. Of course he did. He talked about the forest — which trails were safe, which ones the spirit beasts used, where the good mushrooms grew. He talked about the village — who was kind, who was difficult, who owed whom what. He talked about his mother's baskets and how they were actually very good, but the merchants at the crossroad market cheated her because she was a woman alone and how he wanted to go with her one day to make sure they didn't, except she wouldn't let him because someone had to stay with Baba.

  The sun moved. Shadows rotated. The creek murmured its endless, indifferent commentary. I listened, because listening was the one thing I could not turn off and his voice filled the kind of silence that I had grown tired of filling myself.

  Then he said something.

  I don't remember what it was — the word itself, the content. Something about the creek, or the stones, or how the light fell on the water. But the way he said it — the cadence, the rising inflection at the end, turning a statement into half a question. As if everything in the world was an invitation to respond and he couldn't understand why anyone would decline it.

  My foot hung above a patch of moss, suspended. The forest smelled of damp earth and pine resin and the creek was still talking and the boy was still talking and under all of it—

  I knew that voice.

  Not his. Another one. One that had sounded like that — the same rising note, the same half-question, the same implicit assumption that silence was a problem to be solved. Someone who had walked beside me. Or ahead of me. Or just near enough that their voice reached me without trying.

  A face — no. Not a face. A warmth. Something like laughter, distant and distorted, as if I were hearing it through a wall. Through years. Through the kind of distance that isn't measured in li.

  Then silence. The specific silence that follows someone leaving. Not death — death has its own sound. This was the silence of a space that used to be occupied. A chair pushed back from a table. A door that didn't close because there was no one left to close it.

  He was gone.

  The memory broke. Snapped off clean, the way a bone snaps — sudden, with a wrongness that the body understands before the mind does. I was in the forest. The creek. The moss. The boy.

  The boy was still talking.

  "—and then he said you can tell by the underside of the cap, the pattern of the gills and if they're pink, they're good and if they're white, you should probably not—"

  I set my foot down on the moss. Reached for a branch at my side. Not to break it. To hold something. The branch was rough under my palm — real, present, belonging to now and not to a then that I had buried so deep it should not have been able to surface.

  The branch snapped in my hand. Of course it did. Everything I held broke eventually.

  "—are you okay?"

  I looked at him. The boy. Twelve years old. Dirty. Limping. Alive.

  "Fine," I said.

  That was...

  Nothing. It was nothing. Start walking.