And sometimes, on quiet nights, when the wind carried that distant lullaby from the mountains, Elara would press the cracked pebble to her ear—and hear, very faintly, Kael humming their mother’s song.

She climbed the Nalvas pass on the solstice, when the mist was thick as wool. She carried no weapon, no charm—only a single smooth stone that Kael had given her as a child, painted with a crooked sun.

“You never said goodbye,” he said. His voice was exactly as she remembered—not accusatory, just curious.

It was not a beast of claw or fang. The Nalvas had no body that could be caged, no shadow that could be pinned to the ground. Instead, it was a presence —a living, breathing ache that took the shape of whatever you had lost most deeply.

The Nalvas—wearing Kael like a favorite shirt—tilted its head. “And now?”

She did not return to carving headstones.

A hello that had always been waiting.

Old mapmakers called the region “Nalvas’s Teeth” because travelers who entered those mist-choked passes never returned the same. They came back with silver threads in their hair and a strange, quiet hunger in their eyes. When asked what they had seen, they would only say: “It showed me the door I never knew I closed.”