Excerpt from Book Two: Inheritance of Stone and Tide

The fog had teeth that evening.

It bled down from the cliffs in slow coils, swallowing the signal tower in a salt-white shroud and slicking the streets of Lunthra Point with chilled dew. The sea beyond lay dark and unmoving, a flat slab of memory too old to stir. Beneath the curve of the horizon, the tide itself had retreated—not in fear, perhaps, but in deference.

Eslara Venth stood inside the Archive Hall, wrapped in her salt-thread cloak, staring down at the chant-stones she had arranged on the low-woven kelp mat. Sixty glyphs. Each placed by hand. Copper-etched, sand-sealed. Passed from archivist to archivist.

One was wrong.

She lifted the smallest stone, expecting the swirl and notch of the glyph called Tersill—a name marker used to initiate the monthly rite. It should’ve hummed faintly in her palm, warmed by the touch of memory.

It was smooth. Blank.

Not worn or weathered. Not chipped. Just… glass smooth—absent.

Eslara didn’t move. The registry scroll on the wall still listed Tersill: Memory of salt and origin. It belonged. It had always belonged.

Had she forgotten it?

Or had it forgotten her?

A low mechanical groan echoed from the cliffs outside—the signal beacon rotating atop its tower. The light it shed pulsed once through the fog. Not amber. Cobalt blue. Too cold. Too soon.

Eslara lowered the stone into the woven pouch at her side and stepped out into the gathering mist.

By the time the lanterns were lit, the village had gathered near the tower.

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