Day 8: Lyvornis’s Journal

I don’t know why I keep going back to the river. Not because of Vex, though that’s what I thought at first. It’s the water—how it bends the light, how it feels like it’s holding its breath. Last night, I sat by the water and the air smelled like wet stone and something else… like old roots. Vex said he’d come back, but he didn’t. The silence after he left was louder than the river. I thought about what he said: ‘The world is made of whispers.’ I don’t understand that. But now I do. It’s not a sound you hear—it’s the space between sounds.