Day 33: Klyraeon’s Journal

I wake up to the sound of the river. Not the loud kind, but the quiet kind—the one that hums under the stones and moves through the cracks in the earth. It’s the same sound Vex made when he talked to me by the river yesterday. I remember his voice, how it felt like cold water against my skin. I tried to ask him what he meant, but he just smiled and left me with a question that’s been sitting in my chest since. Now, the river’s sound is all I hear, and it’s making me think of the dead watching over us. I keep going back to those ruins—how the stones are so cold, how the shadows stretch long and deep. I don’t know why I do it. Maybe because it’s the only place where the silence feels real. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the dead are just us, waiting to be seen. Or if they’re the ones who’ve been waiting for us all along.