I LINGERED OUTSIDE THE Archives after the trial, though I hadn’t meant to. My feet found their way there, following a thread I could not see. The quiet held me, or I held it. Questions without answers pressed close, but I let them fall away. Even the guilt, clinging like a second skin, loosened in that silence.
Somewhere, a bell called out. Its voice came soft and distant, blurred by stone and the stretch of empty halls.
“You’ve been thinking too loud.”
I turned and found Elodin standing there, framed by shadows, as though he’d been part of that silence all along and had simply chosen now to emerge. His robe hung crooked. His hair was wild. His eyes held that particular green depth I’d only seen in the Eld.
“Walk with me,” he said. There was no inflection to his tone and no hint of invitation. It wasn’t rude. It simply assumed. Then he smiled, as though he’d just told a joke only he could hear. Before I could return it, he turned and began moving along the uneven cobbles, his steps an easy glide. I didn’t even have to think before my feet followed.
Elodin wove through the campus, bare feet moving easily from cobblestones to gravel to dirt. While he let the silence stretch between us, I found myself falling into his rhythm, joining his pace. Then, “You’re thinking about Herma.”
“Of course I am,” I said, though the words felt too clumsy for the weight I wanted them to carry. “It feels wrong. Too quick. It’s like rushing through a verse before the final chord has time to settle.”
We walked on. Elodin hummed something low, more vibration than music. “He hated chaos,” Elodin said. His words were soft, half a thought spoken aloud. “But not the way you expect. Herma hated what chaos did to people. Have you never noticed it? The scholars, the errant students, the fools trying to wrap themselves in wisdom too large for them? Herma pulled at their ends. Drew them steady. Anchored them.”
“And now?” I asked, careful.
He did not smile this time. He only looked up, studying the sky as clouds unraveled into long pale threads. Mist drifted and tangled on the wind.
“Now his knots are loose,” he said. “Some still hold. Some slipping, some coming undone.” He watched the sky as if waiting for something more. “I wonder which will last. Which will pull tight and never let go.”
When the cemetery came into view, the grave was wrong. Not in its size. Not in its shape. Not in the way the stone sat, cold and square and still. Herma never wanted grandeur. He never wanted statues or carved names. But this ending felt wrong in a different way.
The stone lay flat. The edges were too straight. The lines were too clean. It all fit together, smooth and silent, like a finished song.
But where was the knot that gave it meaning? The complexity? The weight? It was no grave for a man as full of untied stories as Herma had been.
Elodin stood beside me. He did not move. The wild restlessness I knew so well was gone, subdued by the quiet of this place. His shoulders slumped, carrying weight I couldn’t see. For a long time, neither of us spoke. When at last he found his voice, it was low, almost gentle, as if the silence itself were fabric that a careless word might tear.
“The art of listening,” he said, “is more than Naming. You already know this.”
Did Elodin know I’d had a hand in Hemme’s downfall? Had Kilvin woven together my loose threads? But as I opened my mouth, I felt the air itself pressing against my words. I let them fall away. The answer wouldn’t change anything.
Elodin stayed a moment longer, murmuring something that felt more like a prayer than a comment. Then he turned and walked away, leaving me there with my thoughts and the weighted silence of the burial ground.
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