Finch remembers the lanterns.

That’s how it always begins — with light drifting above the fields like a slow constellation, bobbing on the wind. Every year, on the longest day, the children would carry paper lanterns down to the river. They were shaped like birds, or fish, or the long curling horns of the goddesses’ mounts, and as the sun set, they were set afloat to follow the current toward the lowlands. It was said Brigantia watched from the water’s edge, counting each one before dawn.

He remembers Serai’s hand on his shoulder, warm and steady. He remembers the scent of crushed mint and smoke. He remembers laughter — his own, high and thin, carried away by the river. He remembers whispering a wish into the lantern’s paper belly before setting it free.

He remembers saying, “For everyone to be healed.”

He was small enough then to believe wishes needed no precision.

The image is bright in him still — the ripple of flame reflected in water, the gentle touch of Serai’s fingers when he pushed the lantern into the current, the way the whole river glowed like a string of stars. When he was sick, that’s what he would close his eyes and see: not the fever, not the walls of the Sanctum ward, but the light drifting away and the world briefly beautiful.

But he dreams it again now, years later, after the fever, after everything — and the river in the dream is wider than it should be. The banks are choked with reeds that weren’t there before. The water moves too fast, too deep. The air smells not of mint but of vinegar. And Serai isn’t beside him. Someone else stands there instead, taller, her voice like dry grass: “Light it. Quickly, before the wind.”

When Finch lifts his lantern, it isn’t made of paper at all. It’s bone — thin ribs wired together, hollow-eyed, glowing from within. The flame inside is wild, eating through the bone like sickness through flesh. He sets it in the water and watches it sink. The current takes it under without a trace.

He looks for Serai, calls his name, but the river answers first — a low rushing that sounds almost like a voice.

When he wakes, there is little light. He pushes open the door to the Sanctum office. There’s the smell of damp herbs, the clink of glass, the quiet of work beginning. Serai works over dried flowers, grinding them into dust.

“Finch. It’s cold,” Serai says, getting up and draping something soft across Finch’s shoulders. “You need a shawl.”

“Did we used to send lanterns down the river?” Finch asks, sitting down. His voice feels too soft for the question.

Serai pauses, pestle quietening. He stays silent for a long time. “We did,” he says finally. “Not every year, but once. The year before you got sick.”

Finch nods. “I thought it was beautiful.”

“It was.”

Serai's smile is audible, but there’s a shadow behind it. “But it wasn’t a festival. It was a vigil. We sent the lanterns for the ones who’d already died.”

He still sees the lights — hundreds of them — the names, the prayers, the farewells. He remembers the silence, not laughter. He remembers Serai’s hand trembling when he lit his own lantern. He remembers the smell of smoke from the pyres downriver. He remembers that when he whispered his wish, Serai closed his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to hear it.

The memory settles back into place. Heavier, but no uglier. Because even then, even surrounded by death, Serai had helped him light the lantern and had smiled, as if to say that wishing was still a kind of healing. He keeps the image of it: a thousand small flames, carried away by water, their glow trembling like forgiveness.

Outside, the river keeps flowing. The lanterns are long gone, but sometimes, when the evening catches right, Finch swears he can still see them. Not as they were, but as he needs them to be.

Mimi remembers the first time she drew her sword.

She was young, seventeen, perhaps, and the day had been bright, the kind of sunlight that made the wheatfields shimmer like they were already blessed. The stories always said Brigantia’s warriors began that way: sun at their backs, conviction in their chests. She remembers kneeling in the Sanctum courtyard, the air rich with incense and oil, the voices clear as bells.

You are the blade that cuts rot from the flock. You are the flame that drives out the frost.

When she tells the story now; when the younger Herdsmen and women ask about her first mission, she makes it sound clean. A small village struck by fever, its dead unburied, its wells fouled. She tells them it was mercy. She tells them it was necessary.

That’s how she’s remembered it for years: a single day of righteous fire. A test she passed.

But tonight, the memory won’t hold its shape.

She is sat outside, in the churchyard, lighting a small fire in the dark of the early morning. It burns low; the horses stamp in the dark. She’s been home now for a while, but the smell of sickness sticks. She sits awake, twirling the blade on the ground.

The village wasn’t small.

Not then.

The smoke wasn’t clean. It was heavy and wet, clinging to her throat. The flames had eaten green wood, damp thatch, cloth that screamed when it burned. And there had been sounds. She’d told herself they were echoes, the moans of the sick. Herself, sword drawn and shouting. A woman with a child on her hip, shouting words Mimi didn’t understand.

When the orders came—burn every house that smelled of rot—she obeyed. Of course she did. Her faith was obedience. Her goddess was the torch she carried.

But when the smoke cleared, she had to turn a body with her boot to see the face. The woman. The child still clutched against her. The fever spots faint, maybe fading, maybe healing.

She’d told herself it was infection, not innocence, she’d burned. She’d told herself she didn’t remember the child’s hair catching light like gold.

Mimi stands and feeds another stick to the fire. The heat presses against her face, familiar. The sword glints in the firelight. The words of her oath echo again: You are the blade that cuts rot from the flock.

She touches the flat of the blade, cool despite the heat: Then who cuts the rot from me?

No one answers.

But she remembers Serai, hoarse, pleading: “Brigantia tends the flock; she does not count them.”

The fire pops. A spark lands on her glove, burns out.

She sheathes the sword.

The sunlight breaks across the horizon, pale and thin. Mimi watches it rise and thinks, not for the first time, that fire was never Brigantia’s gift at all. It was the river she’d forsaken—the one that washed clean the soot.

Serai used to tell himself the story often, because it was the only one that made him feel worthy.

When he was first taken into the Sanctum—barely twelve, hands still rough from field work—one of the elder healers, Mother Ellas, had brought him to the river. She had been slow-moving, soft-voiced, her skin creased like folded parchment. The day was summer-bright, and the river was clear enough to see the pebbles winking below the surface.

He had done as she said. For years afterward, the stone had been his tether - tucked into his satchel, warmed by his hand before every act of healing. When the Sanctum hardened and the Herdsmen rose, when faith became ledger and triage, the stone reminded him that once, the goddess had been river and mercy both.

He sits in the Sanctum office, grinding flowers into dust. Outside, the rain has swept the earth into mud. He hasn’t seen the river in weeks, but he can hear it somewhere beyond the hill, swollen and restless.

He reaches into his satchel and takes out the stone.

It’s smaller than he remembers. No smooth white now—gray, veined, edges roughened. He turns it over, thumb catching on a scar across its surface. For the first time, he realizes it’s not river-polished at all.

She’d said river because she hadn’t wanted to say ashes.

He remembers now: her eyes wet, not from reverence but from smoke. Her voice steady only because it had to be. He’d believed she was teaching him faith. But she’d only been trying to save his hope.

He goes outside. The rain’s turned colder, sleet tapping against his hair. Down the slope, a rivulet runs through the mud—thin, brown, sluggish. He crouches and drops the stone into it.

For a moment, nothing happens. Then the current catches, washing a thin ribbon of clean water through the dirt. Only a thread, but clear. It slides around the stone and keeps going, cutting its own path downhill.

Serai watches it until his knees ache.

Somewhere in the distance, a fire goes out.