Dusk settled over the lower switchbacks of the mountain burial road in shades of slate blue and cool violet. Beside Seyun, the hired mule walked with the steady, rhythmic clop of iron shoes on packed limestone, the sixteen clay pot jars inside the wicker panniers clinking softly against their straw padding at every turn. The air smelled of fallen oak leaves, woodsmoke drifting up from the river cottages below, and the clean, sharp cold of approaching winter.
Halfway down the slope. There, the road widened beside the wayside funerary shrine, Seyun paused to check the mule’s breast-strap before the final descent into the valley floor. The stone shrine stood quiet beneath the dark pines. Ten months ago, when he had walked past this porch in the driving rain on the first afternoon of his exile, he had stopped on the mud-slick steps and looked back up at the mountain peak where Ash Reed Sect sat hidden behind the clouds.
He remembered the exact weight of the silence in his chest that afternoon. For eleven years since his mother died from a sect healer’s confident misdiagnosis, he had believed that the only way to protect Mina and prove that careful, honest work mattered was to climb inside an institution until he was high enough that no elder could ignore him. The outer gate barred behind him and the rain soaked through his torn sleeping mat. Then, it had felt as though eleven years of his life had been erased by a…
