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“Columbina?” The Traveler’s voice carried across the ruined clearing. No answer came.
Paimon drifted between the splintered trees, peering behind every pale trunk as if Columbina might simply be standing on the other side of one. “Where did she go? She was just here!”
The battle had ended only moments ago. The last traces of scattered kuuvahki still faded through the air like sparks sinking into water, and frost gleamed over the ground where Columbina’s feet had touched it. The Traveler followed the trail until it vanished beside the remains of a broken stone arch.
“Columbina?” they called again. “It’s safe. I brought one of the Lightkeepers who helped us.”
Still, she did not answer. She was standing beyond the arch, hidden behind a curtain of frost-white branches.
She had heard the Traveler the first time and even meant to step forward.
Then she saw the man beside them.
His clothes were much as she remembered, though darker now and immaculate despite the dust, marked with the insignia of the Lightkeepers. Time had sharpened the solemn lines of his face and placed a quiet weariness beneath his eyes.
But Columbina knew that face.
She knew the blue-gray hair moonlight had once turned almost silver, the solemn line of his mouth that had softened around dry replies, the hands that had fastened a necklace at her throat, then offered her a choice of roads. For one breath, she thought memory had made a shape from longing. Then the lantern at his side swung into view. A blue flame shifted behind the glass. It leaned toward her hiding place as a flower might turn toward moonlight.
The face awakened the memory and the lantern made it certain.
Many moons earlier, before she had ever been called Columbina, she learned that leaving and escaping were not the same thing.
The Frostmoon Scions called her Kuutar. Even that name felt less like something belonging to her than another prayer they expected her to answer. She had left the them before sunrise. She moved through the sleeping settlement without shoes, her cloak gathered around her shoulders, while the final lamps burned low beside doorways decorated with carved moons. She expected relief once the prayers could no longer reach her. Instead, as the voices faded behind her, an unfamiliar feeling began to follow.
It crossed the river when she did. It climbed the wooded slope at her side. It remained when the roofs disappeared behind the trees and even the kuuhenki grew quiet.“This is lonely,” Columbina told herself. Giving the feeling a name did not make it smaller.
She continued north without choosing a destination. The Frostmoon Scions had always told her where she should stand, when she should sing, and which hands she should place upon the heads of those seeking blessings. Without their instructions, every path seemed equally possible and equally empty. By evening, frost had formed along the hem of her cloak, and the land had fallen away toward a black, restless sea. There, at the edge of Final Night Cemetery, an old lighthouse rose above the graves. Its beacon was dark.
That was where she saw the grave. It rested at the foot of the lighthouse, half-hidden where the tower’s long shadow crossed the cemetery. There were no flowers, no offerings, and no name carved into the weathered stone. Salt and moss filled the shallow grooves where an inscription might once have been. Frost-stiffened vines crowded the mound, while the lighthouse above it watched the dark water with an empty eye. Columbina approached. “Who are you?”
The grave did not answer. She sat beside it. The silence was different from the silence of the Frostmoon Scions. Theirs had always waited for her to say something holy. This silence expected nothing.
“I left,” she told the grave. Wind moaned around the stones of the lighthouse. “They call me their goddess.” She drew her knees beneath her cloak. “They ask me to heal their children. They ask me to change the weather, to bless their marriages and their harvests. One woman asked me to make someone love her.” Columbina rested her cheek against her knees. “I could not.” That was why she had left, but not the whole of it.
She was tired of being lifted above them when all she had wanted was to stand among them. She did not want every kindness to become an offering or every word she spoke to become an answer. She wanted somewhere she belonged. The Frostmoon Scions had given her a throne instead. Nothing beneath the earth expressed disappointment. She stayed until the moon crossed half the sky.
When she rose to leave, her foot caught on something hidden beneath the frost-stiffened vines. Columbina knelt and pulled them aside. Half-buried between the grave and the lighthouse wall was a lantern. Its metal frame had blackened with age. Soil clouded the glass, and one stubborn root had curled around its handle beneath the stones. Columbina brushed away a little dirt with her sleeve. There was no flame inside. “You must have been important to them,” she said, looking toward the grave. “They left a light so you would not be alone.” She did not know then that the lantern and the grave belonged to the same person
The following night, Columbina came back. She told herself she had returned because the lighthouse was sheltered from the wind. On the third night, she decided it was because the dead made quieter company than the living. On the fourth, when she found herself speaking before she had even sat down, she stopped offering explanations. “The sea is louder than I expected,” she told the grave. “But it does not speak to me.” She cleared more frost-stiffened vines from the mound.
“I found berries today. A bird ate one first, so I knew they were safe.”She wiped another patch of dirt from the lantern’s glass. “I think the bird laughed at me.”
On another night, she said, “I heard them searching near the river.” Her fingers tightened around the edge of her cloak. “They sounded frightened. I almost returned.” The grave listened. “But if I go back, they will kneel. Then they will ask whether I have forgiven them, as though my forgiveness is another blessing they can receive.They miss what they believe I can give them,” she whispered. “I do not think they miss me.” She looked toward the unmarked stone. “Do the living still ask things of you after you die?” No answer came. “That must be peaceful.”
The word peaceful sank through the earth. Far beneath the reach of wind and moonlight, something heard it. The stranger beneath the grave had sealed himself below the lighthouse because he too, was tired of hearing the world.He had carried names, duties, causes, and losses for longer than he cared to measure. In the end, he had placed all of them outside the lantern and allowed his flame to dim. There was no pain in that darkness. There was no joy, either, but joy had become too distant to miss. Then a voice began visiting him. At first it reached him as little more than a tremor, like rain tapping against glass. Over time, words formed within it.
Berries. Birds. Rivers. Prayers. Loneliness. He did not wake, he only drifted nearer to the surface whenever she spoke, then sank again when she left.
One night, she sang. It was not a hymn meant to summon power. There were no followers waiting for a miracle at its end. It was a small, wandering melody without words, and she forgot parts of it halfway through. The flame inside the lantern stirred. Columbina stopped. For an instant, blue light glimmered behind the dirt-streaked glass. She leaned closer, but darkness had already returned. “I saw you,” she whispered.
She placed both hands around the lantern and pulled. The root resisted before releasing it all at once. Columbina fell backward into the frost-stiffened grass with the lantern against her chest. The metal was colder than her hands.
She began cleaning it each time she visited. She polished the glass with the corner of her cloak and carefully worked the soil from its hinges. When the wind became sharp, she placed it beneath the shelter of the gravestone.
The lantern warmed beneath her palm. Columbina lowered her face toward it. “Are you lonely too?” A faint flame appeared behind the glass. It was smaller than a candle’s heart, but it was unmistakably alive.
Columbina watched without fear. She had been surrounded by old powers from the moment she opened her eyes to the world. A sleeping light was no stranger than a worshipper asking the moon to rearrange fate. “I am leaving again tomorrow,” she said.
The flame trembled.
“I do not know where I will go.”She paused.“I only know I do not want to return.”
The flame brightened.
Columbina drew one finger down the newly cleaned glass. “If I could make one wish, I think I would wish for someone who wanted nothing from me.”
For the first time, the grave answered. “What an unusual wish,” said a voice beneath her hand, low and cultured and softened by sleep. “But I am afraid I do not possess the power to grant it.”
Columbina remained very still. “Then why did you answer?”
“You have been speaking to me for several nights. Continued silence was becoming discourteous.”
She considered this. “You are not dead.”
“An astute observation.” Blue fire filled the lantern. It spilled through the seams without heat, curling upward in long ribbons. The light gathered between the grave and the lighthouse wall, first into the outline of a man and then into a solid form. Dark boots settled upon the frost-stiffened grass. A coat took shape around broad shoulders. Last came a pale, weary face and eyes that opened as though they had forgotten what waking required.
The stranger looked across the cemetery, then up at the dark lighthouse. Then he looked at Columbina. She was still holding his lantern. “I believe,” he said, “that belongs to me.”
Columbina looked down at it. “You left it in the ground.”
“Yes. That was intentional.”
“You should not leave important things where roots can take them.”
The man stared at her for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. The sound was quiet and rusty with disuse, but it changed his entire face. “My apologies,” he said. “I was unprepared to be scolded so soon after returning to consciousness.”
Columbina held the lantern out to him. When his gloved fingers closed around its handle, the blue flame pressed toward her side of the glass. “Did I wake you?” she asked.
“It appears so.”
“I am sorry.”
“I have slept long enough to forgive one interruption.”
She glanced at the grave. “Were you trying to die?”
His expression became still. “No.”
“You buried yourself.”
“I was seeking peace.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as peace required.”
“That sounds like dying.”
The stranger studied her with the solemn attention of someone encountering a question he had successfully avoided asking himself. “You are not afraid to speak your mind.”
“No.”
Something near amusement touched his expression. “I had noticed.” Then his gaze lowered to her bare feet, the worn hem of her cloak, and the empty hands folded in her lap. He did not ask what she was or why anyone would search the northern roads for her. He only looked at the loneliness she had carried into his cemetery as though he recognized its shape.
“Is there a town nearby?” he asked. The question surprised her more than his rising from the grave had.
“Yes. Nasha Town.”
“A town,” he repeated, testing the word against some old memory. “Has it been there long?”
“I do not know.”
His mouth curved faintly. “That makes two of us.” He looked toward the distant glow between the trees.“Would you like to see it?”
“Do you?”
“It has been a while since I last saw anything.”
Columbina rose. “Then we can be unfamiliar with it together.”
For a moment, he looked at her as though he had not expected to be included in her uncertainty. “Together,” he repeated. The flame inside the lantern lifted a little higher.
They followed the path north. Whenever the trail divided, the stranger waited for Columbina to choose. At the first crossing, she followed the road descending toward the water because small blue flowers grew between the stones. At the second, she chose the narrower path simply because no one had told her to.
“Why do you keep waiting for me?”
“Because you are the one traveling.”
“People usually tell me where to go.”
“Then they have been exceptionally rude.”
She looked up at him. He appeared completely serious
Nasha Town emerged slowly from the darkness, not yet the sprawling trade port it would one day become. A few dozen buildings leaned around the meeting of river and road. Canvas awnings sheltered stalls that looked as though they could be folded away by morning. Lanterns of mismatched colors hung from posts, balconies, and ropes strung between roofs.
Voices reached them in fragments. Merchants haggled in accents Columbina had never heard. Someone was laughing inside an inn. Somewhere nearby, dough hissed when it touched hot oil. Columbina stopped before the first lanternlit street.
The stranger noticed immediately. “What is it?”
“They might recognize me.”
“Are you well known?”
“They built statues with my face.”
He considered this with admirable gravity. “That does complicate an otherwise simple excursion.” He removed his coat and placed it around her shoulders before she could object. It was far too large. The sleeves swallowed her hands, and when he drew the hood forward, its shadow concealed most of her face.
“You will be cold,” she said.
“I have endured worse.”His mouth curved. He adjusted the hood until only the lower half of her face remained visible. “There. Tonight, you need not be anyone.”
Columbina looked at the man who had risen without a name from an unmarked grave.
“Neither do you.”
“A satisfactory arrangement.”
They entered Nasha Town as two strangers.
No one bowed. No one fell silent when Columbina passed. A merchant called to her from beneath a striped awning and tried to persuade her that his gloves were the warmest in all Nod-Krai. Two sailors argued beside her about the direction of the wind without once asking her to change it. A woman carrying baskets nearly bumped into her, apologized, and continued walking. Columbina watched her disappear into the crowd. “She did not know me,” she said.
“Was she supposed to?”
“No.” The answer felt strange. Then it felt wonderful.
At a food stall, rows of small cakes glistened beneath honey and preserved berries. The merchant described every flavor before asking Columbina which one she wanted.bShe looked at the choices for so long that the stranger leaned closer.
“Is something wrong?”
“I do not know which one I am meant to choose.”
“The one you want.”
“People brought me food before. I never chose it.”
He looked over the cakes with the seriousness of a man inspecting a battlefield. “Then this decision may require more care than I anticipated.”
Columbina pointed to the smallest cake, decorated with a single blue berry. “That one. I like its color.”
The stranger smiled.“An excellent reason.”
Neither of them had the correct coins.nThe few pieces the stranger found in his pocket bore the face of a ruler the merchant did not recognize. After turning one beneath the lanternlight, the merchant declared it old enough to be interesting and exchanged the cake for it.
“Is that how buying things works?” Columbina asked as they walked away.
“Not when I last attempted it.”
“When was that?”
He looked back at the delighted merchant. “Longer ago than I realized.”
Columbina broke the cake in half and held one piece toward him.
He declined.
“You said eating was unrewarding,” she reminded him. “That is not the same as impossible.”
“A distinction with very little practical value.”
She continued holding it toward him.
He looked at the cake. Then he looked at her. “You are remarkably persistent.”
“You woke because I was persistent.”
The argument appeared to leave him with no dignified escape. At last, he bent and took a cautious bite from the piece still held between her fingers. His expression remained perfectly composed. The blue flame leapt against the lantern glass.
Columbina tilted her head. “Unrewarding?”
He swallowed with great dignity. “I may have judged the experience prematurely.”
A laugh escaped her. The sound startled Columbina and it startled the stranger more.
Nothing about it resembled the hymns the Frostmoon Scions had taught her. It was bright, brief, and entirely her own. For a moment, he forgot the cake. He watched the girl beneath the hood as if her laughter were another part of the world he had not expected to find waiting for him.
Then she offered him the rest.
This time, he accepted it without argument.
Farther down the street, a child tended a stall crowded with lamps made from colored glass. Necklaces fashioned from the leftover pieces hung along the wooden frame, scattering tiny pools of red, gold, and blue across the ground.
The lantern immediately captured the child’s attention.
“Is that magic?” she asked.
“No,” the stranger replied.
“Can it grant wishes?”
“Certainly not.”
The child looked deeply disappointed.
Columbina looked at the lantern. Its flame moved toward her as if offended by the answer. “Are you certain?” she asked.
“Entirely.” While he defended his lantern’s lack of miraculous properties, Columbina noticed one of the necklaces. A tiny blue glass bird hung from its cord, one wing slightly crooked.
She lifted it into the light. “It looks as though it intends to fly anyway.” She returned it carefully to the display.
The stranger placed another ancient coin on the stall.
“For me?” Columbina asked.
“Only because you looked at it twice.”
The answer warmed something beneath the borrowed coat.
The child handed him the necklace. “You should put it on your companion.”
Columbina turned, removed the cloak’s hood momentarily, and lifted her hair.
The stranger went very still. Then he stepped closer. His gloved fingers guided the cord around her throat. When he fastened it, one fingertip brushed the skin at her nape. The blue fire flared so brightly that the glass lamps around them answered with scattered light.
The child’s eyes widened. “Are you sure that lantern is not magical?”
The stranger withdrew his hand. His composure had survived, though only just. “I am becoming less certain.”
The bird rested at the hollow of Columbina’s throat. When she turned back to him, his gaze lingered there for one heartbeat before he looked away.
They had almost reached the central square when Columbina saw three figures had entered from the southern road. Carved moons hung at their throats, and pale cloaks marked them as Frostmoon Scions. Their eyes searched every hooded traveler they passed.
Columbina’s steps faltered.
The stranger moved in front of her without asking why. He lifted his lantern between them and bent as though examining the blue glass bird at her throat.
“Do not look at them,” he said quietly, close enough that his voice seemed meant for her alone. Blue light traced the sharp line of his face, while the breadth of his shoulders hid her from the road.
Columbina’s heartbeat stumbled.She had been frightened before. This did not feel like fear. Heat gathered beneath her hood despite the cold, and she became suddenly, strangely aware of how little space remained between them. “They are searching for me.”
“I had gathered as much.”
One of the Scions passed close enough for the hem of her cloak to brush his boot. The stranger did not move. His body concealed Columbina from view, while the lantern’s blue light drew the searching woman’s gaze away from the shadow beneath the hood.
Columbina forgot to breathe.
No one had ever stood between her and her worshippers before. They had knelt before her, surrounded her, and raised her above themselves.
No one had ever simply protected her.
After several breaths, the footsteps receded into the crowd.
“You did not ask who they were,” Columbina said.
“You did not wish to be seen.”
“I thought you said you could not grant wishes.”
“I cannot. Fortunately, standing in someone’s way requires considerably less power.”
For the second time that night, Columbina nearly smiled.
She was about to say something when music began near an inn.
A fiddler stood beneath the eaves, playing for a loose circle of merchants and travelers.
The stranger stopped. He began to hum beneath the fiddle. His melody was older and slower, but it wound around the musician’s tune as if the two songs had once belonged together.
The fiddler heard him and adjusted. The crowd clapped when the music met.
Halfway through, Columbina joined them.
At first, the stranger seemed to think she was still learning the song. He repeated each phrase after her, his lower voice finding hers with surprising ease.
Then she changed the final note.
He followed.
The next time, she changed two.
He followed again.
On the third, his eyes narrowed.
“You are doing that deliberately,” he murmured.
“Am I?” She sang the phrase once more and changed the ending entirely.
The stranger followed without missing a note.
Her hidden smile widened.
The fiddler noticed their game and began to play faster. Columbina caught the stranger by the sleeve and pulled him closer to the circle before he could object. They did not dance, not quite. But she swayed with the rising tune, her hand still curled around his sleeve. Whenever he thought he had learned her next note, she slipped beyond it and waited for him to find her again.
He always did..
Until then, he had understood her loneliness. For the first time, he saw what it had been hiding. She was curious, mischievous, almost unbearably pleased whenever she surprised him. This, he thought, was who she might have been if no one had decided she must be holy. Columbina laughed when he finally anticipated one of her changes and turned the harmony against her.
He watched her for a moment too long.
“Did you forget the song again?” she asked.
“Only briefly.”
“Why?”
His gaze dropped to the blue bird resting against her throat. “I was distracted.”
Before she could ask by what, he returned to the melody. The tune carried them to its final passage..” No one called the song holy. No one asked the moon for a miracle when it ended. They only applauded.
The fiddler raised his bow toward the two of them. “What should we call our visiting singers?”
Columbina looked at her companion. He looked back at her.
“Travelers,” he answered.
The crowd accepted this without question.
They left Nasha Town before sunrise. From the hill beyond the northern road, the settlement looked even smaller. Its lanterns formed a warm little constellation beneath them. Soon the awnings would come down, the strangers would continue to other roads, and the town would begin another day without knowing a goddess had walked through it. Columbina touched the glass bird at her throat.
“Did you enjoy it?” the stranger asked.
“I think so.”
“A cautious assessment.”
“I have never been allowed to decide whether I enjoyed something before.”
He looked toward the fading lights. She thought about the cake, the woman with the baskets, the crooked bird, and the applause that had asked for nothing in return.
“I enjoyed it,” she decided.
They continued until the road divided. One path led back toward the unmarked grave. The other disappeared into a forest Columbina had never seen.
The stranger stopped between them. “Where will you go?” he asked.
“I do not know. And you?” she asked. “Where will you go?”
His gaze followed the road leading back to the grave. “I had not intended to go anywhere.”
“Will you bury yourself again?”
“That was my intention.”
“I do not want you to.”
The words surprised them both. His fingers tightened around the lantern handle. The blue flame climbed higher, and for one unguarded moment, he looked at her instead of the road leading back to his grave. Neither of them withdrew what had been said.
Then Columbina asked, “What should I call you?”
The man glanced toward the lantern.
“A name seems unnecessary under the circumstances”
Columbina accepted the answer. Her gaze lowered to the flame floating behind the glass, watchful and strangely alive. She remembered the child in Nasha Town. “Then I will call you my magic lamp.”
For the first time since leaving the town, she caught him entirely unprepared. “Your magic lamp?”
“You appeared from it after I made a wish.”
“A dangerous title to give someone who cannot grant your wishes.”
“You already granted one.”
His expression stilled. “Did I?”
Columbina did not answer. She only looked at him, the beginning of a smile hidden at the corner of her mouth.
The blue flame gave a small, bright shiver.
“I like it,” she said.
He regarded her for a long moment, as though the answer might still be waiting somewhere in her expression. Then he bowed his head in surrender. “Very well. For tonight, I shall answer to it.”
“What should I call you?” he asked.
Columbina looked down the unfamiliar road. “I left my name behind.”
“Then we are equally inconvenienced.” The blue flame fluttered between them.
“Will we meet again?” she asked.
His gaze traveled over the two roads stretching away from the crossroads. “I cannot say.”
“If we do?”
The stranger’s hand settled around the lantern handle. “If we do, I shall tell you my name.”
She nodded as though accepting a vow. She touched the lantern’s glass. The blue flame rose to meet her fingertips.
Columbina took one step down the unfamiliar road, then looked back. The stranger remained at the crossroads, his coat still around her shoulders. “You forgot this,” she said.
“Keep it until you find somewhere warm, Miss.”
Her fingers closed around its edges. After a moment, she drew it closer around herself. She turned before the sun appeared.
The stranger remained at the crossroads until her footsteps disappeared. Only then did he follow the road back to his grave and allow his human shape to dissolve into blue light.
The lantern went dark again, but not quite as deeply as before.
The lantern at the Lightkeeper’s side burned bright in the present.
Columbina stepped out from behind the frost white branches. “There you are, my magic lamp.”
The man turned. Recognition changed his expression.Surprise crossed his face so swiftly that another person might have missed it. Columbina did not. His hand tightened around the lantern’s handle, and the flame rose high enough to paint blue light across his fingers.
The Traveler stared. Paimon nearly dropped out of the air. “Your what?”
Columbina came to a stop before him. Her gaze moved from the familiar face to the familiar lantern and back again. “He lives inside the lantern,” she said.
“Paimon knows that!” Paimon cried. “That isn’t the confusing part!”
“Is it not?”
A soft, amused laugh interrupted them. The man’s composure had returned, but not completely. Something warmer now lived beneath it. “You’re not afraid to speak your mind, miss. I like that. Please call me Flins. It is my honor to make the acquaintance of one such as yourself.”
The words reached Columbina from two moments at once. He had said almost the same thing beside his grave, when neither of them had possessed a name. “Flins,” she repeated. The name settled into a place that had waited for it through many moonless years. Columbina folded her hands before her. “And I am Columbina.”
Flins’s eyes searched her face. Then the edge of her cloak shifted, revealing the little blue bird still resting at her throat. “So I heard,” he said softly. The lantern’s flame rose between them, bright and pleased.
At last, the stranger from the grave had a name.
And the girl who had left hers behind had returned with one.