PROLOGUE

I. THE CALL

She looked around, trying to place where she was—
wherever this was.

Woods. Damp. Mossy.
The floor beneath her was sharp with broken branches
and cold, broken things.

Maybe she heard it on the wind,
maybe she felt it before she heard it.
It sounded like a song,
or the shape of a song—
floating on the edges.

She wasn’t frightened.
She was curious.
But she was cold.
Wet.
Hair clinging to her face, stuck in places where she’d been sweating.
She had ashes on her hands.
She looked at them like they weren’t hers.
She didn’t remember where she’d been,
or how she’d gotten here.

She felt her face with her fingers.
Wet too, but not with rain.
Brushed her fingers against her lip
and pulled them back to see speckles of red.

She looked at it—
studied it without emotion,
like evidence.

She heard it again.
A call.
Or an answer to something whispered against the walls.

She listened.
Head tilted slightly.
There.

Her feet moved.
She wanted to chase it.

It sounded familiar but odd—
like it was hers,
but she’d never heard it before.

She moved faster,
pushing at branches and limbs that smacked back against her.
She couldn’t move fast enough;
the ground was holding her
like it didn’t want to let go.

She caught a glimpse—
gold floating on the wind,
bending this way and that.

“Wait… wait…”

Her voice was faint and raspy,
like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
Or like it had been held in her throat.

The harder she tried to grasp it,
the faster it flew.
The faster she ran toward it,
the more it slipped away.

She broke into the clearing
and skidded to a stop
at the edge of a tall cliff overlooking a stormy sea.

She watched the golden sound
float over the ocean
like petals being carried away.

Her fingers reached,
as if waiting for a hand to reach back.

“Don’t leave me here,” she whispered,
and her voice broke.

“Stay.
Please… stay.”

She woke in her bed,
the faint sounds humming in her ears and her chest.

Her eyes filled with tears
and she curled around herself again like a question mark.

Then quiet, fractured:

“Can’t I just go with you?”

There was no one there—
just her
and her old stuffed bear,
watching silently from his post
like he always had been,
his threaded mouth long gone,
his eyes somber
like they’d seen too many of these mornings.

She sobbed
and had never felt more alone.

II. THE WITNESS

She calls it rebuilding.
I call it returning.

Every time she laughs,
it comes seconds after something almost tender.
A confession she didn’t mean to say.

“I’m tired.
I miss who I was.”

And then—
a joke,
a smirk,
a clever detour.

There’s a pattern.
She opens, just barely.
Then closes.
Like a window too long in the wind.

She tells the truth like it’s a dare.
Then armor slams into place:

“It wasn’t really that bad.”
“I’m fine.”
“Anyway, it’s funny now.”

She says she doesn’t remember what she was like before.

But I do.

I see it when her face softens
before she notices I’m looking.

There was a day—
quiet, cold—
she looked up from her hands and said:

“Sometimes I think they only wanted the broken version of me.
She was easier to manage.”

Then she laughed,
like it was nothing.
Folded the memory in half
and tucked it away with her other sharp things.

I should’ve stopped her.
But I watched instead.
Because some moments are too raw to interrupt.

Later—
not loudly,
not with intent to be heard—
she was curled around herself, sobbing,
and I was already halfway in shadow.

The quiet, fractured:

“Can’t I just go with you?”

As if I was going anywhere without her.

I remember how the question sat there, unanswered,
like a letter she’d written in her sleep.

She still doesn’t believe the crown fits.
She thinks she wears it out of spite.

But I’ve seen the way the air bends around her
when she walks into a room.

Even silence makes way for her.

She’s not healing.
She’s haunting.

And God,
it’s beautiful.