{-Rhenei-}
“I… think I’ve been here before,” Kalleira said, slowly, as she looked around. It wasn’t hard to guess that she couldn’t tell if she should consider it a good thing her not. She pointed to a spot not far from them. “I picked flowers right over there. My parents were behind me… they weren’t smiling. I think… I think they were sad.”
“Do you want to go over there?” Rhenei asked. She thought she’d been quiet but Farrar still glanced over his shoulder at her. It wasn’t really a confused look; he was waiting for her answer. “I don’t think he’d mind.”
Kalleira considered it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. I want to see if I’ll remember anything else… If I can remember why we went there, and why they seemed so sad…”
Rhenei looked back at Farrar. “Can we—”
“Just show me where it is,” he said with a shrug. It almost felt like Calum talked to him about something—something she didn’t know. Or, perhaps, something she would know, if she cared to put a couple of pieces together.
She gave him a grateful smile and pointed to the spot Kalleira showed her. Farrar then led the way there, though Rhenei soon outpaced him in order to keep up with Kalleira.
“We went here a lot,” Kalleira mumbled. Perhaps she found it easier for her to recall the memories if she talked about them aloud. “I’d always used to get flowers from right over there. That patch had the prettiest. I wanted to choose the best one but I never wanted to get lost, so I got what looked the best from a glance. Then we’d walk together, kinda. They usually mumbled things… I’d be too busy looking for more flowers to pay attention to them. After a while we’d end up right… here.”
She turned to Rhenei with a hopeful look. “I think that’s the spot where I placed the flowers. Can you move all those weeds?”
Rhenei nodded and immediately went to the spot. She didn’t think to match up what they learned about the village to the plants growing around the area. She only vaguely acknowledged Farrar seemed to have a guess, yet he said nothing so she didn’t dwell on it.
As soon as she cleared as much of it away as she could, Kalleira knelt down beside it to get a closer look. Farrar approached more cautiously.
All of Rhenei’s happiness faded the moment she realized what it was. “It’s someone’s grave.”
“Probably some kid,” Farrar remarked, a tone that proved he was impartial to the scene yet held some kind of empathy. “He must’ve been here a lot.”
“Kalleira,” Rhenei said slowly and carefully, “you know who he is, don’t you?”
The name and date of death were near impossible to read at this point. But a family member wouldn’t need that to be able to recall those details.
“He… was my brother…” Kalleira went to touch the grave, but pulled her hand away again. “I don’t remember why he died. I think it was before I was born, or when I was little… But my parents talked about him a lot. They only ever said nice things about him, like how smart or talented he was. He’d end up being what got us out of our hometown and somewhere more ‘prolific.’” She paused. “When we’d come here, they’d always ask why I didn’t have even a bit of any of the things he did.”
With a little nod of confirmation, Rhenei relayed the information to Farrar. Then, all three of them stood there in solemn silence.
“Here,” Farrar sighed. He knelt down beside the two of them and the grave. “Let’s let him know there’s still some people here who are thinking of him. We’re supposed to have candles, but words should do since we didn’t bring any.”
“Repeat after me,” he instructed, saying the next words slowly, “boreí to fos na se vrei.”
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“Boreí to fos na se vrei,” Rhenei and Kalleira both mumbled.
There was something comforting about hearing the phrase. After a moment, Rhenei asked, “What does it mean?”
“‘May the light find you,’” he answered. “May our light—our words of remembrance, of goodwill—find its way through Vriuh’s domain to the person we’re thinking of.”
“Does it?”
“That all depends on who you talk to.”
“What do you think, then?”
“They say every misfortune, every death, is a part of Orestis’s plan for a reason. I’m not too sure about that part, but I know that the dead should still be remembered. It’s only going to lead to more people getting hurt like they were if we pretend like it never existed in the first place.” He rose to his feet and stepped back. “Let me know when you’re ready and we’ll start moving again.”
Rhenei didn’t move until Kalleira did and she still waited a moment after that to tell Farrar they could keep going.
Kalleira alternated between long stretches of silence and sharing more details about her memories of the place. Rhenei only ever listened; she couldn’t think of anything worth saying, and she feared accidentally mentioning one of the things that were actually on her mind.
The village had been destroyed decades ago. That grave hadn’t been visited in probably just as long. Perhaps she should’ve always realized what it would’ve meant for Kalleira, if she had a memory of the Strings… but somehow, it never quite clicked for Rhenei until this moment.
After all, the Strings resided in Vriuh’s domain. Only the dead were capable of seeing them.
Which just led to the question… how did Kalleira die?
Did any of them really want to know?
“I think this is it,” Farrar announced after a while, stopping a bit of a distance away from one of many crumbling buildings. “It looks like those guys were right about it. Do you want some time, or do you want to head in now..?”
Rhenei, encouraged by Kalleira’s less-than-confident steps, walked forward onto the ruins.
“Be careful,” he mumbled behind both of them. “We can’t be sure what’s lurking around here.”
Kalleira likely only half-listened, simply wandering around. After a few moments, she’d say some things, too.
“That’s where the baker lived. I tried stealing some of his baked cookies once, but it didn't work out.”
“The pastor usually stayed in that house. Our actual church got torn down after a storm and they never got around to fixing it. They took turns holding services in their living rooms or basements.”
“I think a friend of my parents lived there. She always visited them whenever there was some kind of festival.”
“Some of the kids would play in that street. I was never with them—I watched from the window of my house.”
She paused. “My house…”
Kalleira scanned the entire area, undoubtedly trying to sort through which one of them felt the most familiar. Then, when it seemed like she caught sight of the right one, she ran off, leaving Rhenei and Farrar to catch up to her.
“This was my house,” Kalleira announced, the message relayed from Rhenei to Farrar. “I mean, I know it doesn’t look like a lot now, but! It was my house, back when I lived in it, whenever I lived in it… I’d play over there, we’d eat there, I slept in that room…”
She wandered over to the place, but must not have liked the emptiness that greeted her there. “But I still can’t remember what exactly happened. It’s still just fragments.”
Farrar, who’d had all of this told to him through Rhenei, slowly picked through some remnants of old furniture. “Maybe it’s a good thing that she doesn’t remember it—maybe it’s for a reason.”
Kalleira glared at him. “Why could there be a reason? I want to know what happened here! I want to know why I ran away in that memory, who that brother was to me, what my parents were like! I don’t think knowing could hurt me any more than wondering.”
Rhenei, unsure exactly how to tell him that, simply said, “She wants to know about her past.”
“Then I suppose there’s always the charm that Calum gave us,” Farrar remarked. “That sounds like something he might have wanted you to use it for.”
Both of them perked up at the suggestion and Rhenei took it out of her bag. “What do you think I’m supposed to do with it?”
“If it does what I think it does, just set it next to something Kalleira might remember using or interacting with a lot. It’ll use that point as an anchor of memories to show you what you want to see.” He shrugged. “Just be careful and prepare yourself for anything you might see. No one said there weren’t some memories that were hidden for good reason.”
She only partially understood his reason for a warning. She followed Kalleira’s lead and placed the charm down amongst a long-forgotten toy, then stepped back to wait for what might happen next.