“Was there anything strange that night? Anything out of usual? Like a sound or something?”
She drew in a long breath. “Not that I can remember. It’s been too long.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to push.”
“It’s alright.” She gave a small smile. “She wasn’t the first to go near that thing and not come back. The Crater’s swallowed plenty of people since its existence.”
“Do you think she died there?”
Another shrug. “There’s no crime in Nimorran. You want to be safe, stay away from the hills.”
Even though I knew the answer, I still asked, “Do you know any way I could reach the person who saw her leave? Oh, or the missing girl’s team?”
She shook her head.
I closed the book. “Thank you. For your time.”
She stood and smiled faintly. “It’s alright.” But before I could move, she turned back. “Friendly warning—don’t go near it. Some people come back alive, sure...but not all. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
If only she knew.
I flashed a polite smile and walked out of the café.
Around six p.m., I sat in a library in Nimorran with five others, three books opened before me, my attention drifting between them as I scribbled down overlapping stories of strange accidents around the hills.
Even as I read, I scrolled through the internet that I felt was mostly fabricated and exaggerated just to make The Crater look more dangerous than it already was. But I still read them. I needed to look for a version of the truth that made sense to me. One that felt like it could explain what I’d seen. But as much as I searched, I found nothing about a messenger and who it served.
Who was thesheit spoke of? It had come from The Crater, but surely, it didn’t belong to...it, right? Selvanyra hated humans because of what was done to her, yes, but she wouldn’t have created monsters just to kill them off even if they meant no harm.
Would she?
The ache in my head sharpened, a dull pressure behind my eyes. I rubbed at my temples and stood, breathing out slowly as I made my way to the back of the library where the older shelves were.
I needed the old stories. The ones that had not been edited for sanity. I needed the raw truth, the one about when Selvanyra, the moon, still walked in a mortal body, before the Soulless Man ruined everything.
I used to read that story as a kid, obsessively so. The last time I touched it, I was seventeen. Somewhere along the line, that fascination had faded.
But The Crater never left me. It stayed tucked into the corners of my mind like an almost due assignment.
Maybe I’d missed a detail back then. Probably a piece of the story I was too young to understand. I’d stopped reading it when the story started to feel too heavy to carry in my chest, when something inside me shattered every time I reached the part where she cursed him. How my chest clenched like the wrong person had been punished.
He’d killed someone, yes. But something about it made my inside feel like they were shedding tears on his behalf.
He’d been made to live on, soulless and alone. More than a thousand years had passed. Surely by now, if he wasn’t dead, he should have been forgiven, right? Yes. Yes. He should have.
I shook the thought off and focused on the shelf in front of me. I was searching for the thick volume that held the entire tales about Selvanyra, the Soulless Man and The Crater in one. My fingers trailed across the spines, dust clinging to my skin.
Then stopped.
A chill kissed my nape, crawling down the ridges of my spine like a fingertip I couldn’t see. The hairs on the back of my neck rose as the air behind me shifted and thickened.
And then the scent bled into me. I froze, my body recognising him before my mind could catch up.
Cedarwood. Myrrh.
My chest stuttered as my stomach turned to silk and fire, longing and relief exploding inside me. Every inch of my body tightened, and a sound clawed its way up my throat—a gasp, half-born, as if relief had hands and it was wringing my lungs with them.
I turned—
