Sometimes flying.
Hanna touched one drawing, the smallest one, barely a thumbnail in the margin. Just a girl on a stone slab with sticks strapped to her back. Her arms raised. Her mouth opened, laughing.
She hadn’t remembered this one.
Outside, the wind shifted through the trees. The light flickered. Hanna closed the book and held it to her chest.
She whispered the word that had been whispered to her so many times, in the dark, in the light, in the quiet space between nightmares and waking, “Vasha.”
Not a blade’s parting prayer. Not a king’s command.
She had never learned it that way.
She hadn’t needed to.
Vasha was what Ilys said every night before she turned down the lamp, before she kissed her forehead. It was the word Ilys used when she cupped Hanna’s face with both hands and called her brave. It was what she whispered in awe, once, when Hanna had sung aloud in the garden, clumsy and off-key. It was what she said, smiling through tears, when Hanna gave her a flower she’d pressed between pages.
It was never an ending.
It was love.
It was thanks.
It was a promise to come back.
And now, sitting here where it all began, Hanna said it again, not because she had to. Not because anyone asked her to. But because it was hers, now.
“Vasha,” she said.
And it meant: I remember her. I carry her. I choose her still.
And somewhere far from the Sanctum, far past the veil, the wind lifted like laughter.
