The Reaching Hand

At dawn, the families turned toward their own dead.

Rishi had spent the night at the edge of the memory hollow beside Maeril and Caereth. He had listened until the Elvish responses settled into his breathing. His feet had gone numb once. Maeril had shifted her weight often, but she had not spoken at the wrong time.

When grey light entered the clearing, the larger gathering opened. Each house withdrew to its own roots.

Caereth touched two fingers to his heart.

“The morning remembrances belong to the families. You may take this time for your own.”

The words were dismissal and kindness in equal measure.

Around the Root-House, Elenya’s kin formed a loose circle. Thiarel stood beside Sirael. Lirae sat near Faelar, with Nessari between her knees. Elenya began to speak too quietly for the words to carry.

No one looked toward the guest lodge. No one beckoned.

Maeril watched the circle close.

“We stay out of their roots.” She glanced toward the path. “Then let’s find water.”

Rishi took up the folded cloth of tokens. The crooked fox remained on its shelf inside the lodge. It had been given by the living and belonged with them. Nessari’s bead-thread stayed around Maeril’s wrist.

They followed the narrow path to the Twilight Stream.

Frost edged the banks. The water ran low and clear over dark stone. They chose a flat place near the current and sat close enough that their shoulders almost touched.

Maeril unfolded the clean cloth between them.

Rishi set down the marked wood for his teacher and the old copper for his murdered family. Maeril placed her flower, rope, copied title line, and unmarked cloth beside them.

They listened to the water for a while.

“Twilight-Stream,” Maeril said. “They took their name from this water. You could leave for years and still know where to come back.”

Rishi looked down at the copper.

“And whom to ask about the years you missed.”

Maeril turned toward him.

“Do you remember the Battlescarred Bard?”

Rishi’s thumb stopped on the edge of the copper.

He remembered the room before he remembered its name: dice striking wood, bodies placed to block doors, a lie being built around a man who did not yet know he had been chosen to carry it.

“Yes.”

“You told me about your family there. A little.” She rubbed one bead beneath her thumb. “You said they served Cyric. That they called themselves lawmakers.”

“They did.”

“And then we had other problems.”

“We often do.”

Her mouth moved, but the smile did not stay.

“You never finished.”

Rishi placed the copper back on the cloth.

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me without wishing you hadn’t.”

He looked across the stream.

“They held offices in the Lower City. Enough authority that people listened when they named someone criminal. They served Cyric in private, but his lies entered their public work. Guilt came first. Evidence was arranged afterward.”

Maeril’s jaw tightened.

“They chose whoever was easiest to crush.”

“Yes.”

“Including you.”

Rishi drew breath down to the base of his ribs. The cold made the old breaks in his body easier to remember.

“I was the youngest of seven. The unwanted one. If anger entered the house, it found me. If a plan failed, I had spoiled it. If I spoke the truth, I was lying. They changed the charge whenever the old one stopped hurting.”

Maeril faced him fully.

“How old were you?”

“Every age I was while I lived there.”

Her hand closed around the edge of her cloak.

He said, “I learned to choose pain before another person chose it for me. For a time, Loviatar’s teaching felt like control. If suffering was devotion, then perhaps no one could use it to make me small.”

“But they could.”

“Yes.”

He rested both hands on his knees. His fingers wanted to close. He left them open.

“My father made the wrong law for someone more powerful than he was. We woke in a Bhaalite ritual chamber. The killing had already begun.”

The current filled the pause.

Maeril did not ask what he had seen.

Rishi gave her the truth he could keep level.

“Five of my siblings died. My mother died. My father died. A band of adventurers broke into the chamber before the ritual was complete. My eldest sister, Kethra, and I were the only members of the family left alive.”

Maeril’s gaze dropped to the tokens.

“Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

“But you know she is alive?”

“Yes.” Rishi’s breath caught before he released it. “We were taken into Lathanderite custody together. I lost her later. I know she lives. I do not know what she has become, or what she believes happened to me.”

Maeril looked toward the water again.

“Kethra,” Maeril said quietly.

“There is no token for her.”

“No.”

Rishi touched the copper.

“I chose this for the others. I still do not know what I can say.”

“Because they hurt you?”

“Because they hurt me, and because they were murdered. I do not know what I owe their memory. I do not forgive what they did. I do not believe they deserved the altar.”

“You could remember the truth and leave the verdict unfinished.”

Rishi looked at her.

Maeril lifted one shoulder. “I know. Very moderate of me. Don’t tell anyone.”

His mouth softened.

“I will protect your reputation.”

Her thumb returned to Nessari’s beads.

“What about the others’ names?”

Rishi watched water divide around a stone and join again below it.

“Kethra’s is the only name I have left of them.”

Maeril went still.

“A man called the Planar Wanderer took me and other prisoners out of Lathander’s prison. He led us through the planes. He called it testing us. Those of us who survived reached Hopeless.”

The word altered his posture before he could stop it. His shoulders narrowed. His weight shifted toward the balls of his feet, ready for a road that was not beneath him.

He planted both heels against the frozen ground.

“The gate-town?” Maeril asked. “Near the Gray Waste?”

“On its edge. Close enough.”

“What did it do?”

Rishi took time before answering.

“Nothing at first. That was its danger. Colour diminished. Food lost its taste. Memories faded and did not return when I reached for them. Each morning, it took longer to remember why movement was worth the effort. Then people began to disappear. Some walked toward the Waste. Some ended their lives. The rest of us watched with less feeling each time.”

Maeril’s hand moved toward him, then waited on the stone between them.

“You began to forget.”

“At first, I was relieved.”

He looked down at his hands.

“I thought forgetting might be mercy. I wanted the house gone. The ritual. The prison. Sometimes I think part of me let the dead fade because remembering them hurt. I stopped reaching. Kethra’s name stayed. I do not know why.”

“Rish.”

“It did not remove the pain.” His right hand had begun to tremble. He closed it once, opened it, and placed it flat on his knee. “My father’s face blurred. My mother’s voice thinned. I lost pieces of my siblings. I could remember that a hand had reached for me in the ritual chamber without knowing whose hand it was.”

His pulse struck hard beneath his jaw.

“The body kept what the mind released. A raised voice could wake me fighting. A certain turn of a lock stopped my breath. I had fear without the memory that explained it. Anger without an object. Hopeless took the story and left the wound.”

Maeril covered his open hand with hers.

He did not turn it over. He let her weight rest there.

“At the monastery, I learned to bring the pieces back without letting them command me. Some returned. My parents’ names did not. Nor the names of the five who died with them.”

“Is that where Ilmater found you?”

“Not as I once would have said it.”

He breathed. The bank remained beneath his heels. The stream remained in front of him. Maeril’s hand remained over his.

“The Order taught me that pain does not become sacred because it can be endured. What my family imposed was wrong. What the Bhaalites did was wrong. The Wanderer’s trials were wrong. None of it earned holiness by shaping what came after.”

Maeril’s eyes stayed on him.

“Then what does chosen suffering mean?”

“Choice.”

He turned his hand beneath hers until their palms met.

“If harm is moving toward someone and I step between them, the step has meaning. The pain does not. If I carry part of another person’s burden because they ask and I am able, the consent has meaning. Not the hurt.”

“And if carrying it destroys you?”

Rishi looked at the clear water.

“Then I have passed suffering onward to the people who love me and called it mercy.”

Maeril’s grip tightened.

“I did not understand that until after I died in the grove,” Rishi said. “I am still learning the difference.”

“Good.” Her voice roughened. “Because I intend to remind you.”

“I know.”

She shifted closer until their shoulders touched.

Rishi allowed the contact to take some of his weight.

“Do you know what shames me?” Rishi asked.

“I can guess. I’d rather let you tell me.”

“I survived them. Now I cannot give their faces to this place.” He looked at the empty spaces between the tokens. “I remember what they did more clearly than I remember how they looked. It feels like a second betrayal.”

“Forgetting was done to you.”

“I stopped resisting it.”

“In a place built to make people stop resisting everything.”

He said nothing.

Maeril leaned against him more firmly.

“You know facts. Seven children. Two survivors. You know the hand reached. You know they were cruel, and you know they should not have been slaughtered. That is not a clean memory, but it is an honest one.”

Rishi looked at their joined hands.

“Maybe honesty is enough.”

“For today.”

He nodded.

The shame did not leave. It changed position, enough that he could breathe around it.

His free hand settled over hers.

“The festival is for the dead. Kethra is alive. I am living. You are living.”

“Last I checked.”

“We are beside clear water in a forest that chose to receive us.” He drew in the cold air. “That should not be hidden beneath grief.”

Maeril’s breath touched his shoulder in a quiet laugh.

They sat until the cold began to work through the soles of their boots.

Rishi could not give names to the others. He did not force the blurred faces into shapes they no longer held.

The six tokens remained between them, waiting for sunset.

Maeril stared at her four for a long time.

“If you told me yours, I should tell you mine.”