“Light doesn’t always return as dawn. Sometimes, it comes as a single ember that refuses to die.”
It’s strange how quiet the world feels when you finally stop running from it. I used to think silence was a punishment — that if I wasn’t moving, if I wasn’t doing, then the ghosts of the Bazaar would catch up to me. But lately… I’ve started to listen.
The wind through old beams. The creak of a half-rotted door. The heartbeat of a forest breathing around me. They don’t sound like loss anymore. They sound like memory — and I think maybe that’s what healing is. Not forgetting, not mending things back to how they were, but learning how to live with what still remains.
I’m not the same girl who stood in those flames. She died, and maybe she was meant to. What’s left of her — of me — is a carpenter still. But I build slower now, with a steadier hand. I build because someone must. Because even if the world burns again, there should still be a few places left where someone can find shelter.
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