Ash woke to the sound of hoofbeats and his own bones complaining.

The hoofbeats belonged to the inn’s gray mare below, stamping in her stall in protest at the cold. The bones were all his. They had a particular way of announcing themselves on winter mornings, each joint putting in a vote against the idea of getting out of bed.

He lay still for a moment on the narrow pallet, listening to the old building breathe around him. The inn’s stable loft had its own noises: the slow snort and shift of animals, the occasional rattle of a halter ring, the soft, steady drip of meltwater from a roof beam where the snow refused to decide whether it was coming or going.

The air smelled of hay, leather, and a faint sourness of old straw. Underneath it all, there was bread. There was always bread, somewhere in the Crossroads— today it was yesterday’s loaves being toasted in the kitchen below, the scent sneaking up the stairwell and teasing his empty stomach.

He flexed his toes, winced, and propped himself on his elbows.

“Still here, then,” he told the rafters.

They had heard worse.

His boots waited at the foot of the bed, still crusted with a veil of dried mud and road dust from days when he’d walked more than the length of the village street. He’d cleaned them last night until his back started shouting; they glinted reproachfully now, as if they knew they’d be seeing mostly inn-yard and cobblestone for the next while.

Ash swung his legs over the side, sat on the edge of the pallet, and eased his feet into the boots one at a time. It was a small act of stubbornness, putting them on instead of shuffling around barefoot or in soft house shoes. Boots meant roads, even if the roads were only in his memory.

When he stood, his knees crackled. He gripped the post at the end of the bed until the brief dizziness passed, then crossed the tiny loft to the low window that overlooked the street.

The shutters were closed, but light leaked through the hairline gap where they met. He unlatched them and pushed them open a hand’s width, letting in cold that cut straight through his wool shirt.

Snow mapped the Crossroads in pale lines and lumps. The main street curled past the inn toward the square like a frozen stream. A couple of early carts trundled by, wheels squeaking, breath of beasts and drivers ghosting in the air. Someone had already swept a path from Pathfinder’s Crumb to the well; he could see the neat track of boots in the fresh powder.

And there—just turning in from the road that ran toward Brookfell—three figures moved in a knot. A woman, a stooped old man, and a slight figure of a girl, all wrapped in brown and gray, walking with the particular set to their shoulders that spoke of a journey started early and finished later than they’d hoped. They had the look of Brookfell about them: clothes repaired a dozen times, faces tanned by hillside wind, steps sure even on the uncertain ice.

Ash watched them pass beneath his window and head toward the mill road.

He didn’t need to hear their words to guess why they’d come.

“Here we are again,” he murmured, fogging the glass with his breath. “Back where all the paths tangle.”

The girl looked up at something—a crow, perhaps, or simply the shape of the mill— and for a heartbeat her gaze seemed to brush the inn’s upper windows. Ash stepped back instinctively, though she couldn’t possibly see him from that distance.

He let the shutter fall mostly closed, cutting off the view and most of the cold.

On the wall by his bed, there was a peg with his cloak on it and another with his staff leaning beside it. Above those, wedged between the rafters, was a small collection of objects that made up what remained of his traveling life: a dented tin mug from a tavern three valleys over, a strip of faded cloth he’d tied around his arm once during a long march and never quite stopped carrying, a wooden charm carved in the shape of a river fish. To anyone else, they would have looked like rubbish. To Ash, they were chapters.

Beside them was a small, battered leather satchel. He took it down carefully and brought it to the little table by the window, where the light was best.

Inside were his notebooks.

He pulled one out, the cover softened and polished by years of handling. The first page still bore, in Crumb’s heavy, decisive hand, the words he’d written the day he’d given the book to Ash:

If you’re going to wander, he’d said, grinning, you might as well remember where you’ve been.

Ash had replied something about not needing paper to remember. Crumb had laughed and told him that memory was a treacherous road, and it helped to put down a few signposts as you went.

He opened the book at random.

A line of cramped script marched across the page.

Third night out from the Crossroads, it read. Snow heavier than we planned for. Crumb insists the next village isn’t far. He is wrong, but not wrong enough for me to say I told you so. We share the last of the good bread. He pretends he isn’t worried. He is.

Ash smiled, though it hurt his chest.

He remembered that night. Crumb’s stubborn shape plowing ahead into the wind, claiming he could smell chimney smoke that never quite materialized. The way his face had shifted when he thought no one was looking, a crack in the easy confidence he wore like an apron.

They’d found the village in the end, half-frozen and half a day later than Crumb had promised. He’d spent the next morning helping patch roofs for free as penance, as if he could nail his mistake down along with the loose shingles.

No one told that part when they spoke about the First Pathfinder leading people through blizzard and famine. No children sat cross-legged at the Flame Circle to hear about misjudged distances and bad guesses.

Ash flipped forward.

There were other fragments, little windows.

Crumb, laughing as he burned a batch of flatbread in a stranger’s oven because he’d been too busy telling a story to watch it properly.

Crumb, arguing with Osric until both their faces were red, then going quiet afterward and asking Ash in a low voice if he’d gone too far.

Crumb, sitting on a stone by the roadside, boots off, massaging his ankles and admitting, just once, that he’d forgotten what it felt like to be young enough to walk all day and still dance at night.

Not a saint. Not a statue.

A man, with sore feet and a temper and a habit of making promises his friends had to help him keep.

Ash closed the book gently and set it aside.

The Vigil would come soon. The first official one, with a name and a date and candles counted and stories chosen in advance. Last year’s had been something else—raw and messy, born out of shock as much as grief. People had spoken whatever came into their mouths, glad just to fill the cold air with words.

This time, they would come expecting… something. A shape to their mourning. Lessons to carry home. Wisdom, neatly baked and sliced.

And they would look at him, because he had known Crumb before there was a Crossroads to anchor him.

They already had, in the weeks after the burial. Little knots of people cornering him near the well, or in the inn, or on the path to the hill.

Tell us what he said, they’d ask, faces hungry in a way that had nothing to do with bread. Tell us the last thing he told you. Tell us the time he knew exactly what to do.

Ash had told some of it. Enough. The easier bits.

He had not told them about the night, three winters ago, when Crumb had sat on the step outside the bakery after everyone else had gone to bed, head in his hands, saying, What if I’ve pulled them onto a road I can’t see the end of? What if there was some other path we missed?

Those kinds of stories didn’t fit well around a fire when people wanted to sleep afterward.

But maybe they should.

Ash rubbed his thumb along the edge of the notebook. His hands were not as steady as they used to be. The lines on his skin were as deep as any road he’d ever walked.

“Should we tell them everything?” he asked the air.

The inn’s old beams gave no answer. The mare in the stall below snorted, unimpressed.

He pushed himself to his feet again and reached for his cloak. The act of shrugging it on was like putting on a little extra weight, but also a little extra armor.

The staff leaned beside the door, its wood polished almost black by years of being gripped and leaned on. Crumb had carved it for him, once, on a long, quiet stretch of road when there’d been nothing else to do with their hands.

“To keep you from blowing away in a strong wind,” Crumb had said, handing it over with a flourish.

Ash had scoffed then. These days, the wind didn’t have to be all that strong.

He took the staff now and felt the familiar fit of it in his palm.

He should have gone straight downstairs, joined the press of morning in the common room, maybe traded a joke or a story to earn his breakfast. Instead, he found his feet carrying him out the side door and around the back of the inn, toward the slope that led up to the hill.

The snow was shallow here, muffled crunch under his boots. His footprints trailed behind him in a staggered line, the right foot digging deeper where his old injury still made him favor that leg. He watched them as he walked, the way they chained together.

He tried not to think about how much shorter the line of his days was getting. All roads had endings. He’d walked enough of them to know.

The hill that held the Flame Circle rose up behind the village, a broad, rounded shoulder of land that caught the light differently in each season. Today it was the color of old bone, grass stubble poking through the snow, stones hunched along its flanks like sleeping beasts.

The Circle itself was a ring of knee-high stones in a flattened clearing near the crest. The snow had drifted between them, but where the fire pit sat in the center, the ground was darker, stained by ash from a hundred nights and more.

Ash paused at the outermost stone to catch his breath. The walk from the inn would not have winded him, once. He pretended it was the cold.

He stepped inside the ring and stood in the center, looking down.

The ashes from the last small gathering were still there, gray and black, flecked with unburned bits of wood. Someone—Liora, most likely—had cleared out the worst, but a thin layer remained, pressed into the earth.

He crouched slowly, knees protesting, and dragged two fingers through the ash. It clung to the grooves of his skin.

Ashes and footprints, he thought. What we leave behind, and how we got there.

The Vigil would draw more of both.

He could already picture it: the circle ringed with candles, Lys from the inn carrying baskets of bread, Liora with her careful voice, Osric at the edge of the light, ever the miller even when no sacks were in sight. Faces from Brookfell, too, if the trio he’d seen from his window was any indication. Two villages, one fire.

What would it mean, to stand here and tell them that the man whose name they were about to carve into stone had doubted himself, had erred, had hurt people with good intentions as much as he had saved them?

Was there kindness, in that truth? Or only cruelty?

He thought of the girl’s face below his window, head lifted. Of Tavi, though he did not yet know her name. Of children who would grow up with the story of the First Pathfinder as something fixed and shining.

If they believed heroes were never afraid, what would they think when fear came for them?

He dug his fingers deeper into the ash until he hit the hard earth beneath.

A soft scrape sounded behind him.

He turned his head, slowly, and saw the small brown bird perched on one of the ring stones, watching him. The smudge on its breast was darker than the rest, as if it had flown through smoke and come out stained.

“Morning,” Ash said.

The bird cocked its head, as if waiting.

“You wanting a story as well?” he asked. “Or just come to see if we’re doing anything worth remarking on?”

Kindle hopped down from the stone, landing just beside his footprints. It hopped into one, then another, leaving its own neat little marks beside the larger, clumsier ones.

Ash watched it, something like amusement nudging at him.

“Is that what you’re after?” he muttered. “New paths to follow? We’re not making many of those these days. Mostly walking circles.”

The bird chirped once, quick and bright, and fluttered over to the center of the Circle. It pecked at something in the ash, then darted back out, leaving the faint impression of its claws in the gray.

Ash pushed himself upright again, using his staff to lever himself up.

“All right,” he said softly, to the bird or the stones or the memory of Crumb—he wasn’t sure. “I’ll speak. At the Vigil. I’ll tell them a little of the man I knew, not just the one they want to build out of candles.”

The wind, as if in answer, tugged at his cloak and made the flames of the village below seem to flicker, even from this height.

He felt foolish, declaring anything to a bird and some rocks. But the words settled in his chest with a certain rightness, like a foot finding a familiar place in the path.

“Not everything,” he added. “I’m not that brave. But enough.”

He turned away from the Circle and started back down the hill, planting his staff carefully in the snow. Each step left another mark behind, fresh and fragile, doomed to be filled in by the next storm.

Kindle lifted off from the stone and flew ahead of him, skimming low over the snow, arrowing toward the village.

Ash watched it go, a small, moving point in the white.

“You walked first,” he said under his breath, thinking of Crumb. “But you’re not the only one who ever did.”

It was a thought he’d never dared to say aloud before. The idea that the path Crumb had opened might not have begun or ended with him.

The inn’s chimney sent up a lazy plume of smoke. Somewhere beyond it, the mill’s wheel turned, and Liora’s candles waited for their wicks.

Ash followed his own footprints back down into the valley, the weight of the years on his shoulders and the weight of the stories in his chest, both heavier and somehow easier now that he’d decided, in his own quiet way, to carry them into the firelight.