Chapter 3: The Silence Between

  The village of Salya did not speak much, but it moved with rhythm.

  In the mornings, the smoke from stone chimneys drifted like soft signals into the gray sky, and by dusk the air was always heavy with the scent of bread and steel. Ryan worked beside Dagon. He didn’t ask questions. He carried, lifted, and hammered, mimicking the men around him.

  No one praised him, but no one pushed him away either. In Salya, where silence meant survival, Ryan was beginning to understand the language.

  Dagon was different. He didn't watch Ryan with suspicion, but with a constant, quiet calculation. Like the man was balancing weights in his mind — who Ryan was, and who he might become.

  They trained during the gaps in labor. Blunt wooden swords, controlled strikes, and reminders that survival was rhythm. That fear was a song that must not be sung.

  There were others who watched him. Quietly. An old man by the forge. A boy who mimicked his stance when he thought Ryan wasn’t looking. A woman who passed him bread without ever meeting his eyes. These small things began to form the shape of belonging.

  But Ryan never allowed himself to feel settled. The weight of his arrival still clung to him. The memory of the fall. The sound of the sea. The loss he couldn’t name.

  That evening, they sat by a small fire near the edge of the settlement. Dagon tilted his head as he sipped from his worn flask, firelight dancing across the hard lines of his face.

  “You’re quieter tonight,” he said.

  Ryan didn’t look up. He was watching the flicker of flame as if trying to pull meaning from it.

  “The dreams are gone,” Ryan said flatly.

  “Nightmares?”

  “No,” he replied, voice low. “They were… different. More like glimpses. Feelings. Moments that hadn’t happened yet — but always did.”

  Dagon raised an eyebrow. “Premonitions?”

  Ryan gave a half-nod. “Sometimes. Sometimes warnings. Sometimes nothing at all, until I was there… and realized I’d already seen it.”

  He rubbed his arms, chilled despite the fire. “But since I got here, since the fall… nothing. Just empty sleep.”

  He didn’t say more, but the thoughts pressed inward. I used to dream every night. Vivid, strange dreams — not always clear, but always close. There was one... I kept falling, deeper and deeper, and just before I hit the bottom, everything would go blue. Cold. Like drowning in light. I never understood it.

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  And then, when I actually fell — into that well, that pit — it was the same feeling. Same light. Same cold. That dream wasn’t just a dream. It was trying to tell me something. But now it’s all gone. Like someone cut the thread.

  Dagon looked at him for a moment, then turned back to the fire.

  “Maybe the land here doesn’t want to be seen before it’s ready,” he said.

  Ryan didn’t respond. But his fingers twitched as if reaching for something that wasn’t there.

  The next morning, a hunting party returned early — faces grim, tunics stained. One of the men carried a bundle of fur and torn flesh in a sack slung over his back. Another limped.

  Whispers spread through the village of Salya like cracks in a frozen lake.

  "They were watching us," whispered Thane, one of the older hunters, his voice rough with cold and blood. "Something's changed in the woods."

  That night, Dagon and Ryan walked the treeline in silence, eyes on the dark. The forest felt tense — as if it were holding breath.

  Dagon finally spoke, voice low.

  "I feel it in the trees. In the bones of the land. Blood where there should be none."

  Ryan didn’t answer. But deep in his gut, something pulsed — not fear, but something older.

  The next day passed like the one before it. Work. Practice. Silence. But something lingered behind Ryan’s eyes.

  Later that night, Ryan sat alone by the dying fire. The silence of Salya wrapped around him, heavy and unkind.

  Footsteps approached from the dark — Dagon, holding something in his hand.

  “Found this on the innkeeper’s table,” he said simply, and held out the pendant.

  Ryan stared at it. His hand moved before thought could intervene, fingers closing around the cold metal.

  A shock of sensation surged through him — not pain, not memory — something deeper.

  Water.

  A voice calling from beneath its surface.

  A hand submerged in glowing current.

  A woman screaming.

  Then it vanished.

  Ryan gasped and stumbled back, still clutching the pendant.

  Dagon’s eyes narrowed. “Is it yours?”

  Ryan nodded slowly, breath shallow. He didn’t know why, but something inside him screamed to keep it — to not let it go again. The pendant pulsed faintly in his hand, and though the vision had faded, the ache it left behind was real. “I think… I need it back.”

  Earlier that evening, before Dagon returned to the fire, he had gone to the inn. The common room was quiet, half-shadowed by dying lanterns. Marta stood behind the bar, polishing a cup that didn’t need polishing.

  “Marta,” Dagon said, stepping inside.

  She looked up, her expression neutral, unreadable.

  “I heard you found something. A pendant,” he added.

  Her eyes flickered. “I found many things, Dagon. People leave things when they bleed.”

  He took a slow step forward. “This one’s not yours.”

  “It paid for the boy’s food,” she replied flatly. “He didn’t argue when I took it.”

  Dagon’s jaw tightened. “Do you know what it is?”

  “No,” she said. Then softer, “But I know what it feels like.”

  There was a pause between them.

  She opened a drawer behind the counter and held it up. The metal shimmered faintly.

  “Give it to me,” Dagon said.

  “You’ll give it back to him?”

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated. “Then tell him something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Tell him I don’t give things for free. Not in Salya.”

  Dagon took the pendant and nodded once. He didn’t answer her with words — just turned and walked into the dark.