Chapter 66. The Name Beyond Names

A story is not over when it ends. Only when it is forgotten.

The girl carried no name. Or if she’d once borne one, she’d long since buried it beneath the same loamy soil she knelt over, the earth still clinging damply to her fingertips. She had wandered under vaulted canopies where dripping fronds veiled the sky in twilight, through moss-choked valleys where emerald carpets swallowed every footfall and muffled her solitary breath. She had crossed skeletal ruins that rose like broken teeth from the earth—bleached bones half-buried in sand—where the wind carried tremors of whispered secrets into her dreams. She had forded rivers that gurgled in tones older than thunder, currents winding past stones polished smooth by the weight of centuries. She had not meant to survive winter’s pinching teeth, nor the summer’s merciless glare. Yet survive she did, scraped and splintered and still driven onward by some furtive spark she could neither name nor resist.

Her boots were frayed