ARCANTHIA: THE DAWN RIDDLE

They say time erases everything...

But they have never heard the echo of a soul that refused to be forgotten.

Centuries passed. Kingdoms rose until they touched the sky, then fell like autumn leaves before the first wind. People believed history was written in the names of kings and armies. The truth was different: it was written in the blood of those no one remembered.

And seven hundred and fifty years ago, war swallowed the continent whole.

Kingdoms collapsed. Cities burned. Civilizations vanished, and secrets that should never have been forgotten were lost beneath their ruins.

And since that day...

The world was never the same again.

One land chose order to survive...

Another was left to chaos, to devour anyone who dared come near.

As for the truth...

It was buried deeper than any human hand could reach.

Centuries went by.

Generations grew up knowing nothing but stories.

Stories some dismissed as legend, while others swore they were true.

And as time went on...

Nothing remained of the past but an echo.

An echo not everyone can hear...

But one that never falls silent.

Does the past truly die once everyone has forgotten it?

Does truth vanish... simply because no one dares search for it anymore?

For some echoes do not fade, no matter how long the silence lasts.

Some wounds are not healed by forgetting — they are only kept alive beneath the ash.

And some truths do not wait to be sought; they always find their own way back.

Because some endings...

Are not endings at all.

They are beginnings... waiting for the one they belong to.

And on a quiet morning...

When the first thread of dawn broke through the darkness of the sky...

Everything began.

No one in Fernil felt that anything had begun — not the baker stoking his oven as he did every morning before first light, not the neighbors who had gone to bed early, not even the man who had spent the whole night pacing outside his own bedroom door, counting his steps without meaning to. None of them knew that the dawn breaking over the sky at that very moment was no ordinary dawn.

That man was me.

All that mattered to me that night was the sound coming from behind the door — Mirin's voice, rising at times, then suddenly falling silent in a way that frightened me more than any scream could have.

The midwife asked me to fetch water, then more water, then cloth — I never understood why we needed so much of it. I realized only later that she simply wanted to keep me occupied, as far from that door as any excuse could manage. I didn't object. I had no idea what I would have done with my hands if they'd stayed empty in that moment.

Between one trip to the well and the next, I stopped for a moment to look at the small crib I had built with my own hands weeks before, set in the corner facing ours. I had gotten the measurements wrong twice before it came out the way I wanted, and Mirin had laughed at me for insisting on starting over instead of just fixing the first mistake. I remembered that now, and wondered whether it would actually be used before morning came, or whether the waiting would stretch on longer than any of us could bear.

I thought, too, about all the advice the older men of the village had given me once they learned Mirin was expecting: be patient, don't expect to understand everything on the first night, fatherhood is learned, not handed to you all at once. That advice had sounded perfectly reasonable in broad daylight, out working in the fields. Now, sitting alone in the dark, it no longer felt like enough. I wanted to know, right then, that very night, how to be a good father — not to learn it gradually, the way everyone kept telling me I would.

Our old neighbor sat with me for a while, not saying much, as if she knew that talking wouldn't make the waiting any shorter. At one point I asked her if it always took this long. She laughed in a way that didn't reassure me much, and said every birth goes its own way, and that my son — or daughter, we didn't know yet — didn't seem to be in any hurry. I thought of Mirin then, of how she had insisted all through the past months that everything would be fine, with a confidence I never came close to sharing, and I wished I could borrow some of it now instead of sitting there, unable to do anything but wait.

I noticed a thin thread of light finally creeping up from behind the distant hills — the first sign that the long night was giving way at last — just as nearly every sound behind the door stopped for a few seconds that felt longer to me than the whole night that came before them. Then the midwife's voice rose suddenly with quick words of encouragement I couldn't make out, though I understood their tone well enough. And then I heard the first cry — that sharp cry unlike any sound I had ever heard in my life — and every question I'd been carrying vanished. I even forgot to breathe for a moment. The midwife opened the door after what felt like an endless, silent wait, and said something about him being a healthy boy, but I didn't really take in the words until I walked in and saw Mirin holding him.

She was clearly exhausted, but her eyes weren't, not in the slightest. She looked at me, smiling in a way I knew well — the smile that meant she wanted to tell me something, but would let me see it for myself first.

I came closer and took him in my arms with far more care than I actually needed, as if I were holding something I already knew weighed more than it looked. I felt the warmth of his small body through the cloth wrapped around him, and his tiny hand, when it slipped free and closed around my finger with no real strength at all, but enough for me to feel it clearly. He opened his eyes for an instant that lasted no longer than a single heartbeat, then closed them again and began to cry like any other child. There was nothing strange in that, really — except that, for one second only, I thought his gaze had held steadier than a newborn's usually does. I forgot about it quickly; there was something far more important to occupy me in that moment.

We named him Lethan later that same morning. My mother, Martha, suggested another name with her usual stubbornness — one carried by some old ancestor of ours I'd never known personally — but Mirin listened to her with a polite smile, then looked at me in a silence clear enough that I needed no further word to understand the decision had been made months ago, and no late suggestion, however well-meant, was going to change it. That small disagreement wouldn't be worth mentioning at all, if it hadn't been the first decision we ever made together about him — one of many we didn't yet know were waiting for us.

My mother looked at the baby for a long while after that, as if she'd forgotten all about the rejected name, then said, in a voice closer to a murmur than words meant for anyone in particular: "Children born with the first thread of dawn carry something of its light with them their whole lives." She paused, then added, with a smile whose meaning I didn't quite catch: "Or its curse. Depends who you ask." Mirin laughed at that, writing it off as one of my mother's old tales that no one knew the origin of. I didn't think about it again — not for a long, long time.

That morning, Mirin and I sat watching him sleep between us, more exhausted than we had ever been in our lives, yet unwilling to sleep ourselves — as though closing our eyes might make us miss something we could never get back.

Through that long night, and the dawn that ended it, I never thought about any old echo, or any crack through which nameless things might have passed. I thought only of a small, red-faced newborn crying in my arms, and of the fact that, for the first time in my life, I was exactly as afraid as I was happy.