The Sable Canticle

They came for her at dusk, when the Veilwood was breathing mist and the lanterns along the stairs that ran down to the water had begun to burn blue. Renna knew what the blue flame meant.

She closed the ledger, wiped the ink from her fingers, and didn’t look up when the first knock came. Not a knock, really. More like the hush of a fingertip against the door. Three touches. Pause. Two more.

They never said her name aloud. That, too, was part of the vow.

The old man on her porch wore bark-colored robes, damp at the hem, and carried no light. He never did. He leaned on a staff etched in runes so old even the Keepers pretended not to know them.

Renna dipped her head. “There’s bread,” she offered, quietly.

He nodded. “Take it. Tonight you’ll need strength more than comfort.”

So she packed the bread and a flask of windroot tea, laced her boots, and didn’t leave a note. She considered writing something. One word, maybe. But everything sounded either cowardly or false.

She had joined the Canticle seven years ago. She had been barely thirteen, starving and sharp as raw quartz. Back then, her mother still believed she worked at the hill-temple sorting herbs. In truth, Renna hadn’t stepped inside that temple since the night they tested her hands over a living glyph and saw her shadow flicker the wrong way.

They had branded her memory in secret then. Not her skin, but her recollection of who she had been before. She remembered the name Renna because they had let her keep it. They didn’t always.

She followed the old man, called nothing but “Kale,” though she doubted that was ever his name, down winding steps that disappeared into the roots of the Veilwood. Her boot squeaked once. She didn’t know why that embarrassed her. The vapor thickened until even sound grew soft, wrapped in velvet hush.

Somewhere behind them, the bells of Norelan rang second dusk. Here, they came muffled. Dream-sounds. As if memory, not reality, called them.

When they reached the first memory pool, Kale stopped.

“You remember what it will take?”

Renna nodded, throat dry. “A truth I haven’t spoken. A wound I still hide.”

He gave a half-smile. “And blood. But only a drop.”

She stepped to the pool’s edge. The water didn’t ripple like real water. It held still as crystal, but the colors shifted. Moonlit teal. Dusked violet. Red as old coals. She let the knife touch her palm.

Her blood struck the surface with no sound.

Then the world bent.

A gate bloomed open. Not in stone or wood, but in the air itself. A folding. A forgetting.

And they stepped through.

The air beyond the veil was colder than it should have been. Clean, but layered in something older than scent. Memory, maybe. Dust that had forgotten its name.

The vaults were carved beneath the Veilwood, hidden under roots that fed on magic and remembered loss. Only the Canticle knew the way. Only those who had offered memory for passage could return.

Renna moved by feel now. Fingers brushing ancient stone. Her feet made no sound. She thought of the moss growing on the temple steps aboveground, how it always smelled like wet ash after rain.

Behind her, Kale walked with a limp he had never explained.

They passed shelves notched with artifacts: masks of warbled bone, scrolls bound in beetle wing, a cracked mirror that reflected not light but sound.

The Canticle collected not knowledge, but memory. Fragments of history too dangerous or too sacred for the living to keep. They didn’t guard them from people, exactly. They guarded people from them.

At the deepest point of the vault, a door of pale horn sealed the inner chamber.

Kale handed her a single candle. Black. Wickless. Unlit. “You’ll know when to burn it.”

She frowned. “It has no wick.”

Kale’s face did not change. “Then you must find the fire that does not need one.”

“And if I don’t?”

He didn’t answer. He just stepped back. “If you fail, the song remembers you.”

Her stomach turned. “And forgets me?”

“No,” Kale said softly. “Worse.”

She breathed once, twice, and entered.

The room was not large, but it was vast.

Inside it, silence hung like gauze. Not emptiness. It pulsed with knowing. With weight. She stepped forward, and the air shimmered as though it remembered light.

On a dais sat a single object.

A harp, strung with nothing.

It looked carved from night itself. Smooth and dark as water in a well, edged in subtle glints. But its strings were missing, or invisible, or perhaps waiting to be recalled.

She felt her own breath still. The air grew taut.

This was the task.

Find the lost song.

Play the Canticle.

Judge the memory.

Renna didn’t know when she had started singing.

It wasn’t a song she had learned. Not in any school or shrine. But it was inside her, bone-deep, and rising. Low at first. Barely humming. The syllables weren’t words so much as shapes, curling out of her like smoke.

The harp flickered.

One string.

Then two.

She didn’t touch it. Her voice did.

The third string appeared like a vein of silver through water. The sound it gave back wasn’t music. It was memory.

She saw a boy kneeling by a tree scorched black, holding the bones of his brother in his lap. A girl with a stolen blade carving a rune into her palm, shaking as it began to glow. A soldier abandoning his armor to plant a flower on a grave.

More strings appeared.

They sang her memories she had never lived.

A village forgotten by maps, swallowed by snow. Its last light a fire meant only for ghosts.

A mother walking into the Veil, singing the lullaby her daughter would later hum at her own execution.

A storm that learned to speak. A prayer that forgot who prayed it.

Each sound from the harp deepened her own voice, wove her into the chord. Until she wasn’t Renna. Not just her, at least. She was every soul that had fed the Canticle before her.

The strings trembled. The room answered.

And then.

A final memory rose.

Not hers.

Not anyone’s.

It pulsed with light and shame.

A child with a book carved in bone. A vault torn open. A song rewritten to erase a war the Canticle had started and lost. A lie sealed with melody.

She knew the name. She knew what the Canticle had hidden.

She knew why the last singer had vanished.

The harp asked a question.

Burn it?

Or return it?

She hesitated.

The wickless candle was in her hand. Cold. She wasn’t sure how it had gotten there.

The harp trembled.

The truth was poison. But it was also power. The last singer had sealed it away to keep the world from remembering what the Canticle had once done. What it still might.

She lit the candle.

It burned anyway.

And the memory was unmade.

Not forgotten. The Canticle never forgot. But buried. Sealed in silence beneath root and oath and ash.

The harp dimmed.

The vault exhaled like it had buried a name.

The flame vanished.

Renna did not cry. She had sung the song. She had chosen. She had judged.

When she turned, Kale was waiting. His face unreadable.

“You burned it?”

“I returned it,” she said.

Kale nodded, eyes distant. “You understand what that means?”

“I understand we are not the keepers of truth. Only its shadow.”

She stepped past him.

He didn’t follow.

Outside the vault, the Veilwood felt unchanged.

But the silence in her chest had grown teeth.

She would carry the memory now. Not the facts, not the faces. But the weight.

The next time the blue flame came, she would be the one knocking.

And the next singer would decide.