Moonstone Quarry The world that hardens as the harsher winter holds

solharr walked in silence for a time, letting the wind whistle through the hollows between stone. his breath was low, steady. the kind of breath that bore weight.

she is the past, he said, at last. not a mournful thing. not bitter, either. simply truth, shaped by the years. gone with the wind.

his pace did not falter, though his eye, the one that remained, was far away. somewhere lost in the shape of her memory.

no. the word came on a low breath. she was everything i was not.

a pause. the air tightened, but he did not withhold.

kind. emotional.

his ear flicked as if to dismiss some lingering ghost. but there was no heat behind it. only the weary respect of a man who had known something once and lost it in the old way—quietly, without fanfare.

i was the storm. she was the still water.

and then silence again, but it was not empty. he walked beside aneira like the sea beside a glacier—two ancient things that knew how to bear witness without noise.