The Ashes of Evervale

The drought had lasted three years.

Fields around Evervale cracked open like old pottery, and the river that once wound through the valley was little more than a scar of mud. Children went to bed hungry. The market stalls that once spilt over with apples, honey, and bright ribbons stood bare. Every night the bell tower tolled, not for celebration but for the dead, another farmer lost to thirst, another child who would never see the rain.

Elira knew those bells as intimately as her own heartbeat. Each toll was another reminder that her gift, her dangerous, untested magic, might be the only chance left.

She had studied the runes in secret for months, translating the scraps of parchment her grandmother had hidden beneath the floorboards. Old words no priest dared speak aloud anymore. They told of the Runestone of Evervale, buried at the city’s heart, its power sealed when mortals proved themselves reckless. The stone could command rain, harvest, and even the return of rivers. But the warnings were clear: The stone remembers every call.

Her brother Kael had begged her to stop. “You’re not a priest, Elira. You’re a healer. We’re supposed to stitch wounds, not carve new ones.”

But Elira couldn’t watch the city starve. She couldn’t watch Kael, once the proud captain of the guard, break apart as he dug graves for neighbours who had wasted away to shadows.

So when the sun sank behind the blackened fields that night, she lit her grandmother’s old lantern and slipped into the square.

The Runestone lay half-buried beneath centuries of moss, a slab of obsidian shot through with veins of pale quartz. It looked harmless, as if it had always been part of the earth. But Elira knew its pulse. She could feel it under her fingertips like the thrum of a distant drum.

She began to chant the words she had pieced together. Her voice trembled, yet the stone responded, a low hum that set the square vibrating. The moss peeled away, flaring into sparks. Light crawled across the surface, brighter and brighter, until the whole stone glowed like a wound.

And then the air tore open.

It was not rain that spilt forth. It was not a river’s return. Shadows slid out of the stone, shapes half-formed; faces of neighbours, ancestors, even strangers. Hollow eyes, mouths stretched with grief. They staggered across the square, whispering:

“You called us… Why?”

Elira stumbled back, horrified. She had wanted to save them. Instead, she had given the dead a doorway.

Kael arrived minutes later, sword in hand. He froze at the sight, the square filled with shifting, sorrowful forms. The light from the stone turned his scarred face ghost-pale.

“Elira!” His voice was sharp with fear. “What have you done?”

Her throat tightened. She pressed her palm to the stone as if to silence it. The heat burned through her skin. “ I-I tried to bring the rains. I thought...” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know how to fix this.”

The words rang louder than any bell. Even the shadows seemed to pause, their faces turning toward her as if she had named the one truth that held them.

Kael’s grip on his sword faltered. “Then what was the point? You said you could save us. You swore...”

“I know.” Her tears sizzled as they fell against the glowing stone. “I was wrong.”

The dead circled closer. One had the face of a woman who had sold bread at the market, her hair still braided with ribbons. Another looked like their father, though his eyes were hollow and wrong. Elira clutched her chest, struggling to breathe. The weight of her mistake pressed down like iron.

But then, beneath the roar of magic, she felt something gentler. A thread of song, almost too faint to catch. Her grandmother’s lullabies, the same ones sung when storms rattled the shutters long ago. The Runestone remembered. It remembered her grandmother, remembered every voice that had called upon it before.

Her breath steadied. She understood then. The stone could not be undone. It could only be carried.

Kael’s hand seized her arm. “We run. Now.”

She shook her head. “If I leave it open, Evervale will drown in shadows.”

“Then we’ll find another way. We’ll...”

“There is no other way.” Her voice was calm now, though her heart raced. “The stone must bind to someone. It chose me the moment I touched it.”

Kael’s eyes widened with horror. “No. Elira, don’t you dare...”

She smiled through her tears. “You once told me I was as stubborn as a river. Then let me be the river that carries this away.”

Before he could stop her, she leaned into the stone and whispered the forbidden name she had uncovered in her grandmother’s notes.

The light flared, blinding. Shadows screamed, collapsing into sparks that spun into the stone’s core. The runes etched themselves into Elira’s skin, searing her veins with silver fire. Kael shouted her name, but the sound was torn from his throat by the storm of magic.

And then it was over.

The square was silent. The shadows are gone. The stone was as dull as river rock once more.

Kael staggered forward, his sword clattering to the ground. He reached the stone and touched its cool surface. There was no warmth in her hand, no trace of her breath. Only a faint shimmer inside the quartz vein, like a figure pressed deep within, watching from behind glass.

“Elira…” His knees gave way. His tears streaked down his dirt-stained cheeks.

Days later, the drought broke. Rain poured over Evervale, soaking the fields until the river filled again. Crops sprouted as if the earth had waited for this moment. The city rejoiced, singing in the streets.

But Kael did not join them. He sat before the stone each night, whispering her name into the silence, as if she might hear. And sometimes, when the rain struck the stone just so, he swore he could hear her voice, faint as a lullaby carried on the wind.

Evervale lived. But Elira was bound within the stone she had awakened, carrying the weight of all the dead she had called.

Her sacrifice was never written in the city’s chronicles. The priests told the people only that the gods had answered at last.

But Kael knew the truth. And every time the bells tolled for the harvest festival instead of for the dead, he heard his sister’s last words echo in the silence:

“I don’t know how to fix this.”

And he would whisper back, “You did.”