The rain came gently in Elessyr, a silver mist more than a storm, soft and persistent. Ravine and Arana stood beneath the cover of an old music hall's overhang, watching the quiet street blur into watercolours. The town was still, the kind of stillness that carried memory in every droplet.
They had spent the morning asking after Tovin, following thin trails of conversation that led them nowhere. Some said he played for the sick. Others remembered him walking the cliffside, humming to the wind. No one gave more than fragments. No one spoke of the expedition.
"He wasn't wanted here," Arana murmured. "But he stayed longer than most would. He loved this place. He just wanted it to love him back."
Ravine didn't reply. Her eyes followed the water as it gathered at the edges of the cobblestones, searching for a current to follow.
Inside the hall, old instruments hung on the walls like sleeping birds. They had stopped there on impulse, sheltering from the drizzle. The air inside smelled of wax and wood shavings, faintly warmed by an unseen hearth.
Arana drifted through the room, fingers brushing the strings of a harp that hadn't been played in years. A single, resonant note followed her like a sigh.
"Do you think he came here often?" Ravine asked.
Arana nodded. "They say this was his favourite place. When no one else listened, the walls did."
A faint creak interrupted the hush. From the back of the hall, a figure emerged. An elderly man, thin as bone, with eyes like polished river-stone.
"You looking for the boy with the strings?" he asked, voice rusted with age.
Ravine stepped forward. "Tovin."
The old man smiled, just a flicker. "He sat right there every evening. Played until the moon was high. Never the same song twice. Said he was trying to write something the world would remember."
Arana watched him carefully. "Did he talk about the expedition?"
The man paused. Then he sat on the nearest bench with the weight of someone remembering something too clearly.
"Not directly. But he had that look. Like he was already half-gone. Like his music was preparing to outlive him. He said once, 'If I vanish, let my echo remain.' I think he knew he wouldn't come back."
Ravine felt her chest tighten. That echo was what they had followed all the way here—through song, through silence, through the heavy spaces where people chose not to speak his name.
"Why won't anyone talk about him?" she asked.
The man looked at her, his gaze sharp despite the years. "Because he left. And he mattered. That combination is harder to carry than death."
Outside, the rain had faded to a mist again, fine as breath. Ravine turned back toward the instruments. She stepped up to the old lyre, fingers hovering above its strings.
One note. Then another. A soft melody that was not hers, but lived somewhere in the room.
She played what she could remember from the recordings Arana had once shown her. Fragments of a song, lost to time.
The old man closed his eyes.
"That's his," he whispered. "That's Tovin."
And in that moment, Ravine felt it too. Not just the music, but the absence it left behind. A space shaped like someone who wanted to be remembered.
A whisper.
A thunder.
A boy with music in his bones.
When they stepped back into the light, the rain had stopped, but the streets were shining.
And Tovin, though never named aloud, lingered in every breath the wind took.