The thing that wore her brother’s face stepped closer. “Then what will you carve instead?”

Elara’s hands trembled around the painted stone. “I couldn’t. If I said goodbye, it would be real.”

One such traveler was Elara, a stone-cutter from the low villages. She had lost her twin brother, Kael, to a rockslide seven winters past. She had never wept for him. Not once. Instead, she carved his face into every headstone she made for strangers, burying his name in other people’s grief.

Elara thought of the empty chair at supper. The unlit candle on his name-day. The way she had stopped humming because they used to hum together.

Old mapmakers called the region “Nalvas’s Teeth” because travelers who entered those mist-choked passes never returned the same. They came back with silver threads in their hair and a strange, quiet hunger in their eyes. When asked what they had seen, they would only say: “It showed me the door I never knew I closed.”

It was not a beast of claw or fang. The Nalvas had no body that could be caged, no shadow that could be pinned to the ground. Instead, it was a presence —a living, breathing ache that took the shape of whatever you had lost most deeply.

And there stood Kael.