NIGHT HAD SETTLED OVER Newarre, and the Waystone Inn lay in silence. It was a silence of three parts.
The first was an absence, hollow and wide. Doors stayed shut. Windows slept dark. No smoke drifted up from the hearths, no footsteps brushed dew from the grass. If there had been music, there would have been some measure of comfort. But there was no music. And so the silence lingered.
In the inn’s basement, the second silence curled, sharp and anxious. Coals in a small forge glowed faintly, their heat fading into whispers of orange light. Tools lay scattered on a workbench, the tongs still tipped with soot and the copper chisel tarnished green. Nearby, acid stained the stone. It hissed as it ate its way inward.
The third silence wrapped around the inn itself, heavy and unmoving. It crept into the locks that held fast and lingered in stones that drank more sound than they should. Upstairs, it burdened the man who slowly undressed by the dim light of a single candle. The man had true-red hair that once caught firelight, but now lay muted in the dark. His hands trembled faintly as he folded his shirt. His eyes, a deep and haunted green, moved restlessly but saw nothing.
The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. The type of silence that comes with quiet tears when certainty falters. One that is born from enduring the same questions with no end in sight. It was the silence of a man who had forgotten his song. It was the silence of a man waiting for time, for change, for an ending.
And so the Waystone lay still. The silence waited on him.