Chapter 5 - Spirit sense

The sun crept gently over the eastern ridge, diffusing its light through the mist that still clung to the treetops. Morning in the village began in low murmurs—carts shifting over dirt paths, tools clinking softly, roosters giving half-hearted calls. Inside the cottage, Sera moved through her routine with the rhythm of someone who had long since tuned her breath to the tempo of the world. Her hands sifted dried roots into labeled jars while the hearth’s soft embers whispered beneath a new log.

Eirian lay wrapped in her blanket beside the hearth.

A knock came, two quick taps. Sera paused only to rinse her hands and dry them on her apron before she opened the door.

Outside stood Tomas.

He looked taller somehow, though he hadn't aged more than a season. Or maybe it was the way he stood now—shoulders back, hands folded awkwardly in front of him. His clothes were better today: a freshly washed tunic and boots still damp with cleaning oil. Behind him stood a man Eirian hadn’t seen before—his father, most likely. Broad-shouldered, dark-eyed, with hands built for farm work and a back bent from it.

The man bowed shallowly. “Mistress Sera. You saved my family’s life. I don’t have the words, but I have my thanks.”

Sera waved it off with a kind but firm gesture. “Your son brought me in time. That was what saved them. You should thank him too.”

“I have,” the man said, clapping Tomas lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll leave you to speak.”

He turned and walked back down the path, boots crunching through gravel.

Tomas lingered on the threshold, holding a small basket—lined with cloth, the corners folded. “We brought some late squash and honeybread,” he said, voice quiet.

“Come in,” Sera replied. “She’s awake.”

He stepped over the threshold carefully, like he was walking into a sacred space. His eyes flicked to Eirian almost immediately. She met his gaze with her usual measured silence.

Then she saw it.

The fox button. Tied to a loop of red thread, dangling loosely from his tunic’s hem.

Her chest tightened.

Her hand dropped to the woven mat, searching for the button, but it was already gone—replaced with empty air and a knot in her gut that she didn’t yet know how to name. Rage. Not loud and thrashing like a child’s tantrum, but sharp and immediate, like a sacred cord had been snapped.

She drew a breath—and screamed, a full-bodied cry that startled even Sera. It echoed off the rafters, a note full of betrayal.

Tomas flinched.

“What—?” He looked down and followed her gaze. Then his expression crumpled. “Oh… oh no.”

He untied the button from his tunic with shaking fingers.

“I didn’t mean to—when I stayed the night—I must’ve… it must’ve fallen into my coat. I didn’t think—” He stepped forward, holding it out with both hands. “I’m sorry. It was yours.”

Eirian didn’t reach for it.

She watched him. Watched the tremor in his hands and the way his voice folded into itself like a leaf closing at dusk.

Sera knelt beside her, one hand stroking her back.

“Shh. Little one. He’s giving it back.”

And he was. Slowly, reverently, as if it were a relic. He set the button beside her and stepped back.

“I didn’t mean to take something that was already given,” he said again, this time to the room, or maybe to something larger than the room.

Eirian’s cries slowed. She blinked away hot tears and touched the button, half-expecting it to feel different—tarnished, wrong. But the moment her fingers made contact, it hummed gently. Faint mana memory still pulsed inside.

She gripped it tightly.

Tomas looked at her again—really looked, like he was seeing someone more than just a baby. Someone watching him from behind borrowed eyes.

“She forgives you,” Sera said softly.

The boy nodded, and something passed through him, loosening the knot in his shoulders.

“I should go,” he said. “Da’s waiting.”

“Tell your mother to rest,” Sera instructed, rising to her feet. “The twins will need her strong.”

“I will.” Tomas looked to Eirian one last time. “Thank you.”

She didn’t respond. But her silence wasn’t angry now. Just quiet.

He left, closing the door gently behind him.

Sera turned to Eirian, raising an eyebrow.

“You don’t let things go easily, do you?”

Eirian clutched the fox button to her chest and blinked.

Sera laughed softly and went back to tending the herbs.

“Good. The world doesn’t either.”

***

The wind changed after midnight.

Eirian woke to silence—not the usual kind, soft and safe and warm—but a hollowed silence. A silence that had lost something. A stillness stretched too tight.

She opened her eyes in the cradle, her fingers still curled loosely around the fox button Tomas had returned that morning. Moonlight slanted through the wooden slats of the shutters, throwing pale stripes across the ceiling.

Her mana shivered.

She could feel how the air around her was wrong. Off-key. As if someone had plucked a single note on a harp and left it hanging unresolved in a room full of dust.

Eirian sat up, slow and quiet. She didn’t cry for Sera.

Instead, she listened.

There. A whisper of something brushing the edge of her senses. It was pressure and scent and thought all at once. A thread woven wrong. A pulse in the earth that came out crooked. It smelled faintly of cold ash, and when she breathed too deeply, it scraped the back of her throat like old rust.

The mana near the windows was constricting.

Coiling in defense.

The cottage was protected—she’d felt it often. Sera had built subtle wards into the walls, not through grand incantations but through steady repetition and quiet care. Lavender twine knotted at doorframes, copper charms buried at the corners of the foundation, ironmint planted in the garden bed by the steps. It was a home woven together with intent.

But the thing pressing against its edges didn’t care about intention.

It didn’t seem to know what it wanted.

It just wanted.

Eirian slipped down into the blanket and focused her breathing. Her soul perception—still fragile, still unnamed by anyone but her—spread slowly like fog, following the old paths her rituals once knew.

She felt the house breathe. The stone beneath the hearth remembered warmth. The walls remembered Sera’s laughter and Orlen’s grumbling.

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And outside—just beyond the line of ironmint and crushed leaves—something waited.

It wasn’t human.

It wasn’t animal.

It wasn’t even shaped like something that had once lived.

The sensation was… tangled. Threads wrapped too tightly. Frayed ends coiled in knots. A presence without coherence. Like a thought that had tried to become flesh and failed halfway through.

A mana wraith.

She didn’t know how she knew the word. But the moment it passed through her awareness, the recognition clicked. It wasn’t from this world—or maybe it was. It was native like rot was native to a fruit. A thing formed from ambient mana left too long without guidance. Magic without memory. Instinct without self.

And it was hungry.

Eirian pressed her palm against the wooden side of the cradle. Her fingers trembled slightly. The wraith had brushed the edge of the charm over the window. The copper thread hummed once in warning—sharp, brief, almost apologetic.

The ward held. But only barely.

She could feel the pressure now. The same way she could sense an approaching storm back in her old life—her mother’s warning voice whispering about the way spirits shifted before the wind changed. “The angry ones come first,” Hana used to say. “They always do.”

This one wasn’t angry yet.

But it was close.

The house creaked.

She turned her attention inward, to her soul.

The demon’s presence lay curled like a dormant flame near the base of her spine. Quiet. Watching. The moment she reached toward it, even slightly, it pulsed once.

Not yet.

That was the feeling she got.

It wasn’t speaking in words, but she understood the silence, and it wouldn’t move unless she did.

Eirian exhaled slowly.

She didn’t want its help—not yet.

Not for this.

Instead, she reached for the strange thread she’d begun spinning on her own. The one that felt like neither mana nor soul. Something in between. Her perception had begun building that thread slowly, breath by breath, ever since she’d started listening to the garden. It was part ritual memory, part instinct. Her soul’s eyes were starting to open.

She leaned into it.

And through it, she reached past the crib, past the walls, into the garden.

There.

The wraith hovered in the tall grass just past the porch steps, half-dissolved and twitching in and out of form. A silhouette without consistency—like a half-formed idea caught in fog. Its presence was slimy around the edges, as if even the mana in the grass tried to avoid it.

It did not see her.

But it felt something inside the house.

And it didn’t understand the difference between a child and a light.

It drifted forward.

The moment it crossed the threshold of the copper charm at the window, the air crackled.

Sera burst through the inner doorway like a pulled blade—her long robe askew, a charm already drawn in one hand. A thin sliver of quartz, etched with a spiral and tied with a hair from her braid.

Eirian watched from her cradle, breath caught, as Sera pressed the quartz against the window frame.

“Return,” she whispered.

A shimmer of light flared along the edge of the cottage. The garden rustled in reply. The ironmint leaves snapped upward sharply, like startled birds.

The presence recoiled.

The ward didn’t hurt it. It didn’t know how to be hurt. But it recognized that something had rejected it.

And it fled.

The pressure vanished in seconds.

The silence that followed was deeper than before.

Sera held still for a long moment, then lowered the charm. Her shoulders slumped. Her breath came hard and fast.

She turned toward the cradle.

Eirian didn’t pretend to be asleep.

Their eyes met.

“Don’t worry baby, everything is alright,” Sera said softly.

***

Morning came grey and sluggish.

Mist clung to the earth like a second skin, and the sky held the color of unspoken tension—muted, silver, expectant. The air outside the cottage had stilled after the wraith’s retreat, but the quiet it left behind was not the same peace it had disrupted. It was like the silence of a held breath.

Eirian sat bundled in the corner of the room, a thick knitted blanket over her lap and a strand of twine knotted loosely between her fingers. She wasn’t playing. She was thinking. Replaying the feeling of the night before.

The sensation of something wrong scraping across her perception still lingered—raw and unfinished like a knife dragged over stone.

In her first life, spirits like that would never have gotten so close. Her mother would have prepared the house days before a shift in the season, carving bone wardings into the threshold, tying bells to the lintel, tracing oil across the walls with fingertips that never trembled. The power she commanded was rigid, orderly, and filled with sacred history.

The rituals weren’t just habits. They were defenses built on centuries of reverence. Old wisdom etched into breath and ink.

Hana had once banished a storm wraith using nothing but chalk and her voice. She’d done it like she was brushing dust from her sleeve.

Sera hadn’t even raised her voice.

Eirian wasn’t sure which approach felt stronger.

The charm Sera used had been small. A slip of quartz and a braid, without a chant or a grand gesture, and yet the mana had obeyed.

And that, Eirian realized, was the difference.

Sera didn’t rule the mana.

She spoke to it.

It was not the kind of magic that stood tall in libraries. It didn’t have ceremony or lineage.

But it worked.

Eirian turned the charm in her hand—the one Sera had given her before. A river stone wrapped in copper, lavender thread knotted thrice around the center.

It was still warm from use.

She tilted her head and closed her eyes.

There.

The mana inside it whispered, a rhythm could be feel. A pulse that matched Sera’s quiet hums, the cadence of her movements in the garden, the breath she took before lighting a burner.

It was infused with her.

Eirian let her own mana touch it—just lightly.

She opened her eyes again and stared at the window, where the copper thread ward had held against the wraith.

The wraith hadn’t understood the barrier, not really.

Eirian leaned forward and pressed her hand to the floor. Her small fingers splayed against the wood, and she pushed.

‘Do you remember?’ she thought.

The grain under her fingers thrummed once. A faint echo. A heartbeat in reply.

Yes, it remembered.

That meant she could build on it.

She wasn’t ready to recreate her mother’s rituals. Not with the lack of materials, and not with this body.

But maybe she didn’t need to repeat the old songs exactly.

Maybe she could hum a new tune in the same key.

***

After one year there weren’t many changes for Eirian, she spent most of her time with Sera or playing by herself, she had noticed how the village depended a lot from Sera, every day there was someone at their door, asking for help.

After Sera had gone to the garden to gather herbs, Eirian sat upright in her cradle and examined the little bottle of ink Orlen had left behind earlier that week. He’d used it to mark lumber measurements. It was thick, ruddy, and not meant for fine script—but it would do.

She dipped her finger into the mouth of the bottle and began to draw on the inside wall of the cradle. Simple lines. A crescent. A spiral. A mark for observation, a second for resilience, and a third that didn't belong to any formal system but had appeared in her thoughts like an old memory resurfaced.

The strokes weren’t symmetrical.

Her lines wobbled.

But the moment she completed the spiral, her mana pulsed.

Like it had found a seat to sit in.

She exhaled, surprised.

It worked.

A crude sigil. A child’s drawing. But something had listened.

And now… something watched.

The house.

The walls.

Maybe the land.

It had noticed her back.

She wiped the ink off her fingertip with a scrap of cloth and laid back, gaze tilted toward the rafters where light moved like slow water.

The world was speaking.

She would learn to answer.

But not in the voice she used before.

That one was gone—left behind with train stations and school uniforms and half-priced iced coffee and her mother’s steady hand.

This new voice would be quiet. Threaded.

Woven one breath at a time into a home that listened back.