CHAPTER 9 – Lior's Heat

The morning grew warmer, but it wasn't because of the sun. In this world, that didn't have a direct route — it came filtered through a layer of cloud cover that was neither cloud nor mist, but something in between. The heat came from below, from the earth, from the dry needles at the edge of the forest where the moss receded and the soil began to change.
Harder.
Warmer.
With ash in the fissures, as if the landscape itself had burned through long ago and still kept it in its memory.
Harjin felt it on his boots.
Through the soles.
And then on the soles of his feet.
He stayed by the hearth where he had spent the night, but the fire was cold. Soryn had left sometime before dawn, the Old Woman with Hands of Stone had vanished already in the evening, and Naeve was sleeping by the root of a nearby tree, curled up, with the little stone still in her palm, her white hair spread across her shoulder onto the moss.
Harjin got up slowly.
His body was stiff from the night on the ground, from the chill that had arrived before dawn and settled into his joints.
But the warmth was coming from the south—or from a place that in this light was called something other than the south, but it was what the sunset leaves behind.
Harjin turned toward that place and stood motionless for a moment.
Naeve moved her hand.
The pebble slid from her palm onto the moss. Harjin picked it up and placed it back on her.
She didn't wake up. Or she woke up and decided not to show it. Harjin never quite knew when Naeve was still herself and when that other, animal side of her was back inside—the boundary between them remained blurred. At times she spoke like a human. At times she sat exactly the way a small white animal sits, knowing where it's safe.
He walked past the fireplace.
He walked toward the warmth.
The forest changed after a ten-minute walk.
The transition wasn't sudden. The trees didn't stop all at once. Rather, they retreated, thinned out, letting in more sky—and the sky in this part of the world had a redder tone. Not like a pinkish sunset, but something richer. As if the air carried glowing iron within it.
There was more ash underfoot.
Harjin noticed it when he stopped. He crouched down and ran his fingers over the soil. Beneath a thin layer of dry earth was ash—old, gray, fine as flour. Not from a single fire. As if the landscape had burned through repeatedly, layer by layer.
He stepped into the clearing.
It wasn't big.
In the middle was a stone—different from the One-Eyed Stone, but a plain piece of granite, flat and dark, with traces of fire on the surface. Around the stone was a circle of burned grass. Not fresh. Older, with new shoots trying to grow back into the charred patch, and partially succeeding.
A boy sat by the stone.
Harjin saw him from behind first: dark, tousled hair, a narrow back, shoulders slightly hunched. He sat with his knees drawn up, elbows resting on his thighs, hands hanging loosely. A profound exhaustion emanated from that posture.
Harjin stepped closer.
The boy did not lift his head.
Harjin sat down on the ground opposite the stone, a short distance away.
It was quiet.
Then the boy said, without turning around:
"Why do you come here?"
That wasn't very welcoming. The words were direct and very tired.
"I followed the heat," Harjin said.
Pause.
The boy finally turned around.
His eyes were dark, almost black, with a yellowish flash where the light hit them. Like glowing embers under a layer of soot. He had scars on his neck and arms—not deep, but present, lighter than the surrounding skin, with the texture that comes from repeated contact with something hot.
He swept his gaze over Harjin—the tattoos, the shaved head, the boots, the hands.
"They don't burn you," he said.
"No," Harjin admitted.
The boy returned his gaze to the ground.
„They are burning me.“
He said it without any self-pity. He made no attempt to hide anything.
Harjin looked at his hands. When he placed them in his lap, palms up, he could see that the skin on the insides of his hands was softer than on the backs. Harjin waited to see if heat would emanate from them — the kind of warmth he felt from the landscape — but nothing came from the boy's hands.
Yet he felt his presence like thunder on the horizon.
„What do they call you?“ Harjin asked.
The boy looked up.
He looked at Harjin with an expression that weighed the question — whether it was a trap or genuine interest, whether to give his name or not.
„Lior,“ he said finally.
Harjin nodded.
„I am Harjin.“
Lior returned his gaze to the burned patch by the stone. He ran one hand over a clump of new grass—one of those trying to grow back—and stroked it with his finger. The grass hadn't burned. But Lior's finger left behind a thin trail where it bent slightly. As if it had leaned away before the touch.
Harjin saw it. Lior withdrew his hand.
„You came because of her,“ he said.
Harjin stopped in his tracks.
„Because of whom?“
Lior looked at him.
In those dark, coal-like eyes was an expression Harjin couldn't quite name. He had the impression he glimpsed jealousy in them, mixed with something more delicate and painful. Like a man who loves a thing while knowing that one day it will leave him for someone else.
„Because of Naeve,“ Lior said.
„Where do you know Naeve from?“ he asked.
Lior lowered his eyes.
„I've been here a long time,“ he said quietly. „Longer than her. Longer than anyone.“ With his finger, he traced the grass again, gently, then pulled it back. „Things remember here.“
Something tightened in Harjin's chest, quietly, without a word.
He rose from where he was sitting and stepped closer to the stone. He placed his hand on it. The stone was warm—distinctly warm, like when you notice a warm surface and immediately realize where the heat is coming from.
Lior watched him.
„Doesn't it burn?“
„No,“ Harjin said.
Lior narrowed his eyes.
Then he opened them again.
„Everything burns for me,“ he said. „Or I burn. I don't know which comes first.“
Harjin sat back down.
Closer this time.
Lior didn't run away — but Harjin felt a change in the space between them. A slight tension. Like a string that is properly tuned, you just have to know it's there.
They sat for a moment.
The air was dry.
Harjin felt his lips drying out, the skin on his hands tightening slightly. The dryness drifted up from the ground, from the ash, from the drying edges of the scorched earth.
"How long have you been here?" he asked.
Lior shrugged.
"There's no way to count." He let his gaze drift over his own hands. "I only remember when it stopped being safe anywhere else."
Harjin waited.
Lior didn't continue.
He just moved his fingers—his right hand, gently, unconsciously, like a person checking for something they know is there but hoping that this time it won't be. His fingers brushed across the inside of his palm. Across the scars.
"Did you do that to yourself?" Harjin asked.
The silence was so thick that Harjin could hear the distant sound of cracking. It sounded like a dry twig somewhere deep in the bedrock.
“Yes,” Lior said.
One word.
Harjin sat. Lior sat. Then footsteps came from the edge of the clearing.
Quiet.
Light.
Naeve.
Harjin caught a glimpse of her at the edge, coming from the forest. Bare feet on the ash-strewn ground, white hair slightly matted from sleep on one side, a pebble still in her clenched palm. She was coming slowly.
She stopped at the edge of the circle of burnt grass.
She looked at Lior.
And Lior looked at her.
Harjin watched both of them.
In Lior’s gaze that expression was there again — compound, layered, not simple. He looked Naeve over from her hair down, across the white fabric, to the little stone in her palm. He stopped at the stone.
Then he looked at Harjin.
And back to Naeve.
His jaw tightened slightly.
“Did he give you that?” Lior asked.
His voice was a degree different.
Harjin understood.
„I gave a stone to Naeve,“ he said.
Lior closed his mouth.
Tikal glanced from Harjin to Naeve and back to Harjin. Then he turned to the stone and ran his palm across its surface — from behind, harder, with more pressure. Where his palm passed, a faint trace of warmth lingered for a moment. Focused and present warmth.
Naeve stepped into the clearing.
She walked across the circle of burnt grass — slowly, precisely — and approached the stone. Not Harjin, not Lior. The stone that was the center of this space.
She ran her hand across its surface.
Lior watched her with an expression that Harjin now recognized more clearly — fascination and pain so close together they were separated by only the width of a single breath.
„You always came to the stone,“ Lior said softly.
Naeve looked at him.
In the amber eye, there was silence. Not an icy detachment. The silence of a man who can hear the pain in the words of others and does not pull away.
"Yeah," she said.
A single syllable.
Lior looked away.
He ran his hand over his own forearm—over the scars, quickly.
"He gives you more," he said to the stone.
Naeve stepped a little closer to Lior.
„You give me warmth,“ she said quietly. „He gives me other things.“
Lior looked at her.
"Like what?"
Naeve thought for a moment.
„Shadow,“ she said finally. „Rest. A place where I don't have to keep the warmth going.“
Lior heard it.
Harjin heard it too.
What struck him the most was that he himself must have had on his face weeks ago — or years ago, or before that August morning — the expression of a man who loves and at the same time claims ownership.
Harjin lowered his eyes. He looked at his own hands in his lap. Hands that had carried Amaril across the steps. Hands that had poured broth into a bowl. Hands that had covered her with a blanket. Hands that at the very last moment had felt the movement of ribs stop. These hands knew how to hold on and not let go. They knew it all too well.
Lior stood up. He walked to the edge of the circle. He stopped there, his back to them, facing the forest.
Harjin looked at his back.
At the narrow shoulders, the tousled hair, the boyish frame that held a fire too large for it.
"I know what you're thinking," Lior said to the tree.
"What am I thinking?" Harjin asked.
"That I have a problem."
Harjin wondered whether to deny or confirm it. Either would be a lie.
"I think you are carrying something you don't know what to do with," he said.
Lior turned around.
He looked at Harjin.
Then toward Naeve.
„You too,“ he said.
Harjin nodded.
„Yes.“
The admission hung in the dry air for a moment.
Then Lior took a step back toward them.
Just one.
He stopped.
„She looks at you differently than at me,“ he said.
„I look at you the same as myself,“ Naeve said.
Lior stopped.
Naeve continued:
„Both burn.“
A quiet sentence. Precise as a needle.
Lior's shoulders relaxed slightly. Like a stone that shifts an inch because the water turned it.
Harjin watched the fire pit.
The embers under Lior's hand did not catch fire. They remained gray and cold. Only where Lior passed, the air was a little drier, a little warmer.
„Lior,“ he said.
The boy looked up.
Harjin stepped toward the fireplace. He crouched down. He lowered his hand into the ash. Cold. Then warmth.
Beneath the layer of gray ash was a single glowing ember—dark, with red at its center, with edges where the red faded back into gray. Harjin didn't touch it. He just held his hand over it at a distance of a centimeter.
The warmth rose.
"This is you," Harjin said.
Lior watched.
"Still burning. Still present. Without the fire to burn." Harjin pulled his hand back. "The problem isn't that you're burning. The problem is forgetting how close another can stand."
Lior sat motionless.
Harjin got up.
Naeve got up and walked over to Lior. She stopped a short distance from him, that precise distance of hers, and leaned down not toward his face, but toward his hands. She looked at his scars. Lior did not pull them away.
"It left you," she said.
"Yeah," Lior said.
"That doesn't mean you're going to leave, too. I know how close to stand," Naeve said.
Lior nodded. Slowly. Then he turned to the small stone that lay in the middle. He picked it up. He looked at it. Then he handed it to Harjin.
Harjin took it. It was still cold. Still the exact same weight. Still with a white vein running through the middle.
"Take it," Lior said. "I don't need cold things."
Harjin closed his palm.
„And what do you need?“
Lior thought about it.
He swept his gaze across the fire pit, across the scorch marks, across the edge of the clearing where the forest began and was old and knew what had been happening here for years.
„I don't know,“ he said. „But probably not to be alone with it.“
Harjin nodded.
Lior looked at him, then smiled slowly. It was a small smile—not entirely present, as if he were learning how it's done. But it was there.
The fire in the clearing was no longer a threat.
Naeve returned to Harjin. She took the little stone back.
Harjin let her.
Lior sat by the hearth. He looked at the cold embers.
Then he said, without turning round:
"Will you come again?"
Harjin thought about it.
"I don't know if I'll be able to."
Lior nodded.
As if he had been expecting that very answer.
"Alright," he said. "At least I asked."
Harjin turned to Naeve.
Naeve looked at Lior.
In the amber eye was a light — shifting, otherworldly, without a source — and in that light was an expression Harjin recognized, because he had seen it all his earlier life in another eye, in another body, in other gestures.
Care without conditions.
Without reproach.
Without demands for return.
Naeve looked at Harjin and slightly tilted her head.
They walked back across the clearing, across the scorched earth, past the edge where the trees began and returned the world to moss and shadow and shifting light. Behind them, they left Lior by the fire.
Harjin did not turn back.
But he heard behind him — the moment the forest swallowed the sound of their footsteps — a soft snap. Like a dry branch, or like something that holds together for a moment and then gives way at the right place.
Not fire.
Just warmth.
Alive, present, and conscious of how close it was allowed to stand.
Naeve walked beside Harjin — at her own distance, at that precise gap which was not a pull-back, but a space in which one could breathe. She held the pebble in her palm.
Harjin walked.
In his chest, he carried the sentence differently than before.
I won't let you go.
The sentence was still there.
But now he knew what in her was fire and what was light.
And that fire must learn how close to stand.