“You’re chasing ghosts,” her grandson Kellan said, not unkindly. He was a practical man, a fisher of the new coast. “The old well is dry. The kirk’s bell is at the bottom of the bay. Let them rest.”

It didn’t stop.

She explained it once when he was small: im (inside), ceag (to crack open), laer (song). A crack inside a song. The echo left behind after the music stops.

In the coastal village of Dunbrig, old Mareg knew every stone by its first name. She had to. She was the last person who remembered the village before .

But the silence hummed . It felt like a held breath. Like the place itself was waiting to be remembered.

Not ghostly. Not threatening. Just… faint. Like a memory pressed into wet stone. A child’s giggle. A fiddle tuning. The shuffle of soft shoes on a wooden floor.

And down below, in the drowned schoolhouse, the imceaglaer shifted.

But it sighed.