A Quiet Heart

The seed, Soren thought, was not a thing of gentle growth, but a thing of shattering. It was a stone in his hand, a weight in his gut, a promise he had made not to Nyra or Jorun, but to the silence he had found in the heart of the wood. He had to go back. The thought was no longer a question, but a fact, as solid and unyielding as the grain of the ironwood he had spent a week learning to read.

He found them in the main hall, the scent of sawdust and beeswax a familiar comfort. He did not prevaricate. “I am leaving,” he said, the words stark in the quiet of the morning. “I will return to my home and be the first stone.” He looked at them, these two masters who had taught him to listen. “What must I have? What must I master before I can go?”

Jorun did not look up from the piece of yew he was carving. The wood curled away from his blade in a long, unbroken spiral. “You must have a quiet heart,” he said, his voice as rough and steady as the wood itself. “The world is a loud place. It will try to shout you down. You must learn to hear the silence beneath its noise.”

Nyra, who had been sanding a tabletop smooth as glass, set down her work. “You must master the art of beginning,” she said. Her eyes, the color of a winter sky, were fixed on him. “A hall is not built in a day. It is built one stone at a time. You will be that stone. You must learn to be patient, to be still, to wait for the next stone to be ready.”

Soren listened, the words settling into him like rain into dry earth. A quiet heart. The art of beginning. These were not tools to be packed, but seeds to be carried. “And the wood?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. “How will I know when the wood is earned?”

Jorun finally looked up, his gaze as keen as his carving knife. “The wood will tell you,” he said. “When you have built a hall of people, the wood will come. It will want to be a part of what you have made. You will not have to ask.”