Liora's absence was not as quiet as Cael’s.
Where his had been a fading, hers was a sudden stillness.
The walks stopped.
The door no longer opened at dusk.
The path lay untouched.
But Bramble did not understand absence in the way humans do.
He understood patterns.
And patterns, once broken, must be restored.
So he waited.
At first, by the door.
Then by the path.
And eventually, beneath the tree.
Days turned to weeks.
The seasons shifted.
The leaves fell, returned, and fell again.
Still, Bramble came back.
Each evening, at the same time, he walked the path alone. His steps slower now, not from age alone, but from something heavier. Something that pressed into him with each passing day.
He reached the tree.
He sat.
And he waited.
The world moved on around him.
People passed, sometimes noticing, sometimes not. A solitary dog beneath an old tree was not an unusual sight, not at first.
But there was something in the way he stayed.
In the way he did not wander.
In the way he looked at the empty spaces beside him, as though they were not empty at all.
Years passed.
The path changed.
The tree lost branches, gained others.
But Bramble remained.
Until, one evening, he did not rise again.
The next day, the path was empty.
The tree stood alone.
And for a time, nothing returned.
Until the first sighting.
A small shape, barely visible at the edge of the clearing. A flicker of movement where none should have been.
Then another.
Not alone.
Three shadows.
Faint.
Incomplete.
Standing together beneath the tree.
Not as they were.
But as they remembered.