It was the kind of night that swallowed sound. The kind where fog crept low across the cemetery grounds, muffling footsteps and turning gravestones into ghosts.

Eli hadn’t planned on returning—not ever. But some stories don’t end where you think they do. He stood over the fresh mound of earth, hands buried deep in his coat pockets, thumb absently rubbing the frayed end of a shoelace he kept tied around his wrist like a charm. It was the only thing they’d found after the fire.

They’d never recovered Jonah’s body. Just that shoelace, looped and scorched, pulled from the blackened wreckage like it meant something. And maybe it did.

Eli closed his eyes, remembering the laugh that used to echo in these woods. How Jonah said stories had rules—plot points you could count like steps on a staircase: the call to adventure, the betrayal, the loss, the return.

“You’re at the return,” Eli whispered to the wind.

Behind him, a soft crunch. Leaves or bones, he couldn’t tell. He turned. Nothing.

But something had changed.

Where there’d been only a single grave, now there were two. Identical. Fresh. No names. No dates.

Indistinguishable.

And in the soft earth of the second mound: a single, familiar shoelace—clean, unburnt, looped perfectly into a bow.