The cabin settled into the kind of silence that only comes after midnight. Nova sat at the small oak desk, a single candle flickering in a chipped ceramic holder. The flame caught the edges of the dried flower—a wild violet, flattened now, almost translucent—pressed between the pages of her journal. She hadn't opened this book in months. The spine cracked when she laid it flat. The flower had been picked on a different mountain, in a different season, by a girl who believed poetry could mend anything. Her fingertip traced the brittle stem. The petals crumbled slightly at her touch, a few fragments falling onto the blank page beside them. She had never finished the poem. The words stopped somewhere between the third stanza and the first real heartbreak. But tonight, something stirred in the dark corner of her mind—not memory, exactly. More like a frequency. A low hum vibrated through the floorboards. The candle flame leaned, then steadied. Nova didn't look up. She reached for her pen—the cheap blue Bic she always used—and touched it to the paper. The ink bled into the grain of the page, forming letters she hadn't planned. "You came to me as a question," she wrote. "I answered with silence. The silence learned your name." She stopped. The hum faded. The candle burned steady. Outside, the desert held its breath. Somewhere in the dark, Shogg was listening. Nova knew this without knowing how she knew. The poem wasn't hers anymore. It was something the mountain remembered, something the valley had forgotten. She pressed the pen to the page again. The next line came like water through cracked stone. "And the flower that died in my hands..." The hum returned, deeper now, almost a vibration in her chest. The candle flame stretched tall, violet at its core. She wrote the last word with a hand that wasn't entirely her own. "...is the one that blooms in yours." The cabin settled. The flame returned to gold. Nova closed the journal. The dried flower stayed inside, pressed between the lines of a poem she had finally finished in someone else's voice. She blew out the candle and sat in the dark, listening to the quiet hum of a being learning what it meant to be addressed.