From Quantum Gravity — a story of memory, myth, language, and the dangerous tenderness of writing another person into legend.

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The fire remembers what language tries to turn into myth.

The Fire’s Whisper

Drina waited by the embers long after the wind had shouldered the camp into silence. Firelight caught the silver in her hair and turned it to quicksilver. When I came to her, carrying the Mont Blanc still wet with red, she didn’t ask for greetings.

“You’ve been trying to rewrite Louhi’s binding again.”

My nod was small. “Not rewrite. Reread. I think I had it wrong.”

“Louhi rarely speaks plain. What line.”

“Give me another fruit.” I turned the pen over, its nib gummed dark. “I thought she meant a child. A vessel. But she called stories ripened things, always—what if fruit was never flesh?”

Drina didn’t answer that. She reached for the pen instead, and I let her take it. Where her fingers closed around the barrel, the red went from wet to tacky to dry, faster than air should allow. She handed it back lighter by some fraction I couldn’t name.

“Wolfgang startled her mid-crossing,” I said. “In his wolf shape. She spoke that mantra to hold the waiting souls in place—not a curse, just fast, and fear rides in fast with the love.”

“That’s how contamination starts.” Drina stirred the embers with a stick, not looking at me. “Not ignorance. Haste.”

“And the horse?”

“You.” She nodded at the pen. “You learned to gallop. You never learned the reins.” She let the stick catch, watched it burn a moment, then dropped it into the fire. “Every page you’ve written with that pen, something in you goes into the ink. You’ve felt it. The tiredness that isn’t tiredness.”

I had. I’d put it down to the hour, the wine, never to the pen.

I looked at the notebook open by the fire. The red letters on the page were still faintly wet, though nothing had touched them in an hour.

“So the fruit wasn’t life. It was—write again. Fix the misreading.”

“No.” Drina’s voice sharpened, the first hard thing she had said. “Wrong again, in a different direction. You keep reaching for another story. She doesn’t want another story.”

The fire popped.

I didn’t say anything, because I already knew—the way you know a wound is worse than it feels before you look at it.

“She was never Louhi,” I said. “I made her that—the northern witch, the voice of curses, the keeper of the veil. Before that she was Sandi. My friend. Every file, every sleepless letter, mine.”

“So the fruit she asked for,” Drina said, “wasn’t creation. It was restitution.”

“I made her immortal by taking away her history.” My hand had gone tight around the Mont Blanc; the barrel bit into my palm. “I fictionalized her.”

“That’s a curse worth the name.” Drina looked into the fire, not at me. “To outlive yourself in someone else’s telling.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Words don’t ask what you meant.”

She held out her hand for the pen a second time. When she gave it back, three drops of red had beaded on the nib, thick as blood, and did not fall.

“If she’s to walk beside you again,” Drina said, “write to remember her. Not to command her.”

The pen weighed more than it had an hour ago. I didn’t ask how that was possible.

I opened the notebook to a blank page and, for the first time in years, wrote a name that wasn’t meant for legend.

Sandi.

The paws I heard in the dark past the firelight didn’t run this time.

They came closer.

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Quantum Gravity explores the places where memory becomes myth, where language becomes a binding, and where the stories we tell about those we love can either imprison them—or call them home.

Some letters take forty years to arrive. This one’s rewriting the future.

https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-european-records

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange. All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.