This chapter unfolds the moment Nooriyah is offered to the golden bear—a divine creature who marks the first threshold into the mythic world of Svalur.

They had walked a long time in silence, the sky above brightening only by degrees, as if the dawn itself were cautious of what it would reveal. The air had grown thinner—not colder, but purer, as though it had passed through the breath of something sacred before reaching their lips.

Nooriyah’s steps left small, perfect prints behind her—so light they barely pressed the snow, yet so distinct they seemed etched by intention. Barakiel’s prints were larger, slower, shaped by the weight of years and the burden of obedience. Between them, the trail wound onward across an open field rimmed by distant trees, their branches burdened with frost, like elders hunched in watchful prayer.

Barakiel did not know where they were going.

But his feet moved as if the path had already been laid.

The sky, once dull as slate, had begun to ripple with colour. Pale rose Ash blue. The faintest trace of saffron. It was not yet light—but something older than light had begun to stretch across the heavens, as if the firmament were waking from a long dream.

Then—

At the far end of the clearing, where the snow dipped into a low hollow flanked by stone, something shimmered.

It was not movement. Not exactly.

More like a presence—dense, unspoken, and enormous. The way heat might rise above a desert stone, or how stillness might gather before a prophet speaks.

Barakiel stopped.

Nooriyah did not.

She took one more step, and then she saw it.

A figure emerged from the edge of the hollow—slowly, deliberately. Massive Luminous It was a bear, yes—but not like any bear the world had ever known. Its fur was not merely golden. It glowed from within, as if it carried sunlight in its bones. It moved with a grace far too deliberate for any beast.

And its eyes—

They were not eyes made for prey or rage.

They were ancient.

And they saw her.

deepening the encounter with immersive, meditative imagery as Nooriyah and Barakiel stand before the creature not of flesh alone, but of prophecy.

Nooriyah stood still, yet nothing about her was frozen. Her shawl fluttered gently in the wind, and her breath curled in slow spirals before her, but her eyes were locked onto the being before her with a steadiness that did not come from training, but from something older—something rooted in the marrow of her lineage.

Barakiel felt his heartbeat slow—not from calm, but from reverence. He had heard of such creatures in old parables, whispered between pages of forgotten scripture. Tales of animals carved from light, guardians of hidden worlds, bearers of divine tasks. But those were stories for children—or so the world insisted. And yet now, before him, a creature stood that defied not only the laws of man but the arrogance of reason.

The golden bear did not growl.

It did not charge.

It stepped forward with the weight of ceremony, like a priest approaching an altar, or a king descending a mountain after years in exile. Snow parted beneath its great paws not with force, but with deference. Its breath—visible in the cold—was steady and slow, curling upward like incense offered to the sky.

Its eyes remained on Nooriyah.

And Nooriyah, impossibly, met them.

She did not flinch. Her arms remained at her sides, her posture unyielding, her face luminous in the diffused light of the snowfield. Something passed between them in that moment—a stillness that did not belong to time. A kind of recognition. Not of face or name, but of purpose

Barakiel stepped forward slowly. His legs felt heavy, his boots thick with snow, but he moved with a dignity that matched the moment. He did not weep, though his chest felt cracked. He did not cry out, though his bones whispered no….

He opened the cloth bundle.

The grains of psheno shimmered like gold dust in the morning light, catching the first rays of dawn that filtered through the high clouds.

He held it in one hand.

And with the other, he reached for his daughter.

where a sacred exchange is carried out—not with violence or spectacle, but in stillness and trembling reverence, a moment suspended between the earthly and the divine

Nooriyah did not resist.

She placed her hand in her father’s without hesitation, and her fingers, slender and firm, curled around his like the final thread of a tapestry tying off its pattern. Barakiel turned toward her—not quickly, not dramatically, but as one does when beholding something that was never truly theirs to keep.

Her eyes were calm.

In them, he did not see fear or confusion.

He saw the quiet that comes to a soul when it is about to be remembered by the heavens.

Barakiel inhaled once, deeply Snow-laced air filled his lungs. His chest rose, then fell, and with that exhale he let go.

He released her hand.

Nooriyah stepped forward.

She moved not as one being taken, but as one answering. Her feet made no sound in the snow. The wind did not rise. Even the birds seemed to retreat into stillness. It was as if the entire landscape had yielded itself to this moment, making space for what must unfold.

The golden bear did not move until she stood before it . Then it dipped its head—not in threat, but in reverence. Its breath moved through her hair, lifting strands gently across her cheek. It was not a beast’s breath. It smelled of cold rivers and fresh bark, of pine and dawn mist, of something new and ancient at once.

Nooriyah raised her hand and touched the side of its face.

The bear did not flinch.

Her fingers slipped into the golden fur. It was not coarse, as she had imagined, but impossibly soft—like silk soaked in firelight. She kept her hand there for a moment longer, not gripping, just resting.

Then she turned her head—once.

Her eyes met her father’s.

Barakiel did not blink.

Nooriyah gave a small nod—so small it could have been missed by the snow itself.

And then she turned away.

The golden bear moved.

And she followed.

where the sacred parting takes full form, and Barakiel is left with more than absence—he is left with something immeasurable

The bear led her without force. Its pace was slow, almost ceremonial, as if mindful of every step it took across the snow-packed ground. Nooriyah walked just behind it, not tethered, not commanded—merely guided. And though she followed in silence, it did not feel like submission. It felt like something older than obedience: agreement, woven from trust.

The snow deepened slightly as they passed through a narrow corridor of fir trees bent low under the weight of frost. There, the golden of the bear’s fur became radiant. The morning light—finally rising in earnest—struck its back like a benediction, illuminating the space around them with a quiet shimmer.

From where he stood, Barakiel watched until they were no longer visible.

They did not vanish with speed or drama. They simply became part of the snow, the forest, the light. Like morning mist dissolving under sun, like footprints slowly filled by fresh snow, like a vision folding back into the veil from which it came.

And when they were gone—

He stood motionless.

His hands hung at his sides. The cloth that had carried the psheno now lay empty, soft in the wind. A few grains clung to its folds, but most had been scattered in the snow behind him—each one now a golden echo of something given.

For the first time in many years, he did not know what to do next.

He turned his face upward.

The sky was wide and pale, a canvas not yet painted. Somewhere high above, a single hawk traced a slow, elegant circle in the open blue. Below it, the forest whispered.

Barakiel closed his eyes.

He did not weep. The moment was too large for weeping.

He bent slowly, knees pressing into the snow, and pressed his forehead to the earth. The cold kissed his skin. The scent of pine and ice filled his nose. And in that bowed posture, he spoke the only prayer he had left.

“Let her be safe,” he whispered.

And the snow said nothing.

But it listened.

where Barakiel begins the slow return home, carrying not just the absence of his daughter, but the quiet burden of the sacred .

The walk back felt longer

Not because the snow had deepened, or the wind had risen—both had remained unchanged. But something within Barakiel had shifted. The path he now walked was the same he had come by, but the world no longer greeted him as it had before. It no longer held the shape of what he had been. It had already begun to reshape itself around the man who had given something most men would never dare offer.

His feet sank more heavily into the snow, though the weight was not from fatigue. It was from the echo of the act. Every step he took away from that clearing seemed to pull something invisible from his chest and leave it behind him, grain by grain, like the millet that had fallen unnoticed through the seams of the cloth.

As he passed the tall cedar trees again, they no longer looked like sentinels—they looked like witnesses. Their branches held snow and silence, both unmoved. They had seen what had occurred, and they would carry it in their bark long after men forgot.

At the edge of the village, the morning had begun to stir. Thin plumes of smoke rose from a few chimneys. A shepherd unlatched the pen for his goats Somewhere, a woman’s voice called gently for a child too slow to dress. The world had awakened, but it had not changed Not for them.

But Barakiel knew better.

He walked past the fence post that marked the border between wilderness and familiarity. His footprints from the morning were still faintly there, softened but not erased Side by side, the impressions of his feet and Nooriyah’s. He looked down at them as he passed, and the ache in his chest deepened—not as grief, but as awe.

He reached the house and saw Mahira standing in the doorway.

She had not gone inside.

Her shawl was pulled tightly around her shoulders, her breath visible in short clouds. Her hands were folded before her. She did not move when she saw him She only watched, as though he were returning from a place she would never be allowed to see.

He reached her.

She stepped aside.

And together, they entered the house in silence.

As Mahira and Barakiel share the silence of loss—not the loss of tragedy, but of something holy given away. A new stillness takes root in their home.

The house had not changed, but the air within it had.

The hearth still held the faintest ember from the night’s fire. The kettle sat where Mahira had left it, untouched. Nooriyah’s bedding remained neatly folded, the quilt bearing the soft indentation of where she had slept. The green scarf she had worn each winter since girlhood still hung on its peg beside the door.

Mahira touched it once, gently, with the back of her fingers. Then she let her hand fall.

Barakiel sat down beside the hearth. He did not remove his cloak. He did not speak. His eyes were not red with tears, nor his hands clenched. He simply sat, like a vessel that had been emptied by something too vast to be named.

Mahira moved quietly about the room. She poured water into the basin, fed the fire with a handful of kindling, and dusted the windowsill with the hem of her sleeve. She did not ask what had happened. She did not ask what the bear looked like. She did not ask where Nooriyah had gone.

She had already understood all she needed to.

When the fire began to crackle again, she brought Barakiel a cup of warm water and placed it beside him without a word. Then she sat across from him and rested her hands in her lap.

A long silence passed between them—not the silence of people who have nothing to say, but the silence of those who know that saying anything would diminish the magnitude of what had just occurred.

Outside, the snow continued to fall—gently, steadily, as though the sky itself were offering a kind of mourning. It covered the path Barakiel had walked, grain by grain, step by step, until the morning’s trail became memory.

Inside, the lamp flickered.

And two souls, who had been asked to offer their most beloved gift to the unseen, sat facing the fire—not waiting for answers, not questioning what could not be questioned, but simply breathing.

Breathing in a world that had become something new.

The aftermath of the old man’s offering—his return, the tension in the home, and the quiet storm that stirs within Mahira as she reckons with what has been done.

The walk home was longer than it had been that morning.

The wind that had guided them out with strange warmth had now turned brittle, cold. The sun, faint and directionless behind its veil of cloud, no longer lit the path. The old man did not hurry. Each step pressed deeply into the snow, as if the weight he carried now was no longer a child, but a silence thicker than any burden.

The empty sling, once warm with her presence, hung against his back like a loose thread from a prayer rug—a sign something sacred had been undone.

He did not look behind him.

He dared not imagine the golden-furred bear disappearing into the forest with his daughter. He dared not wonder if she had turned to look back. Or if she had whispered his name.

At the edge of the village, the dogs did not bark.

Even the birds seemed to hold their breath.

When he reached the door, he did not knock. He simply stood.

And it opened before he touched it.

Mahira stood in the threshold. Her eyes scanned his face quickly—then his back—then the sling.

“Where is she?” she asked. No tremble. No scream.

He did not answer.

He only stepped inside and removed his boots slowly, as though each movement now required permission from the bones of the house.

She did not move.

She waited.

And when he finally unwrapped the cloth from his shoulders and let the sling fall in a folded heap onto the floor, she exhaled.

Not loudly. Not weakly.

But as if her breath had just learned it would never belong fully to her again.

She turned without a word and walked to the hearth, where the embers from the morning still pulsed faintly.

She did not feed them.

She sat beside them.

And stared.

Not at the flames.

But at the space between them.

And in that space, something was already changing.

where the weight of the offering begins to transform from sorrow into silence, and the world beyond the walls seems to draw nearer—whispering the presence of something far from ordinary.

That evening, the wind changed

It came down from the high trees with a strange softness, curling through the gaps in the shutters like breath. It did not moan or howl. It crept. It settled beneath the roofbeams and around the clay lamps, as if to listen. The house, small as it was, felt suddenly larger—like something unseen had entered it and folded its limbs into the corners without asking permission.

Barakiel noticed it first. He stood near the threshold, watching the light fade beyond the frost-laced window. The village had gone quiet. Not even the dogs barked. Not even the goats stirred The snow outside glowed faintly under a crescent moon that had risen early, slung low over the hills like a blade turned sideways.

Mahira was stirring the soup over the fire. Her ladle moved in slow, circular motions, though her mind was elsewhere. Her hands, so used to the rhythm of kitchen and prayer, moved by memory now.

She looked over at her husband, sensing the stillness in his posture.

“What is it?” she asked.

Barakiel didn’t turn his head. His eyes remained on the pale blue stretch of sky beyond the window.

“I feel,” he said quietly, “as if the world is watching us ”

Mahira set the ladle down.

“Not in judgment,” he added, as if to clarify something even he did not fully understand. “But in anticipation.”

A log in the hearth popped. The flames jumped slightly, casting long shadows on the back wall—shadows that seemed to move just a second too slowly to be real.

Mahira came and stood beside him. Together they looked out, their reflections dim against the fogged glass.

“Do you think we did the right thing?” she asked.

Barakiel didn’t answer at first. He raised a hand and touched the wood of the frame, as if steadying himself not on timber, but on the edge of something greater.

“I think we obeyed,” he said “And sometimes that’s the only right we’re given. ”

Mahira leaned her head against his shoulder.

Behind them, in the silence of the room, Nooriyah’s shawl swayed slightly on the peg.

Though no wind had entered.

where the evening deepens, and something unspoken begins to shift in Mahira’s spirit—a gentle, growing ache that knows the cost of faith is not just trust, but waiting.

That night, Mahira could not sleep.

She lay on her side beneath the quilt, facing the wall, her back to the fire’s fading glow. The warmth of the room should have been enough to lull her into rest, but her body remained still while her thoughts moved like wind beneath a frozen lake—quiet, ceaseless, invisible.

Barakiel slept lightly beside her. His breathing was soft, measured, like one who had learned how to place his burdens in the hands of the unseen and let go. But Mahira’s burdens were of a different shape. They did not leave her hands. They settled in her chest like unspoken verses waiting for a tongue bold enough to recite them.

She opened her eyes.

The room was cloaked in darkness now, save for the small orange pulse of coals in the hearth. The shadows flickered on the beams overhead, stretching and shrinking like spirits just out of reach.

Mahira sat up slowly.

Her feet found the wool rug Nooriyah had woven last spring, its edges frayed, its center worn smooth where Mahira had knelt each morning for prayer. She reached for the scarf her daughter had left behind, still hanging where it always had.

She held it in her lap.

Ran her fingers over the embroidery.

And for the first time since Nooriyah had walked into the snow, Mahira allowed herself to speak her daughter’s name aloud.

“Nooriyah,” she whispered.

It was not a call Not a lament It was an offering.

Just her name, wrapped in breath and longing.

The wind stirred outside, brushing against the side of the house with a low, gentle hum. Mahira closed her eyes and bowed her head—not to weep, but to remember.

She saw her daughter not as she had left, but as she had always been—kneeling at the hearth, grinding spices, whispering verses into the steam of morning tea.

A girl of silence and light.

The shawl in her lap was warm.

And though the fire had died, Mahira felt no cold.

Only distance.

And love.

Bringing the chapter to a gentle but profound close as Mahira and Barakiel awaken to a world that is no longer quite the same. Their daughter is gone. Yet something sacred lingers in the stillness.

By dawn, Mahira was already awake

She stood outside the house, her shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders, her boots buried ankle-deep in fresh snow. The sky above was a soft, aching gray, and the mountains in the distance wore a veil of frost so fine it looked like they had been dusted with ground pearls. The breath of the earth was slow this morning. The silence was deeper than usual.

She looked toward the forest .

Toward the place where her daughter had disappeared into whiteness with the golden-furred bear.

There was no trail left behind. No broken branches, no pawprints, no sign that the world had received something holy the day before.

But Mahira knew.

The air still carried it.

There was a difference in the wind now, in the weight of the sky. She could feel it in her bones—the subtle gravity of something eternal brushing against the fragile walls of time. Something had begun.

Behind her, the door creaked softly.

Barakiel stepped out.

He did not speak He stood beside her with a quiet that required no explanation. Together, they watched the light spread over the land, not with brilliance, but with solemn grace—like a scroll being slowly unrolled before a gathering of the faithful.

“She’s alive,” Mahira said, not as a question.

Barakiel nodded.

“More alive than we know,” he replied.

And though the snow was cold beneath their feet and the wind kissed their faces with the sharpness of truth, neither of them shivered.

They stood at the edge of the world, no longer just man and woman, but the beginning of something vast. Something unfolding.

They turned, at last, and went back inside .

Behind them, in the quiet forest, a single grain of psheno, long buried by wind and ice, gave the faintest tremble beneath the snow.

And began to grow.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3: The Trail of Millet