Married to the Cold Hearted CEO

It began, as many things did in the Forge, not with an announcement but with a stirring.

The wind arrived at sunrise.

It was not violent, but purposeful. Not loud, but undeniably present. It rushed through the carved arches of the Heartroot Tower, fluttered through hammocks and scrolls, lifted the edges of tapestries strung between trees. It swept across stone spirals and learning circles, leaving goosebumps in its wake. The Forge, usually awake with the quiet hum of early risers, fell into reverent silence.

The people knew this wind.

It was not from the east, where the salt marshes lay. Not from the north, where the elders spoke with stars. This wind came from the south from the edge of the world as mapped by their ancestors, a coastline where the land once fractured and folded inward like a scar.

Kian was the first to respond.

He stood barefoot at the Spiral of Renewal, eyes closed, one palm pressed to the soil. The wind tugged at his tunic, whispered against his ear.

"Return. Listen. Witness."

He opened his eyes and quietly began to gather provisions: flint, honeyed rice, three hand-woven blankets, and a memory bell forged from broken tools.

By noon, a caravan had formed.

Not by formal request.

But by instinct.

Maya joined him, her walking staff etched with stories gifted to her from across the continent. Khalila followed, braiding medicinal roots into her satchel. Luma appeared last, gripping her Map of Questions, now folded into a scroll of silk.

Three elder residents offered to come. Two apprentices volunteered. A weaver from the Healer's Grove sent a bundle of balm-leaves and a pouch of soil.

The Forge didn't send people out with banners or trumpets.

It sent them out with silence, with blessing, and with the understanding that stories knew how to find their next chapter.

The path was not marked.

They followed the wind.

Sometimes they moved fast. Sometimes they camped beneath baobabs and listened to the earth breathe. At one stop, a farmer in a ruined village shared his rain-catching technology a system made of bamboo, recycled cloth, and hope.

"It's not perfect," he said. "But it lets us drink skywater."

They left him with a collection of Forge seeds plants that thrived on neglect and sang to nearby pollinators. In exchange, he taught them a lullaby that changed tempo based on the direction of the wind.

At another stop, they met a woman tending to a garden that grew only at night.

"It doesn't like to be watched," she said. "It opens when we forget our names."

Luma stayed with her that evening, both of them silent, watching the flowers bloom in shadow.

On the fifth day, the caravan reached the coast.

They didn't arrive at a beach.

They arrived at a threshold.

Before them stood a cliff, jagged and noble, cloaked in wild hibiscus and thornbush. Below, a narrow inlet churned with restless water. Atop the cliff barely visible through the overgrowth were the ruins of a structure that looked too deliberate to be nature, and too broken to be memory.

A fortress.

Or perhaps, once, a prison.

The sea crashed far below, the wind roaring in approval.

"It's not marked on any of the Beacon maps," Khalila whispered.

"Because it was meant to be forgotten," Maya replied.

Luma stepped forward. "Or because it remembers itself."

They climbed to the ruins in silence.

Each step up the crumbling path stirred more than dust.

It stirred ghosts.

Not malevolent spirits, but ancestral echoes. The kind that linger in forgotten halls and moss-laced corridors. The kind that watch and wait for someone to look past the rubble and into the wound.

The fortress, once grand, now sagged into itself like a lung that had exhaled its final breath. Vines wrapped around broken archways. Firegrass split the foundation. The bones of what had been were half-swallowed by time.

And yet it pulsed.

It vibrated.

Luma was drawn into what must have been the central hall. There, on the inner stone walls, she found them:

Carvings.

Crude but urgent. Etched not for beauty, but survival.

"They brought fire and took our names."

"We buried our stories under their monuments."

"One day, the wind will return for us."

She ran her fingers across each line. Her breath caught. Her eyes stung. Something within her cracked open.

That night, she did not sleep.

She sat in the hall and listened.

Not for ghosts.

For invitation.

At dawn, the rest of the caravan joined her.

Without direction, they formed a circle in the center of the hall.

They lit no candles.

Offered no speech.

Just presence.

Each person placed an object in the center:

Maya: a strand of golden thread given to her by a blind weaver.

Khalila: a hollowed-out seedpod that once carried the ashes of a healer.

Kian: a page torn from his old design journal blank, except for a water ring.

Luma: her Map of Questions, unfolded and torn at the edges, now soft from being held.

The elders added their memories:

A song never sung aloud.

A scar covered by silence.

A name once outlawed.

Then they sat.

And the fortress… changed.

Not physically.

But energetically.

The walls no longer loomed.

They listened.

The stone absorbed the grief.

The wind swept through the corridors, lifting dust and sorrow.

The carvings glowed not with light, but with clarity.

The place had not wanted to be remembered.

It had wanted to be re-seen.

For the next three days, they stayed.

They made no repairs.

They planted no flags.

They gave the place what it had long been denied:

Witnessing.

Children from nearby villages visited, drawn by stories whispered on the breeze.

They brought poems, feathers, bones, trinkets. One child gave Luma a necklace of bottlecaps.

"It keeps away forgetting," she said solemnly.

On the final day, the group formed a circle of stones in the main hall.

No plaque.

No inscription.

Just the weight of presence.

And then, the tower sang.

Not from speakers.

Not from mouths.

But from within the stone itself a vibration that began in the rock and echoed through their spines.

It was a sound of exhale.

Of release.

Of return.

Amara, though absent, felt it from the Forge.

She paused mid-step and whispered, "They found it."

When the caravan returned, they carried no treasures.

But they walked differently.

As if the story they had uncovered had rewritten their posture.

They brought nothing back.

And yet, they returned with everything.