Solas was twelve summers old when he first felt the sun after dark.

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The camp had quieted for the night, the last firewood pushed into the lingering flame.  The smell of curing fish-skins and smoked grass drifted through the reed-thatched huts.  A cold, needling wind slipped off the sea, piercing sealskin cloaks and finding the softness beneath one’s ribs.  Restless, Solas slipped from the dozing adults and wandered into the dunes.  He liked it there, where gullies held the last daylight and sand remembered footprints.  Barefoot, he drifted without aim, chasing the fading warmth on his skin.

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A flat stone lay half-buried near a knot of sea thrift, the same one he had sat on that afternoon.  He brushed his hand across it and flinched.  The stone was warm, not faintly, but living warm, as though something breathed inside it.  Pressing his palm harder, he felt the heat seep into him, slow and steady, like the stone had stolen a piece of the sun and kept it safe beneath its skin.

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Solas glanced at the pale shimmer where the sun had vanished.  Why should a stone remember the day when the day itself had already died?

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He had no words for the question, but it settled in him like an ember.  He picked up a smaller pebble, warm against his skin, and slipped it into his pouch as if tucking away a secret.

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In the years that followed, he kept the discovery to himself; language had not yet caught up to the shape of the thought.  The memory lived quietly in his hands, drawing him back to stones again and again.  At first, it was a kind of play.  He gathered pebbles from the upper shore: smooth greys rounded by tides, flecked flints from storms, pale granite speckled like frost.  He arranged them on the earth in crooked lines or senseless circles, pushed them close or far, buried some to their rims in sand and perched others on sun-bleached slabs.

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Most days, no one noticed.  Hunters sharpened flint spears.  Women cured hides with bone needles and wove baskets.  Other boys wrestled for strength.  A few muttered about the dreamy one lost in his stones, but he let their voices pass like wind across grass.

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Patterns unfolded slowly: dark stones warmed quickest, heavy stones cooled slowest, stones shielded from wind stayed warm longest, those resting on earth held heat deeper than those on bare rock.  He did not think of it as knowing.  He thought of it as listening.

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Sometimes he fell asleep beside his little clusters, waking when the chill returned.  Other times he carried a warmed pebble home in his palm until it cooled and became an ordinary stone again.  When his mother asked where he had been, he shrugged.  How could he explain that he was following warmth through the world?

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Seasons turned.  Solas grew taller.  His shoulders were narrow, his gaze wide.  The habit of watching light became the quiet spine of his days.

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By his early twenties, the boy had become a gentle man.  Not the strongest hunter nor the fastest runner, but steady.  He speared fish with patient aim, wove willow traps, built shelters against winter winds.  When he loved, he loved quietly and with his whole being.

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When his first child was brought to him on a thin autumn day, Solas held her as though she were made of light.  They named her Lira.  Her skin was warm against his chest, her breath soft as a sparrow’s.  She was strong at first, bright-eyed, but the cold season came early one year, frost clinging even to the sheltered hollows.  Many in the camp coughed in their fur-lined beds; Lira shivered through the nights.

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Solas hardly slept.  Her tiny hands were icy to his touch.  Fires helped, but wood was scarce and burned too quickly.

He remembered the stones.  The next morning, while the camp bustled with chores, sharpening tools and salting fish, he placed dark, heavy stones in the brightest patch of sunlight.

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At dusk, they stung his palms.  Wrapped in hide, he tucked them near Lira’s bedding.

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All night he lay awake listening to her breathing.  When dawn came, her skin was warm.  Her cough was quieter.  She slept without stirring.

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Relief broke over him like light across water.  His years of wandering had found their purpose.  After Lira’s illness, Solas gathered stones not for play, but for life.

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Lira grew quick and confident, often trailing him along the coast.  She learned to spot the best stones first: the dark ones that drank the sun greedily, the smooth ones that warmed fast but lost it quickly, the rough ones that held heat deep into the night.  He often found her arranging pebbles in rings or crescents, mirroring his movements with instinctive grace.

He began to work on a larger scale.

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Fist-sized stones placed in earth-lined pits revealed that soil itself partnered with the sun, slow to warm, slow to let go.  Driftwood windbreaks kept warmth from fleeing.  Rows of stones angled toward the sinking sun revealed shadows that lengthened differently as seasons turned.

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The others watched him now, not with derision but a quiet curiosity.  They did not grasp everything he did, but they recognised the warmth his stones gave.

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As his understanding grew, Solas shaped a shallow arc of heavy stones designed to catch the last strength of the day’s light.  Lira hauled stones twice her size, laughing as they rolled them along the ground on lengths of driftwood. When they fitted a final slab, she pressed her small hand to it and gasped at the heat.

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“It holds the light!” she cried.

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Solas brushed sand from her hair.

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“No,” he said softly. “It remembers it.”

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The sun trap was born.

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By his early forties, Solas was an elder, weathered by wind, labour, and winter’s slow bite.  Still, he tended the trap each morning: brushing sand away, adjusting fallen screens, greeting the light as it touched the stones.

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Lira, grown now, walked with him, knowing his rhythms.  The community no longer doubted him; warmed stones were woven into daily life, easing joints, helping sleep, slowing the spoil of food.

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But Solas’ strength thinned as winter approached.  A cough settled in his chest.  Some days he tired halfway to the trap, and Lira supported him with a firm hand under his elbow.

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He never protested for long.  He had never been proud of the wrong things.

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In the final frost, he lay on a bed of skins by the hearth.  Lira warmed stones for him as he once had for her, placing them gently along his sides.

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In the grey before dawn, with the first faint light touching the sky, Solas exhaled a long, quiet breath, and did not take another.

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Lira lowered her forehead to his chest, her tears warming the stones he had taught to remember the sun.

The camp gathered silently at dawn.

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Grief was simple, bowed heads, hands on shoulders.  Solas had not sought notice in life, but in death his absence left a shape in the air.

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Lira lingered beside him long after the others drifted away. In her hand she held a cooled stone from the night, smooth and dark, a shared memory.

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When she rose, clarity settled over her like dawn light.  She walked toward the sun trap.  The stones brightened under the morning gold, warmth rising through her bare feet.

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She knelt by the great central slab and rested her palm upon it.

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“He should rest here,” she said when the others approached. “In the place he made. In the light he learned to keep.”

It was not a plea or a command, simply a truth.  The elders hesitated.  One murmured that tradition called for burial by the sea.  Another touched the warmed stone beside him and nodded.

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“Solas changed what we are,” he said. “Let this place honour him.”

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One by one, they agreed.

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Through the day, they transformed the trap into a chamber: lifting slabs with woven ropes and driftwood levers, deepening the curve, placing standing stones to mark the turning of seasons.  Smaller rocks were fitted along the inner walls, ready to drink daylight and release it long into the night.

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Lira carried her father’s body herself.  She laid him upon the warmed stone bed as the sun dipped amber across the horizon.

Before the final slab was placed, she set the first warm pebble she had ever seen him carry beside his hand.

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“You taught the stones to hold the night,” she whispered.  “And now they will hold you.”

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The chamber glowed softly as the sun vanished, warmth lingering like breath.

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Seasons turned.  Grass thickened around the stones; sand filled their crevices.  Children played near the entrance without fear, for it was not a place of dread but of warmth, a shelter belonging to everyone.

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Lira visited often.  Sometimes alone.  Sometimes with those who sought comfort.  Most often with her own daughter, a small, curious child with Solas’ quiet patience in her eyes.

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One late autumn evening, as the sun dipped low across the water, Lira led her child into the chamber. The amber glow rose from the warmed stones, holding the last of the day.  The girl knelt and pressed her palm to the central slab.

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“It’s warm,” she whispered. “But the sun is gone.”

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“The sun leaves its memory behind,” Lira said. “Your grandfather learned how to listen to it.”

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The child traced a small spiral in the dust.

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“Did he leave his memory too?”

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Lira smiled, not sadly, but full of life.

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“Yes,” she said. “The stones hold him. And the warmth he gave us lives on.”

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Outside, the light slipped into the sea.

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Inside, the stones glowed, quiet, faithful, carrying the warmth of the day and of the man who first understood how to keep it.

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