There was once a woman known in the valleys as the Seer of the Between, one who could look into what others feared to glimpse — not the future, but the hidden pulse of things. Her sight was not of the eyes but of the listening heart, and those who came to her came not for prophecy but for unveiling.

One dusk, as the high wind rattled the bronze chimes at her doorway, a man arrived. He had been before, many times, seeking her insight to guide him through the shifting labyrinth of his own longing. But this time he was not alone.

At his side stood a figure — his companion — veiled in the faint shimmer of dusk-light. The Seer saw her before she stepped through the threshold, saw her not as a woman but as a shape made of echo and unfinished desire. Something in that shape breathed with the man’s own breath, spoke through his pauses, watched her through his eyes.

The Seer felt the old current stir — the pull to name what she saw, to give it form, as she always had. But before her words could rise, something deep and ancient within her drew a boundary across her tongue.
She knew: to name what belongs to the underworld before it is ready is to undo its weaving.

So she poured him tea instead, fragrant with cacao and bay leaf, and asked him of his dreams — though she already knew the images that stalked them. The man spoke with a searching heart, unaware that his companion was listening too, feeding on every syllable that left his mouth.

When he pressed her for vision, when he asked, “Tell me what you see this time,” the Seer bowed her head. Her silence was not cold, but sacred.

“Some things,” she said softly, “are not to be spoken when they arrive in pairs.”

He frowned, not understanding. “You told me before,” he insisted, “when it was only me.”

She nodded. “Then you came alone. And I could tell you what belonged to you. But now you come joined — not by hand, but by shadow. What I see now belongs to both. To speak it would bind you in ways that are not mine to weave.”

He was wounded by her restraint. He mistook her silence for distance, not knowing it was mercy. The companion’s shimmer thickened, as if sensing the protection she could not name. For the Seer had seen that this new presence was not yet born into speech — and to describe it would be to tear it from the womb of its own becoming.

That night, after they left, the Seer went to the river to wash her hands. The water was dark with starlight. She whispered a prayer to the unseen powers who keep the boundaries between seeing and saying.

“For the healer who speaks too much,” she murmured, “dissolves the vessel. And the one who names what is still forming, steals the breath of its birth.”

And so the Seer kept her silence — not from fear, but from fidelity to the frame that holds both mystery and love.
In that silence, something sacred was guarded:
the man’s unfolding, the companion’s truth,
and the Seer’s own integrity — that luminous thread between sight and speech.