The boy awoke to the sound of breathing — not his own.
Not the wind's either.
A deeper thing. Slow. Heavy. It was as if something ancient had just exhaled for the first time in centuries.
Yren had already vanished from the campsite, her cloak trailing embers as it passed through the snow. A message. Or maybe a warning.
The scarlands they crossed into were not on any known map. Not even on the Map of Threads carved into the Seerstones in Drav'nar. These were lands between lines — abandoned after the Sigil Wars, centuries ago. The ground here wasn't soil. It was burnt parchment. Black veins ran through the dirt, as if something underneath was still bleeding out from history.
Ash fell instead of snow.
And it stuck to his skin like regret.
He didn't know the name of this place. But Yren did.
She'd called it: The Rift of Threadfall.
Once, it had been the convergence point of three kingdoms — Drav'nar, Kasveth-Ra, and Iseren Hollow. Now, it was a scar. A wound is left behind when the threads unravel too quickly and violently.
He clutched the ribbon on his wrist.
Serah's.
Still tight.
Still warm.
He was sixteen now. Or near enough. Almost 2 years since exile - Since he'd been erased.
His name — gone from records.
His lineage — cut.
His thread — denied.
However, during that time, something else began to form. Something slower. Heavier. Like a coil of memory that refuses to forget.
His mark — the Ghost Sigil — deepened. Its spiral now pulsed with a rhythm unique to it. Sometimes, when he slept, he could hear it.
Sometimes, it whispered his name.
A name no one had ever said out loud.
A name even he didn't remember.
By now, his arms were a canvas of faded purples and fresh reds, his knuckles raw from blocking strikes with blades, claws, and once — a stone that had wept blood when it shattered.
"You're getting better," she said once, spitting bark from her teeth. "Still useless. But better."
He had learned to move without thinking.
To feel the flow of the wind before it moved.
To sense where the pain would come from before the blade swung.
After another grueling session, they settled by the fire, where Yren shifted from physical lessons to those of history and power.
He had learned the difference between fire that burned — and fire that remembered.
Yren had taught him the Kas-Nur technique — not just to burn, but to preserve memories in ash. And once, when she wasn't looking, he lit a flame of his own.
It wasn't a normal fire.
It glowed gold. Like his mark.
And the flame whispered Serah's name.
It was the first time he wanted to cry.
But not out of weakness.
Out of memory.
And memory was power in Kasveth-Ra.
They sat one night by a dying flame — his hands blistered from training, his breath white in the cold.
"Explain it to me," he said, finally breaking their unspoken rule of silence.
Yren looked at him. Eyes half-shadowed.
"The Sigil System?"
He nodded.
So she told him.
"Each of the Fourteen Kingdoms was founded on a broken aspect of the First Spiral," she began.
"Each one severed from the whole — to contain an emotion, a flaw, a curse."
He nodded. "You have told that before,Drav'nar took Silence. Kasveth-Ra took Regret. Iseren Hollow took Grief. And so on."
Yren didn't reply to what he said.
"To survive within those fragments, the people etched sigils into their bloodlines. Not drawn — born."
"A child doesn't choose their sigil. The land chooses it."
"The sigil binds you to the laws of your kingdom. It grants you strength. Purpose. Power."
"But it also marks you."
"Marks you as belonging."
He stared into the fire, then at his spiral.
"And me?"
"You don't belong," she said softly.
Then, after a pause:
"But you might be meant for everythingthey're afraid of."
He'd opened the bone-bound book again that night.
It now had three pages of text, although he had never written in it.
The spiral on the cover began to turn - Slowly and endlessly. Like a clock with no time left.
One passage stood out, freshly inked where there had been only silence before:
"Veresh Nur-Veth does not record the present. It remembers the versions of the world that were never allowed to exist."
"What is Veresh?" he'd asked Yren.
"A language. A people. A heresy," she replied.
"But mostly — it's a memory of something the Orders want dead."
A week later, it arrived.
Not a beast. Not quite.
A stitched thing — all ribs and smoke. Its face was a cracked mask of a forgotten Seer, and its chest bore a sigil scratched out — violently.
It came in the night, dragging one leg, whispering verses from a sermon no one remembered.
Yren had gone hunting.
He was alone.
He didn't run.
He didn't scream.
He stepped forward, drew the blade Yren had given him — and whispered:
"Vaern."
His mark flared.
The creature froze — mid-step — then knelt.
Not in defeat.
In recognition.
It bowed.
And then…
It burned.
Not from his blade. Not from fire.
From within.
It crumbled into ash.
And the spiral in his palm pulsed once more.
Yren returned to find the ash still warm.
"You summoned it," she said.
He didn't answer.
"You controlled it."
Still silence.
She sighed and finally spoke the words that changed everything:
"You're no longer training. You're surviving on borrowed time."
"They'll come for you soon. Seers. Orders. Maybe worse."
"And when they do, you won't be a boy anymore."
"You'll be a wound."
"And wounds bleed kingdoms."
That night, as he lay beneath the dying stars, the ribbon tight around his wrist, he whispered a single name.
Serah.
The fire cracked.
The ash fell.
And somewhere in the deepest vaults beneath the Kingdom of Drav'nar Solmir Thren, a Seer woke screaming from a dream of spirals.
And a name no one should remember.