The wind in Mirestead never stopped. It slipped through the skeletal ruins of old machines and whistled between the broken towers that once funneled smoke skyward. What hadn't collapsed was buried, and what wasn't buried had burned out long ago. The ash here didn't fall, it settled, like everything else.
Mirestead sat on the edge of House Vireth's outermost holdings, just far enough from the main trade routes to be forgotten, just close enough to still matter if something valuable was pulled from the ground. It was a quarry town. Or had been. The veins were thin now, brittle, mostly drained. The only reason anyone still worked it was the rumor that something deeper lay under the stone. Something that hadn't been charted yet.
His name was Dareth, though no one said it much. Names stuck too hard to those who didn't last. He didn't know much about House Vireth. No one in Mirestead really did. What they knew was that the tall ones in bone-etched armor came twice a cycle to collect quotas, and if you didn't meet them, someone disappeared. What they knew was that if you found a fragment too bright or too strange, you wrapped it in cloth and left it outside your door until the Archive teams arrived.
Quarry law wasn't written, it was passed from mouths with missing teeth. House Vireth didn't care about names. They cared about marks, about keeping track, and about preventing "unregulated phenomena."
Dareth had never been to Calveth, the city of spires and spines where the Vireth ruled from their fossil-throned sanctum. He'd seen a mural of it once, carved into a trader's wagon, a great ringed city built on the bones of a titan. White towers. Tiered walkways. Watching eyes. It didn't look real.
All he knew was Mirestead. Gray skies. Dust lungs. Bones that shouldn't be bones. And the distant possibility that something bigger than all of it still slept beneath the earth.
He didn't think about power. He thought about how many fingers he'd lose if the quarry cracked again. How many teeth he could trade for medicine. Whether the ash would choke out the fire before morning.
The world was dying. That much was obvious. But Dareth, like everyone else in Mirestead, had learned to stop asking why.
Ash fell like snow over Mirestead, coating the scaffolds and bone carts in a layer of gray so fine it blurred the shape of things. The quarry bell hadn't rung in hours, not since the last tremor. Most of the workers had gone back to their shelters, too many cracks, too much creaking underfoot.
He crouched at the rim of the lower shaft, fingers stained black from sifting through sediment that steamed faintly in the cold. He pressed his palm to the earth, feeling the faintest thrum, like a heartbeat too slow to live.
One of the older pathstriders had warned him off this trench. Said it was a dead vein. Fossil bones too soft to hold memory, too old to resonate. But Dareth had felt something when the ground opened. He'd seen bones before. These weren't bones.
He leaned in, brushing soot aside. The split in the rock wasn't natural. It spiraled, unnaturally smooth. Thin wisps of heat danced along its edge. He could smell something beneath it. Not rot. Not sulfur. Memory.
The whisper of movement behind him made him flinch.
"You always this dumb, or just poor today?" A sharp feminine voice came out from behind. She knelt beside him, hood down, scarf flecked with static.
"It shifted again," Dareth said. "Opened wider."
She glanced at the crack. Her brow tightened. "That's not quarry stone. That's....goddamn. That's fossil."
Dareth nodded.
"You're not climbing into that."
"Someone has to." He looked at her. "You know what happens when a new chamber's found. Vireth'll send claimers. No one from Mirestead sees a coin."
The lady swore under her breath and stood. "You fall in, I'm not dragging your sorry ass out."
He waited until her footsteps vanished, then slid a binding hook into the scaffold, tied the rope around his waist, and lowered himself down. The ash clung to his lashes, the rope groaned above, and the crack yawned open below, wide as a throat.
It wasn't dark inside.
Faint lines of amber glowed from deep within the rock, tracing veins like runes beneath skin. The chamber opened into a hollow belly of stone and fossil, it's ribs curled inward, forming a dome. It looked alive, somehow. Wrongly alive.
Dareth moved slowly. The bones didn't look like anything he'd ever seen, no beast walked on ribs like these. They rose, spiraled, narrowed again at the tip like they'd been reaching for something when they died. He pressed a hand to one.
The pulse came like thunder without sound.
His vision doubled. A child screamed. A bell rang backwards. He staggered, eyes wide.
From the far end of the chamber, something shimmered.
A single fragment, embedded in the wall. It gleamed faintly, like a wet tooth left in firelight.
And it was warm.
Dareth's breath came sharp and uneven as he stared at the fragment. It pulsed once, faintly, as if acknowledging him. He stepped closer, ash cracking softly underfoot. The chamber vibrated, though not enough to shake.
He reached for it.
His fingertips stopped just short of the surface. The heat coming off the shard wasn't like a fire's warmth, it was internal, bone-deep, like something inside him recognized it. Something half-forgotten.
"Don't," he whispered to himself.
But his hand moved anyway.
Contact. A jolt, not pain, not exactly. Memory. Someone else's. A hand grasping a sword of liquid stone. A voice without lungs howling at the stars. A sensation of being buried, not in soil, but in time.
He yanked his hand back. It had left no burn, no mark, yet something crawled beneath his skin. He could feel it coiling low in his spine.
Then the shard pulsed again.
And the chamber answered.
All around him, the fossil ribs glowed. Lines of amber stretched out like veins, flaring with sudden life. The spiral in the floor blazed. Dareth staggered, nearly falling into the central pit as the whole cavern began to shake. A deep, grinding groan echoed through the quarry above.
Ash trickled down the rope.
"No, no—" he turned, scrabbling toward the rope, just as a wall of air slammed into him, throwing him back into the pit. His vision snapped white.
The Pulse had come.
It wasn't sound or light, it was presence. He was no longer inside his own skull. He was falling through memory, but not his own. Flashes of limbs that weren't shaped like his. Teeth that weren't built to chew. Oceans made of blood and black stars. A world that sang.
Then silence. A presence like a mountain breathing in his ear.
Dareth.
He screamed. He tried to stand but had no body to stand with. He tried to wake but had no eyes. Something uncoiled inside him like a spiral cracking open. His mind folded around a shape he couldn't comprehend.
And then.....nothing.
Black.
Then ash.
Then breath, shallow and cold.
He was buried.
Dareth awoke with the weight of the world pressing down on his chest.
Ash filled his mouth. He gagged, turned his head, coughed until black mucus clung to his lips. It was dark...no, dim. The faintest gray seeped through cracks above. His arms were pinned. Something heavy lay across his legs.
He screamed once, hoarse and muffled by the dirt. The sound didn't echo.
Panic came first. He thrashed blindly, forgetting pain, clawing at the loose ash. One hand freed, then the other. Then the taste of blood as he dug upward, fingernails tearing. Minutes, or hours had passed as he fought through collapsed rock, until finally his hand punched into open air.
He broke through. A sickly light fell over him as he pulled himself free from the grave.
The quarry was gone.
What had been scaffolding, carts, and tents was now a landscape of sunken dust. The central shaft had collapsed inward, forming a gaping crater. Everything was coated in layered ash like tree rings. Static buzzed in the air. The ashstorm still loomed overhead, it...it hadn't moved.
Storms never stayed.
Dareth staggered upright. Every part of him ached. His skin felt tight. His breath came in short, stuttering hitches.
He looked at his hands.
The veins in his forearms shimmered faintly—like threads of gold, buried under skin. When he flexed his fingers, the shimmer pulsed, as if something was beneath the surface. Like it was breathing.
He turned, slowly, to look at the stone outcrop where the fossil chamber had been.
It was cracked open like a broken jaw.
Something had crawled out.
He didn't remember climbing. He didn't remember surviving. But here he was.
A sound behind him made him spin.
A pair of figures stood at the quarry's edge. Dust cloaks. Face-wraps. One held a rusted rifle. The other leaned on a poleaxe etched with bone-carved glyphs. Both stared at him like they'd seen a ghost.
"Holy shit," the taller one said, voice muffled through their wrap. "That's a fresh mark."
The one with the rifle stepped forward. A woman, by her voice. "Stay where you are."
Dareth didn't move.
"Where's the rest of your crew?"
He shook his head. His throat hurt too much to speak.
They came closer. One knelt, pulled his sleeve back. Saw the glow at his wrist. Leaned back, slowly.
"Still warm."" she said.
Dareth collapsed.
He woke to motion.
The world tilted in a slow, rhythmic sway. He was bundled in something heavy, slung across the back of a crawler-cart. Bonewheels creaked beneath him, and the scent of old iron and bitter herbs hung in the air. The sky hadn't cleared. That unnatural ashstorm still coiled above like a coiled serpent.
Dareth groaned.
"Easy," a voice said from somewhere above. "Still breathing, that's something."
He tried to sit up. Leather-wrapped hands steadied him.
The woman from the quarry crouched beside him. Her scarf was pulled down now, revealing skin weathered by wind and soot. A pale scar ran from her ear to the corner of her mouth. She looked like someone who'd seen too many things worth forgetting.
"I'm Erren," she said. "This is Jorr."
The man driving the crawler gave a half-wave without turning.
"You're lucky we saw the storm spike. Didn't expect to find a survivor down there."
Dareth coughed. "How long?"
"Two days. Maybe three. You're not the first to crawl out of a Pulse. Just one of the few didn't end up looking like jerky."
He shifted, then froze. His skin felt tight, thick like clay dried under sun. He pulled back his collar. The glow was still there, pulsing faintly at his shoulder, tracing delicate, curling lines down his chest like some kind of molten tattoo.
Erren saw. "You're new, and unclaimed."
He looked at her. "Claimed?"
"Marked like that? Someone's going to want you. Vireth's got scouts everywhere. If you don't register it, they take it. Or take you. Depends on the mood."
Dareth's fingers clenched. "It spoke to me."
Erren tilted her head. "They don't usually do that, not this early."
"It knew my name."
That made her pause.
Jorr let out a low whistle. "You're in deep, boy."
They rode in silence for a while, ash crunching under the wheels.
Finally, the crawler crested a ridge. Below, nestled in the folds of old ruin walls and twisted metal scaffolds, lay a sprawl of lights: half-dug shelters, tents of bone canvas, smoke rising from low fires. Vell's Hollow.
The crawler-cart rattled down the slope into the shantytown of Vell's Hollow. Smoke coiled in thin strands between bone-rib shelters and crumbling walls left from something older than cities. Tents stitched from stitched-hide flapped in the wind, and makeshift lanterns flickered behind warped glass. Every surface seemed layered in ash, none of it fresh.
Dareth sat up slowly, the blanket still over his shoulders. His skin itched under the thin glow that pulsed just beneath it. The lines on his chest had receded, curling tighter, like something hiding just under the surface.
Erren noticed him looking.
"It's normal," she said, softer now. "They always burn bright at first. Like the mark's trying to find shape."
Dareth glanced at her. "You mean it's not finished?"
"Not until it stops moving." She climbed down from the cart as it slowed, then gestured for him to follow. "Come on. You need a place to lie low before anyone important sees you."
He slid off the cart and landed hard. His knees buckled, but he stayed upright. Every joint ached. The ash crunched beneath his boots like bone dust.
They walked past rows of scavengers huddled near burners, stitched-together tents, and children with masks too big for their faces. Most didn't look up. A few did, and looked away fast.
Erren led him into a side alley between two lean-to shelters. She stopped at a rust-stained curtain and pushed it aside. Inside, it was warmer. Low light from a hollowed-out lanternstone. Blankets, a cot. It smelled of old herbs and smoke.
"This is one of mine," she said. "You'll stay here for now."
Dareth eased down onto the cot. His breath shook.
"I don't understand," he said quietly. "I touched it. That shard. And now it's like… like I'm not just me anymore."
Erren crouched by the cot. "You've been marked. The fossil didn't just give you power. It carved something into you. Not just skin. It goes deeper."
He looked at her, eyes wide. "What is it?"
She hesitated. Then, "No two are the same. Sigils come from what the fossil remembers, and what you are when it finds you. It takes something from you. Gives something back."
"So what did it take?"
Erren didn't answer.
She stood, pulling the curtain closed. "Rest. You're not done changing yet. And tomorrow, you're going to meet someone who might help you understand it. Or kill you."
Dareth didn't sleep. Not at first.
Because beneath his skin, the mark was pulsing, and in the dark, he swore he heard something breathing.
Not him.
Inside him.