The first Weeper exploded from the treeline with a sound like a drowning man's last gasp. Its limbs bent in too many places, joints popping as it scrambled across the frozen ground on all fours. Moonlight glistened off the fresh sinew stitching its mouth shut - the same black threads he'd severed hours before, now regrown and pulsing.
Yren didn't flinch. "Left knee buckles when it lunges," she muttered. "Aim there first."
The creature's sobs turned to shrieks as it charged. He barely had time to raise the strange dark blade before it was upon him. Claws like rusted nails tore at his chest, drawing hot lines of pain. He swung wildly, feeling the knife bite deep into something that shouldn't have been there - a second mouth opening in the Weeper's stomach, lined with jagged teeth that snapped at his wrist.
"Wrong fucking knee!" Yren barked from somewhere behind him.
The Weeper's vertical mouth tore open with a wet ripping sound, threads snapping one by one. Its breath smelled like a battlefield three days after the fighting ended - copper and shit and something sweetly rotten. Acidic drool splattered his forearm, eating through his sleeve in seconds. The pain was a living thing, crawling up his arm like ants made of fire.
Then something...shifted.
The golden spiral beneath his skin flared so bright he could see the bones in his arm. A wave of unnatural calm washed over him, muting the pain to a distant annoyance. The world sharpened into perfect clarity - he could count every hair on the Weeper's mangy pelt, see each individual thread of sinew in its gaping mouth.
Time slowed.
He moved without thinking.
The dark blade found the buckling left knee, slicing through tendon and bone with eerie precision. As the creature collapsed, he was already pivoting, driving the knife up through its chin and into whatever passed for a brain. Black blood gouted from its nostrils, but he didn't stop - couldn't stop - carving through flesh until he hit the pulsating core between its shoulders.
The moment the blade pierced it, the sigil's glow intensified. Golden tendrils snaked from his arm into the dying Weeper, drinking in its essence. He felt something vital tear loose inside him, something he'd never get back.
When the glow faded, the world had changed.
The snow was wrong. The trees were wrong. Everything had lost its...redness. The blood pooling at his feet wasn't crimson anymore, just a dull grayish-black. The Weeper's pelt lacked the rusty undertones it had seconds before. Even Yren's scars looked different - the angry pink faded to a pale, lifeless beige.
"You just paid your first real price," Yren said, watching him with something almost like pity. "What'd it take?"
He opened his mouth to answer when the other Weepers attacked.
Not one or two, but a dozen at least, pouring from the trees in a wave of malformed limbs and weeping eyes. Their collective sobs formed a discordant choir that made his teeth vibrate. The largest - a hulking monstrosity with too many joints in its arms - dragged something behind it. Something human-shaped and still screaming.
The corpse wore tattered Drav'nari robes, its face a ruined mess of acid burns. But the sigil on its chest still pulsed faintly - an ember struggling to stay lit. Kas-Nur. Just like Yren's.
"Ah," Yren said softly. "That's where the rest of my hunting party went."
The giant Weeper opened its stitched mouth and vomited a stream of black bile. Where the fluid struck the ground, the snow didn't just melt - it unraveled, revealing patches of bare earth covered in strange, spiraling scars.
"Fourth lesson," Yren said, drawing her greatsword with a metallic shriek. "When you see a Weeper priest, run."
The Weeper Priest's limbs unfolded—not like a man stretching, but like a puzzle box solving itself in reverse. Each joint popped wetly, bones elongating until it stood nearly nine feet tall, its spine a grotesque curve of knotted vertebrae. The thing it had been dragging—the half-digested Sigil-Bearer—slumped to the ground, still twitching.
Yren spat a curse and swung her greatsword in a wide arc. The blade bit deep into the Priest's thigh, spraying black ichor that sizzled where it struck the snow. The creature didn't scream. It laughed, a sound like grinding glass, and clamped a hand over its wound.
Then it licked its own fingers clean.
The sigil on its chest—a twisted mirror of Yren's Kas-Nur—flared crimson. The gash in its leg *stitched itself shut* with threads of glistening sinew, pulled from somewhere inside its body.
"Fucking hell," Yren hissed. "It's learned to weave."
The remaining Weepers circled, their sobs harmonizing into a single, dissonant hymn. The air thickened with the stench of rotting meat and spoiled honey.
Vaern's ghost sigil pulsed in response, sending jagged lines of gold branching up his forearm. The warmth was back—that terrible, comforting numbness that made the pain feel like it belonged to someone else. He could *see* the Priest's weakness now: a throbbing black mass where its heart should be, visible through its translucent skin like a shadow behind parchment.
But using the sigil again would cost him.
Something else.
Yren didn't give him time to hesitate. She charged, her greatsword carving through two smaller Weepers in a single swing. "The core!" she roared. "Before it—"
The Priest moved faster than anything that size should. One moment it was ten paces away, the next its elongated fingers were wrapped around Yren's throat, lifting her off the ground. Her boots kicked at empty air as the creature squeezed, its nails drawing thin lines of blood that ran down its arm in hypnotic spirals.
Vaern didn't think.
He pulled at the sigil's power, willed it to wake.
The gold in his veins turned white-hot.
Time fractured.
For a single, excruciating second, he existed in two places at once:
1. Here, lunging toward the Priest with his knife aimed at its pulsing core.
2. Somewhere else, standing in a ruined temple, watching himself from behind a veil of smoke.
The vision shattered as his blade found its mark.
Black blood erupted from the Priest's chest in a geyser, drenching him from head to toe. It burned worse than the smaller Weeper's tears—not just his skin, but his memories.
Serah's face flickered in his mind.
Then it ripped in half, the left side dissolving into static.
The Priest collapsed, its body convulsing as its core detonated, taking the other Weepers with it in a wave of liquefied flesh. The ground trembled, snow turning to steam where the acidic remains splattered.
Silence.
Then—
A slow, mocking clap from the treeline.
Three figures stood watching, their bodies wrapped in bandages made from what looked like living parchment. The script moved across their wrappings, rearranging itself endlessly.
The tallest tilted its head, revealing a single eye beneath the bindings.
"Interesting," it rasped.
Yren went very still. "Bone Speakers."
The figures smiled in unison.
The Bone Speakers stood motionless, their presence warping the air around them in subtle, unsettling ways. It wasn't heat or light that distorted the space between them and the two survivors—it was language. The ancient, guttural kind, the kind that predated spoken words, the kind that bones remembered when flesh had long since rotted away. The script etched into their bandages slithered across the fabric like worms burrowing through wet ash, forming and reforming words that Vaern couldn't read but could feel in the marrow of his bones.
The Ghost Sigil in his arm flared to life.
In recognition.
Yren was already stepping back, her greatsword raised, her lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. "Stay behind me," she muttered, her voice tight.
Vaern didn't move.
Not because he was afraid.
The realization settled over him with the same eerie detachment one feels when a tooth is finally yanked free—the pain is gone, but the absence is just as unsettling. The fear had been hollowed out of him, scooped clean like the inside of a gutted melon. The sigil had taken it.
He blinked, and the world sharpened.
Colors dulled further—what little red had remained in his vision was now entirely leached away, leaving the snow a flat, lifeless gray. Time slowed. He could feel the pulse of every living thing within ten paces—the minute twitch of Yren's wrist as she adjusted her grip on her sword, the sluggish exhale of the Weeper Priest's final breath curling into the frigid air, the unnatural stillness of the Bone Speakers, who didn't breathe at all.
Then the tallest of them moved.
It didn't walk. It folded forward, its bones bending in ways that defied anatomy, its body slithering like a serpent wrapped in human skin. It didn't attack with fists or blades.
It spoke.
A single word.
"Vreth-Khraoon"
The moment it left its lips, the forest screamed.
The snow exploded outward in perfect, concentric spirals, as if the ground itself had been struck by an invisible hammer. Bark peeled away from the trees in long, curling strips, revealing weeping, blackened wood beneath. Roots tore free from the earth, oozing thick, tarlike blood. Yren staggered, clapping a hand to her temple as twin rivulets of crimson streaked from her ears. The word struck Vaern square in the chest—it should have shattered his ribs, should have sent him flying—but it didn't.
It passed through him.
As if he were less solid than before.
His fear would have buckled him.
But fear was gone.
He moved.
Faster than thought, faster than instinct, his body was already in motion before his mind could process the command. The second Bone Speaker extended an arm—not a hand, just lengths of exposed bone knotted together by sinew and dried meat. Symbols ignited in the air between them, burning black-gold like cinders floating in oil.
Vaern didn't dodge. He cut the spell itself. His blade passed through the runes, and for a single, disorienting heartbeat, the universe itself seemed to pause in confusion. As if the laws of reality hadn't anticipated that working. The spell burst like a ruptured blister, force and heat rippling outward—but Vaern was already inside the Speaker's guard. He buried the knife under its chin and twisted. Black tar oozed from the wound. The Speaker didn't scream. It just stared at him, and for the briefest moment, he saw something inside its hollow eye socket—not an eye, but a mirror. Not glass.
A memory.
Serah, smiling, her fingers threading that crimson ribbon around his wrist.
Then the image burned away.
He'd lost more.
The sigil pulsed.
A second emotion collapsed inside him—grief.
It didn't feel like anything. That was the worst part. Just… nothing. Serah's name still floated in his skull, but it no longer ached. He didn't miss her. Didn't love her. He remembered loving her, the way a scar remembers a wound—but the feeling itself was gone. The third Bone Speaker opened its mouth— And the trees bent.
Literally. Every trunk twisted toward it, groaning as bark split and sap wept from the fractures. The forest floor itself warped, dead roots writhing like veins beneath skin. The world obeyed the command of the Speaker's tongue. A wordless script tumbled from its lips, falling like ash, each symbol burning itself into the air before dissolving into smoke. "Cover your ears!" Yren screamed.
Too late.
The sound wasn't sound—it was loss. The howl of every failure, every stolen future, every dream that had died before it could be born. It struck like despair wearing a crown.
But Vaern… wasn't afraid.
He stepped into the scream.
The third Bone Speaker hesitated.
That was its first mistake.
Vaern vanished. Threadburst activated—his second ability. His body became motion incarnate, weaving between the spiraling arcs of blackened script and barbed syllables as if he'd been born to kill language itself. He reappeared behind the Speaker, snow curling off his boots in slow-motion as the sigil in his arm burned gold-white with furious intensity.
He struck without mercy.
The blade punched through the Speaker's nape, severing the symbols inked along its spine. They wept. Not blood, but ink—the kind used in ancient Veresh contracts, the kind that bound souls to oaths. It sprayed over his hands, and for a single, dizzying moment, his own name began to dissolve from his memory.
He gritted his teeth and dragged the blade downward, splitting spine and sigil in one brutal motion.
The Speaker fell.
Silent.
Final.
The forest exhaled.
Real silence returned. Not the heavy, waiting kind. Just… stillness.
Yren limped toward him, dragging her greatsword behind her, her face unreadable. Awe? Fear? Grief? He couldn't tell. The emotions were fading—his own or hers, he didn't know which.
"You just killed three Bone Speakers," she said, voice hoarse. "Alone."
He nodded.
Yren stared at him. "What did it take?"
Vaern looked down at his shaking hands. The ink still crawled under his skin, threading itself into his veins. His breath fogged the air—but his chest didn't ache. His throat didn't tighten.
He looked up.
"…I don't think I.... remember that smile of hers anymore."
Yren didn't reply.
Instead, she sheathed her blade, sat down in the snow, and lit a fire with bones instead of wood.