The dawn crept across the frozen wastes of Shiverwake with the sluggish reluctance of a dying man dragging himself toward an unmarked grave. Vaern awoke not to sunlight but to its pale imitation, a sickly gray glow that seeped through the skeletal trees like pus from an infected wound. His breath came in shallow, mechanical gasps, each inhalation a conscious effort as if his lungs had forgotten their purpose and now required deliberate instruction.
The campfire had long since surrendered to the night, its embers reduced to blackened husks that crumbled to ash at the slightest disturbance. He stared at his hands with detached curiosity, observing how the skin had taken on a disturbing translucency, the veins beneath standing out like ink spilled across parchment, dark and ominous against the unnatural pallor.
The Ghost Sigil coiled around his forearm in lazy spirals, its golden luminescence pulsing faintly beneath his flesh as though amused by his gradual unravelling.
Yren was already engaged in her morning ritual, the grating scrape of her obsidian blade against the whetstone cutting through the heavy silence with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. The whetstone itself was no ordinary rock but a length of polished weeper bone, its surface worn smooth from years of use and stained dark with substances better left unexamined.
She worked with the methodical patience of someone who had performed this act ten thousand times before and expected to perform it ten thousand times more, her calloused fingers moving with unconscious expertise as she honed the weapon's edge to lethal perfection.
"Dreamt again?" she asked without looking up, the question hanging in the frigid air between them like the lingering stench of a battlefield three days after the fighting had ended.
Vaern remained silent, not out of defiance but because the dream still clung to him with the tenacity of a drowning man's grip, its fingers sunk deep into the fabric of his consciousness. Fragments of it surfaced in his mind with disturbing clarity: the sound of a child's voice that he somehow recognized as his own yet couldn't possibly be, raw with terror and pleading for mercy that would never come; the crimson ribbon Serah had tied around his wrist the day before his exile, now frayed at the edges with threads snapping one by one as though unravelling the very memory it represented; and always, always the book, its cover shifting and breathing like a living thing, its pages whispering secrets in a language that made his teeth ache.
Yren spat into the snow, the glob of saliva striking the ground with enough force to melt a tiny crater in the frost. "You're shaking," she observed with the clinical detachment of someone noting the weather.
He wasn't, not in any visible sense, but she was right all the same. Something deep within him trembled with the terrible inevitability of a glacier calving into the sea, a vibration so profound it seemed to originate in his bones rather than his flesh. The Ghost Sigil had already taken his fear, leaving behind only a hollow where terror should have been. Then it had claimed his grief, excising the pain of Serah's absence with the precision of a surgeon removing a tumour. Now it gnawed at something even more fundamental, something for which he had no name but whose absence he felt with every faltering beat of his heart.
Without ceremony, Yren tossed him a strip of dried meat that landed in the snow with a wet thud. The flesh was dark and fibrous, cured in salt and something else, something that left a metallic tang on the tongue and made his stomach clench in protest. Weeper meat, harvested from the corpses of their fallen enemies and preserved through methods he didn't care to contemplate. "Eat," she commanded, her voice brooking no argument. "We're heading to the Cradle today, and I won't have you passing out from hunger halfway there."
The journey to Hearthspire Cradle took them through landscapes that seemed actively hostile to life, where the very air carried the weight of forgotten sins. They followed the course of a frozen river, its surface cracked and buckled like the skin of some ancient corpse, the ice so thick it had preserved the skeletons of those who had died attempting to cross it. The bones gleamed whitely in the weak sunlight, their fingers still clasped in prayer or perhaps supplication, their empty eye sockets staring skyward as though awaiting a deliverance that would never come. The trees lining the riverbank stood as silent sentinels, their bark blackened by some long-ago fire, their branches reaching upward like the grasping fingers of the damned.
Yren moved through this desolation with the ease of someone who had long since made peace with death, her boots crunching through the frost with deliberate, measured steps. "This was once called the Path of the Devout," she said, her voice carrying oddly in the still air. "Pilgrims would walk it barefoot to prove their devotion to the Spiral. Most froze to death before they reached the halfway point." She kicked a skull from her path with casual indifference, sending it skittering across the ice to shatter against a rock. "The smart ones turned back. The faithful died where they stood."
Vaern said nothing, his attention caught by something glinting in the ice. Kneeling, he brushed away the frost to reveal a sigil carved into the frozen surface, its lines still sharp despite the passage of untold years. The moment his fingers made contact, the Ghost Sigil on his arm flared to life, its golden light pulsing in time with his heartbeat as though recognising an old friend. The ice beneath his hands began to melt, revealing more of the carving, the intricate whorls and spirals of some ancient language that made his eyes water just to look upon it.
Yren was at his side in an instant, her hand closing around his wrist with enough force to bruise. "Don't," she warned, her voice uncharacteristically tight. "That's Veresh's script. The words have power even now." She dragged him to his feet, her eyes scanning the surrounding trees with newfound wariness. "We need to keep moving. This place isn't safe."
As they pressed onwards, the river widened into a basin where the ice had fractured into jagged plates, their edges sharp enough to flay the skin from a man's bones. At the centre of this frozen maelstrom stood their destination: Hearthspire Cradle, its broken towers jutting from the cliff face like the ribs of some long-dead beast. The structure had clearly been grand once, its walls carved with intricate spiral motifs that told stories in a language no living man could fully comprehend. Now it was little more than a corpse of stone, its once-proud arches collapsed, its grand halls open to the elements, the remnants of its glory slowly being erased by wind and frost.
The altar stood at the centre of what had once been the main chamber, a massive slab of black stone veined with streaks of gold that caught the light in strange, unsettling ways. Its surface was covered in carvings so deep they seemed to have been made by something far stronger than human hands, the grooves stained dark with what could only be ancient blood. Yren approached it with something approaching reverence, her fingers tracing the symbols with a familiarity that spoke of long acquaintance.
"This was a training ground," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Before the Orders turned sigils into shackles, before the Splintering War tore the Spiral apart, this was where they made the first Weavers." She turned to face him, her expression unreadable. "Touch it. See for yourself."
Vaern hesitated only a moment before pressing his palm to the cold stone. The effect was immediate. The Ghost Sigil on his arm blazed to life, its golden light pouring into the carvings and illuminating words that hadn't been visible before. The symbols burnt themselves into his retinas, their meaning impressing itself upon his mind with the force of a hammer blow:
"Nur-Vas Ethes. Vorth Mirn."
The Spiral remembers. The Thread lies.
The pain was instantaneous, a spike of white-hot agony that drove itself through his skull and into his brain. His vision fractured, doubling, tripling, until he was no longer standing in the ruins of Hearthspire Cradle but somewhere else entirely, somewhen else entirely.
A hundred children knelt in perfect rows, their heads bowed, their hands outstretched. A figure in a mask of woven bone moved among them, a dagger in one hand and a burning brand in the other. As Vaern watched, the figure pressed the brand to the first child's palm, the flesh sizzling as the sigil burnt itself into their skin. The child screamed, a sound that was somehow both deafening and silent, and Vaern realised with dawning horror that he knew this ritual, knew it in his bones, in his blood, in the very fabric of his being.
"You are the Weavers now," the masked figure intoned, its voice echoing through the centuries. "You are the shuttles through which the Thread is drawn. You are the hands that shape the Spiral. Remember this, and do not falter."
Then the screaming began in earnest, and Vaern understood with terrible clarity that this was no mere memory—this was an inheritance.