> "Not all curses are shackles. Some are stitches—holding what should have unraveled long ago."
—Fragment from the Codex Umbrarum, sealed archives of the Custodes Noctis
The river sang to her.
Not with music, but with memory—each ripple threading through her mind like a needle through flesh. Lyraen sat motionless beneath the stars, her coat wrapped tight, her gaze fixed on the black water that had once run red. She remembered the boy's laughter echoing off its banks. She remembered the way his blood had steamed in the cold.
She hadn't meant to take so much. Not from him. Not that night.
The hunger had bloomed sharp and sudden, a hollow ache that overrode reason. He had smiled at her, trusting. He had kissed her fingertips and whispered that he wasn't afraid. And then the taste—iron, sweet, sacred—had drowned everything. His pulse against her lips. His breath fading in her arms.
She had cried over him, there on the riverbank, rocking his body like a mother mourning her child. She had screamed into the reeds, into the stars, into the silence that answered nothing. And when she looked into the water, she had seen herself—not as she was, but as she had become: a revenant of shattered grace, eyes glowing like coals, mouth stained with the sin of survival.
The wind shifted. The sigil on her wrist, once dormant, throbbed faintly. The same mark scorched into chapel walls and alley brick pulsed now beneath her skin, as though it had tasted the soil of Briar Hollow and stirred awake.
A heron startled nearby, lifting into the sky with a soft beat of wings. Lyraen didn't flinch. She watched its form vanish into the dark, envying its weightlessness.
Wind rustled the trees behind her, a soft shivering of branches. But underneath it, another sound—barely audible—rose from the forest: chanting. Faint. Inhuman. A rhythm more ancient than language.
She stood.
She had no map—only memory. But memory, for the cursed, was a compass.
At the edge of town, past where lanterns turned to shadows, the forest yawned open—Graveback Forest. It was older than the city, briar hollow, older than the chapel ruins or the stones beneath the streets. It whispered in tongues not spoken for centuries. Even hunters feared it.
She walked between twisted trunks, guided by instinct and something deeper—drawn to a place where the veil had once thinned. Where blood had opened a gate.
The forest whispered like a cathedral of ghosts.
Branches clawed at her coat, but none dared touch her flesh. The deeper she went, the quieter the forest grew, until even her footsteps were swallowed by the loam.
There, where the earth dipped into a hollow and moonlight trembled on dead leaves, stood an altar of bone and root. At its base: glyphs written in languages lost to fire. And above it—spun between two blackthorn trees—hung a web not of silk, but silver thread and blood.
She knelt. Not to pray. To remember.
The Boneweaver had once been worshipped here, before angels fell and vampires rose. Said to be neither god nor demon, but the first to touch the soul's stitching—the one who could unmake what had been cursed. Or bind it tighter.
Lyraen breathed deep. "If you're listening," she whispered, "I've come to trade."
Silence.
Then, from behind her, the forest breathed.
A figure stepped forth—not walking, but gliding. Its limbs were too long, its face veiled in shadow. Silver thread wove through its hair and across its chest. When it spoke, its voice came from all directions.
"You wear the thorned wing."
Lyraen stood. "You know me."
"I know what you were. What you could become again. But threads cannot be unraveled without a price."
"I don't fear price," she said. "Only lies."
The Boneweaver extended a hand. "Then let me show you truth."
Its fingers brushed her temple, and the world broke open.
Visions flared—wings burning, blood spilt across altars, a boy smiling through tears. And beyond it all: the fall. Not just hers, but the beginning. The pact that birthed vampirism. The sealing of light in flesh. The lies passed down as law.
She staggered back, breath shallow.
"You were made to fall," the Boneweaver whispered. "But you do not have to stay fallen."
"What must I do?"
"Find the first thread. In the city beneath Nytheralis. Where the dead still sing."
The vision ended. The Boneweaver was gone.
Only the sigil remained—etched anew into the altar stone.
But the forest had not finished its revelations.
Drawn by a sensation she couldn't name, She rose slowly, her boots silent on the damp grass. The sigil on her wrist tingled, a pulse just beneath her skin. Not pain. Not exactly. A summons. A thread pulling her toward something deeper than fear.
Lyraen followed the sound, weaving through trees that had once marked the edge of the town's boundary. The air grew colder, the light stranger. Shadows stretched too long. The fog curled in patterns. A shimmer in the darkness.
Lyraen wandered deeper, past trees twisted by time, their bark etched with sigils echoing her own. At dusk, she found the remnants of a temple—choked by ivy and silence. Its stone matched the chapel where she had once been cast out.
She stepped into a clearing and stopped.
At its center stood a circle of stones, worn smooth by centuries, and covered in glyphs she had seen only once—on the walls of the ruined sanctum where angels once wept. In the middle of the stone circle: a figure. Cloaked in fabric the color of dusk, head bowed, arms outstretched.
A mural within, half-erased by time, showed a figure of many limbs and a face of threads. The Boneweaver again. Its name was never spoken aloud, but she felt it settle in her marrow.
At the altar's base lay an offering: a vial of blood wrapped in old prayercloth.
A name was stitched into the fabric.
His name.
Lyraen staggered back. Impossible. He was dead. She saw him burn.
But the cloth was warm. Fresh.
From the archway behind her came a whisper:
"He's not gone. Not all of him. The Boneweaver keeps what others discard."
She turned.
The chanting ceased.
The figure lifted its head.
Eyes—no, not eyes. Voids. Hollow wells of memory and madness.
A child stood there. Or something like a child—eyes too old, voice like dry leaves.
Lyraen's voice caught. "Why is his name here? Why him?"
The boy tilted his head. "He was a thread. A knot pulled tight, one among many. His death wasn't random. It was a sacrifice."
"To what?" she asked.
The boy's gaze darkened—not unkind, but solemn. "To silence. To forgetting. The kind of sacrifice needed to keep the Weave from unraveling. Blood offered to stitch the rift."
Lyraen reeled. "He was just a child…"
"All sacrifices begin as innocence," the boy whispered. "But the truth you seek? It was buried here, beneath stone and sorrow. He was marked because his bloodline carried memory.
A spark of the Weave's original harmony. His death sealed a rupture—one you are destined to tear open again."
"You asked for truth," it said. "But truth undoes."
She stared at him, heart hammering. " "And you? What are you?"
The boy gave a fragile smile. "A ghost. A whisper left behind. A memory the Boneweaver refused to cut loose."
He stepped closer, raising a hand to her wrist, where her sigil glowed faintly.
"You were not meant to return," it said, voice like leaves cracking underfoot. "Yet here you walk, marked by the past and fettered to the thread."
"I seek the Boneweaver," she said. "I seek what was stolen from me."
The figure tilted its head. "The Boneweaver does not answer to seekers. It answers only to memory. To pain. To loss."
"Then I am already halfway there."
A slow, rattling breath. "You carry more than sin. You carry the broken pieces of what you once were. Do you truly wish to know who pulled the first thread? Do you wish to see what the angels burned from the records?"
Lyraen hesitated. But then her eyes hardened.
"I would rather be damned by truth than saved by a lie."
The figure gestured to the stones. Each one flared with soft violet fire.
"Then step within, fallen child. And remember not what you were told. But what you forgot."
"You are not just Fallen. You are the keyhole carved by prophecy. And the threads will tighten until you decide whether to bind... or unravel."
"He slipped between veils, a trace of spirit scattered by the breath of forgotten gods."
And with that, he was gone—dissolved into the dust-laden air, leaving behind only the echo of burnt names and ancient guilt.
Lyraen crossed the threshold.
The world fell away.
And memory, like a blade, began to cut.
---
Far above the haunted forest, within the Sanctum Stirpis, Ezran stood at a high window overlooking Nytheralis. Shadows stretched across the city like fingers. The halo fragment he carried pulsed like a heartbeat.
"She's touched the Weave," he said.
The scarlet-cloaked woman beside him nodded. "Then the old powers will stir."
Ezran turned, face grim. "Ready the Custodes. The prophecy accelerates."
"What of Lyraen?"
"She's not the same creature we once hunted," he murmured. "She's becoming something else."
"And if she chooses truth?"
Ezran's eyes darkened.
"Then we choose war."
Later, alone, he descended into the restricted vaults beneath the Sanctum. There, behind layers of holy wards and rusted locks, lay a volume bound in skin—the Codex Obscura.
He opened it with reverent dread. The pages bled symbols—angelic and vampiric, interlaced with meanings older than either.
A passage pulsed faintly beneath his fingers:
"The fallen flame shall seek the Weaver. And through her, the wound shall bleed anew."
A moment later, the sigil over his chest ignited.
A voice in his mind: "She remembers."
The relics around him began to hum, and Ezran reeled as something ancient awoke within the vault.
His breath caught.
They had not just hunted the Fallen.
They were wardens, keepers of secret too dangerous for the world above
They had shaped them.
And Lyraen...
She may have been the first.