The fire had burned low. Only soft crimson embers pulsed in the dark, casting flickers across the bark-lined walls of their small shelter. Suhra sat with her legs crossed, cloak drawn tight, her gaze lingering on Ashai's small form as he slept, chest rising and falling in slow rhythm.
She hadn't meant to doze, not really. Her mind had been restless since the last trace of twilight fell — not because of danger, but because of memory. Memory, when left alone too long, becomes heavier than armor.
And in the stillness, memory returned.
---
Snow and silence.
The pass at Kareth's Mouth.
She saw it first through a lens of strategy, not emotion. A natural choke point carved by the mountains — narrow, treacherous, perfect for one skilled in Binding. She had stood there once, alone, barely twenty winters old, wind tearing at her robes while her unit lay broken behind her.
They told her to flee. Reinforcements wouldn't come in time.
But Suhra didn't need time. She needed space. And precision.
She drew glyphs with slow, deliberate strokes — each one a thread in an invisible net. They weren't just traps. They were calculations. Angles. Tensions.
Binding Myhn was not simply about sealing or stopping. It was about anchoring intent. Every glyph formed a contract with the world: If this happens, then this must follow.
One glyph delayed sound.
Another bent space ever so slightly.
A third confused gravity, just enough to make a man's feet forget how to fall properly.
As the warband charged, they were swallowed by her field. Some staggered. Some screamed. Most simply… stopped, as though forgetting what they were doing halfway through.
She moved only when she needed to. One step here to reset a line. Another there to reactivate a failing weave. Each movement was calculated, silent.
By dawn, she hadn't drawn a blade.
And none who tried to pass had survived.
When the first scout arrived days later, he whispered, "She didn't fight. She just stood there."
No blood. No chaos. Just control.
They called her Suhra of the Still Step.
She never asked for the name. But it followed her, like ink that had already dried.
---
The snow melted into sand and stone. The wind changed.
She found herself in Gharun's Hollow, the memory too vivid to be called a dream. This was the one that never faded.
They had taken a royal envoy hostage — a pretense for war. Twenty-four enemies held the crater, armed and surrounded by glyphs meant to alert, bind, and destroy intruders.
But Suhra had changed since the pass.
She had begun experimenting with motion-based Myhn — lines not anchored in stone, but in gesture, in will. Something beyond Binding. Something new.
The Order had forbidden it. They said Myhn must be measured, recorded, sacred. Not drawn in the air like a child playing with shadows.
But Suhra had listened to the way Myhn moved, not just what it responded to.
She stepped into the crater.
Drew her arm.
A line formed — thin, weightless, pulsing with power.
She exhaled.
The line became a blade.
Not metal. Not illusion. It hummed with temporary solidity, shaped by thought and drawn form. It flickered out the moment it struck.
One movement, one death. Another curve — a spear. A half-circle — a shield, just long enough to deflect a bolt of fire.
She moved like a dancer, like a scribe writing the end of twenty-four men into the earth.
None screamed.
Not because they didn't want to.
Because they didn't know it was happening.
Later, survivors would say:
"There was no warning."
"Just lines. Ink in the air."
"We were already dead before we realized we'd been drawn."
And so, her second name was born:
Suhra of the Unseen Ink.
---
She stirred beneath the moonlight. Her eyes opened slowly.
Ashai was still asleep beside the fire. His small hands curled near his chest, where the star-shaped mark still glowed faintly beneath the wrappings she always made sure he wore.
She looked down at her own arm, where her second mark curled like a spiral of ink. It had formed the night after Gharun. It burned through her robes, not with pain — but with understanding.
Inkthreading.
That was what she called it.
Where Binding created laws for the world to follow, Inkthreading was pure expression — it wove intention into physical form for a fleeting heartbeat. A blade. A bow. A chain. Each one drawn, used, and gone.
And yet… she had been cast out for it.
The Order feared what could not be recorded. What could not be taught from scrolls. They labeled her dangerous. Unreliable. Rogue.
But it was not power that made her dangerous.
It was her understanding.
Most Myhn users believed they controlled the Myhn — pushed it, bent it, ordered it into shape. Suhra had learned the opposite. Myhn responded, like music to movement, like brushstroke to thought.
You didn't control Myhn. You invited it.
And now, that same understanding kept her hidden, here, in this quiet forest — far from temples and politics and names written in blood.
Because the boy lying beside her bore a mark older than anything she'd ever seen.
He hadn't earned it.
He had been born with it.
And that terrified her more than any battle.
She reached out gently and brushed his hair from his forehead.
He stirred, not waking, but his brow furrowed — as if caught in a dream of his own.
Suhra exhaled.
She had once stood at the edge of a pass and held back a horde.
She had once stepped into a crater and drawn death in the air.
Now she sharpened sticks into practice blades, taught a child how to read, and whispered stories of the old world to help him sleep.
But if they came for him—
If the Order ever followed the threads of old rumors and legends—
They would not find Suhra the exile.
Not the scholar.
Not the teacher.
They would find the one who had already written their fate.
In ink.
Unseen.