Snow fell like ash, soft and relentless, cloaking the Scarline's gnarled trees in silence.
Teon, barely eight, trudged beside Gregor, his small boots crunching ice, a knife too big for his hands tucked into his belt like a toy playing at war. The Week of Knives was a month gone, but his mother's blood still stained his dreams—warm, screaming, then still. Her lullaby curled at the edges of his memory, faint but sharp:
The rot that remembers will name the world lost.
His back burned, the Rot Mark—new, raw, a spiral scabbed under his tunic—searing like it wanted to claw free, to carve itself into the world.
Gregor knelt by a fallen log, brushing snow from its bark, his cloak dusted white, his face hollow with sleeplessness. His beard was untrimmed, his eyes kind but fractured, not yet the nails they'd become.
"Carve it like this,"
He said, voice soft, guiding Teon's trembling fingers to the wood. The knife bit deep, slow, hesitant, tracing a spiral with jagged thorns that curled like the ones choking Ruttenmark's Gut. Each cut matched the mark on Teon's back, and with each stroke, the mark flared, white-hot, as if the tree's sap answered his blood.
Teon gasped, dropping the knife. Tears welled, freezing on his cheeks before they fell.
"Why does it hurt?"
he whispered, voice small, breaking like ice underfoot.
Gregor looked at him—not as a mayor, not as a soldier, but as a man crumbling under a weight he couldn't name.
"Just growing pains,"
he lied, his voice steady but his hand trembling, a parchment rustling in his cloak: an Ash Clergy letter, sealed in black wax, its words a noose.
The marked child in Ruttenmark must be watched. The rot wakes. Containment or termination.
He'd chosen to raise Teon, defying the Clergy's colder path, but the choice felt like a blade at his throat. He glanced at a crow perched above, its third eye—cracked open in its forehead like a wound—glinting, unblinking, unnatural. Its claw scratched the snow, tracing a spiral that bled frost, mirroring Teon's carving.
"Don't look at that bird,"
Gregor muttered, voice low, frayed, stepping between it and the boy.
"It's just a trick of the snow."
But the crow stayed, its third eye fixed, remembering what Gregor wished he could erase.
Teon's voice shook, barely a whisper.
"Mama used to sing to it. To the spiral."
His eyes were wet, distant, seeing her—Mayla, by his crib, her voice fierce with defiance, whispering to him her mother's words:
They fear what sings.
The lullaby had been her rebellion, sung against the Ash Clergy's bans, her blood the price.
Crows forget their wings at a terrible cost.
Gregor swallowed, his throat tight. He remembered her singing, her eyes burning with love and fear, the night the knives came.
"Don't hum that, boy,"
he snapped, then softer, almost pleading:
"It's not safe anymore."
His hand rested on Teon's shoulder, gentle but heavy, and the mark twitched under his touch, alive, answering the spiral in the snow.
Teon curled against the log, his sobs quiet, muffled by the snow. The half-carved spiral bled sap, thick and red, like the blood in his dreams. Gregor sat beside him, silent, his own scar—the one from the Clergy's sigil—burning under his glove.
The crow didn't move, its third eye a wound that saw too much, and somewhere in the falling snow, the lullaby lingered, out of tune, out of time.
The tower's cold stone bit into Teon's spine. He jerked awake, the crate from Gregor's chamber heavy in his lap, its spiral-carved lid burning under his palm, the same jagged thorns as the log in his memory. The same shape. The same pain. A whisper, not his, curled through the dark:
The flame is coming.
Sura stood over him, her eyes dark, tired, her blistered fingers twitching like they felt the burn too.
"You okay?"
she asked, her voice soft but sharp, cutting through the frost of his memory.
Teon said nothing. His hand lingered on the crate, the spiral pulsing like the mark on his back. In his silence, he felt Gregor's touch on his shoulder, the snow, the pain that never left. Above, the crows watched, their caws a faint echo of the lullaby, and Ruttenmark bled on.