He came to with a jolt—on his knees, hands clamped to his skull like he could crush the pain into silence. His thoughts were screaming, loud and jagged, too loud to hold onto. Blood kept trickling out of his nose, warm at first, then cold as it hit the snow, turning everything around him into a nasty mess of red. Not just a nosebleed. It looked bad. Like something had been hunted down and torn apart right there. A rabbit, maybe—small, helpless. And he felt just as broken. Yren was still beside him, her grip locked tight around his arm, the only thing stopping him from collapsing flat onto the bloodstained snow. He would've face-planted right into it. Would've stayed there, too.
"Fucking breathe, idiot," she muttered, sharp and clipped, but not as mean as she wanted it to sound. There was something behind her voice—something softer, like she almost cared. "The Cradle's memories are sharp. They'll cut you to ribbons if you let 'em in too deep."
She didn't ease him up—she yanked him, like a dislocated limb getting shoved back into place, and dragged him to the altar with steps that meant move or die. No hesitation. She hauled back and kicked it square in the side, heel slamming into the stone. A shudder ran through it, followed by a sound like something old waking up—gears grinding, stone shifting—and then a hidden panel slid open with a hiss.
Inside it pulsed. A mass of flesh, black and bloated, like a tumor too stubborn to die. It throbbed slow and heavy, coated in some kind of thick, sticky goop that clung to itself like molasses and caught the light in these oily rainbow swirls. It shimmered, almost pretty—if you ignored how wrong it was. A Weeper core. But bigger than the ones he'd seen before. Stronger. Meaner. Its skin was carved with soft-glowing runes that looked like they were still burning from when they were first etched in.
"Lesson one," Yren stated, her voice adopting the cadence of a seasoned instructor unveiling a foundational concept. "Steal its voice before it steals yours."
Morning didn't start. It just sort of… leaked in. Like someone had soaked a bandage in blood and wrung it out over the sky. The snow turned this weird, almost pink color—sickly, diluted. Vaern's first thought wasn't about light or color, though. It was breath. His own breath. Every inhale felt like a test he kept failing. He had to think about how lungs worked—inhale, exhale, survive. His breath puffed out in short, uneven clouds that hung too long in the cold, like even the air didn't want to move.
The fire was gone. It had died sometime in the night, leaving behind a pile of sad black twigs and ash that crumbled when he touched them with his boot. When he looked at his hands, something twisted in his gut. They didn't look right. Too pale, too thin, almost see-through. His veins stood out like rivers on a dead map. And the Ghost Sigil on his arm? It pulsed slowly, in perfect rhythm with his heart. Watching. Laughing. Feeding off how much worse he looked each day.
Yren was already awake, sharpening her blade like it was the only thing in the world that still made sense. The sound of obsidian scraping against bone broke the silence in clean, steady strokes. Not a regular whetstone, either. A Weeper's femur. Worn down smooth from years of use, darkened with… stuff Vaern didn't want to guess at.
She moved with the kind of precision that comes from repetition—not habit, not laziness, but ritual. Every pass of the blade, every angle, measured like she'd done this through storms and corpses and worse.
"Dreamt again?" she asked. Didn't even look at him when she said it. Like just asking was enough to make her skin crawl.
Vaern didn't answer. Couldn't. The dream was still there, clinging to the inside of his skull with claws. He could feel it, even awake. Little pieces coming back up like bile: a child's voice, panicked and begging. It was his voice, maybe. Maybe not. Didn't matter. It was scared, and it hurt to remember. Then that ribbon—Serah's ribbon—tied around his wrist. The one thing from before. He could see it fraying in slow motion, each thread snapping like tiny heartbeats breaking. And then the book. God, the book. It was breathing. He could feel it breathing. Its pages moved when they shouldn't, and it whispered in that horrible language—the kind that made his gums ache and his eyes burn, like it was trying to write something inside his bones.
Yren spat onto the snow. The glob impacted the frozen surface with enough force to melt a small crater.
"You're shaking," she observed clinically, as though diagnosing an early sign of illness.
He did not appear to tremble outwardly, but she was correct. Deep within him, there was a tremor—subtle but persistent—comparable to the inevitable cracking of a glacier. His fear had been stripped away by the Ghost Sigil. His grief followed soon after, excised with cold precision, leaving an emotional void. Now it gnawed at something even more fundamental—a presence without a name but felt through every irregular heartbeat.
Without ceremony, Yren threw him a strip of cured flesh that landed on the snow with a wet thud. Saliently dark and fibrous, it carried a metallic tang that triggered nausea. It was Weeper meat, clearly harvested from fallen adversaries and preserved by methods Vaern preferred not to contemplate.
"Eat," she commanded, her voice uncompromising. "We're heading to the Cradle today. I will not have you collapse from hunger on the way."
Their journey to Hearthspire Cradle traversed terrain that appeared intrinsically hostile to life. The air seemed burdened with the weight of forgotten sin. They followed the course of a frozen river whose surface was cracked and buckled like the skin of an ancient corpse. The ice was so dense it preserved skeletal remains beneath as though immured in glass. These bones gleamed pale in the weak sunlight, fingers still self-positioned in prayer or supplication, and empty eye sockets seemed to watch the sky in eternal longing.
Blackened trees flanked the riverbanks, their bark charred long ago, branches extended like the skeletal grasp of the damned.
Yren advanced unaffected by the grim scenery, her boots making calculated crunches on the frost with calm confidence.
"This was once called the Path of the Devout," she remarked, tone curious. "Pilgrims would walk it barefoot to demonstrate devotion to the Spiral. Most froze before reaching the midway point." She kicked aside a skull without hesitation; it slid and shattered against the ice. "The smart ones turned around. The faithful died where they stood."
Vaern remained silent but attentive—his eyes drawn to a glint beneath the frost ahead. He knelt and gently brushed the ice away. There lay a sigil carved deep into the frozen surface, its lines still sharp despite the passage of ages. Upon contact, the Ghost Sigil on his arm flared to life, pulsing in concert with his heartbeat as though greeting an old ally. The ice beneath his fingers began to liquefy, revealing more of the glyph—intricate spirals in an arcane script that made his vision blur slightly.
Yren moved immediately to his side, grabbing his wrist with sufficient force to bruise.
"Don't," she warned, voice unusually terse. "That's Veresh script. The words still carry power."
She hauled him upright, her gaze sweeping swiftly across the treeline in cautious vigilance.
"We must continue. This territory is unsafe."
As they pressed deeper, the river gave way to a basin where ice had fractured into jagged plates—edges sharp and unyielding enough to flay unprotected skin. At the basin's center rose Hearthspire Cradle: remnants of broken towers thrust outward like skeletal ribs from a colossal corpse. The architecture, once monumental, lay in ruin—proud arches collapsed, stone halls open to wind and frost, relics of lost grandeur dissolving with each gust.
In the chamber's core stood the altar—a massive slab of black stone veined with gold, catching light in unsettling patterns. Depression-carved grooves ran so deep they seemed destined for non-human tools; the cuts appeared stained with ancient blood still visible in recesses.
Yren approached, almost reverently, tracing symbols with her fingers as though reacquainted with old companions.
"This is where the earliest Weavers trained," she said softly. "Before the Orders twisted sigils into shackles. Before the Splintering War splintered truth. This is where they created thread-bearers."
She turned to face him, her gaze unreadable.
"Touch it. Experience it directly."
Vaern hesitated briefly before placing his palm firmly against the cold altar surface.
The result was swift and unequivocal.
The Ghost Sigil in his arm ignited. Golden light poured into the altar's carvings. Symbols blazed into his vision. Words impressed themselves upon his mind with the ferocity of hammer blows:
Nur‑Vas Ethes. Vorth Mirn.
The Spiral remembers. The Thread lies.
An intense spike of pain flared behind his eyes, racing through his skull and into his consciousness. His vision fractured—multiplying, collapsing, until he was no longer standing in Hearthspire Cradle but somewhere else entirely—somewhen else entirely.
Around him knelt a hundred children in perfect formation, their heads bowed, palms extended. A figure adorned in a woven bone mask glided between them, wielding a blade in one hand and a burning brand in the other. As the figure applied the brand to the first child's palm, flesh hissed and blackened; the child's scream reverberated through the hall in a tone that was deafening, yet horrifyingly silent—etched into memory more than heard.
Vaern knew this—not intellectually, but viscerally. Though centuries removed, he felt this ritual in his marrow, in the blood beneath his skin.
"You are the Weavers now," the masked figure proclaimed. "You are the shuttles upon which the Thread is drawn. You are the hands that shape the Spiral. Remember this. Do not falter."
The collective scream erupted then—raw, primal, and unstoppable.
Vaern returned to awareness in a single motion: kneeling again, hands pressed to his temples, nose bleeding, the snow beneath turned a deep, uncompromising red. Yren supported him—her arm steady, though her face carried a fleeting expression: not pity, but urgent caution.
"Breathe," she said again. "The Cradle doesn't forgive mistakes."
She hauled him upright and led him to the altar. Without hesitation she kicked its base, triggering ancient mechanisms to open a hidden compartment. Inside pulsed a tumor-like mass of black flesh, slick with viscous liquid reflecting the fractured light. This Weeper core was unusually large, its surface carved with faint green runes that glowed intermittently.
"Lesson one," Yren stated—her voice authoritative yet contemplative. "Steal its voice before it steals yours."
The Weeper core throbbed in Vaern's palms like a diseased organ. Its surface slick with fluid that clung like coagulated blood. The runes carved into its flesh cast a sickly green light, making the Spiral motifs etched into the altar walls seem to squirm in unnatural animation. Yren watched with professional intensity, her blade resting across her knees, edge dull yet ominously present.
"You must understand something vital about sigils," she continued, voice steady as if delivering a doctrine. "They are not instruments. They are not blades. They are living contracts—spoken in a language older than civilizations, older than gods. And every contract demands sacrifice."
She gestured to the core, placing it into context. "That is a voice. A Weeper's voice. Stolen. Just like yours may be if you're not vigilant."
Vaern turned the core with care, feeling its warmth seep into his skin. The surface yielded slightly under pressure—as if ripening. He asked softly, half to himself: "How?"
Yren leaned closer, breath frosting between them. "The same way you handle any sigil—you take what is not yours and force it into your will. But understand this: the Spiral never forgets. Every theft demands equal return."
At their combined pressure, the core finally surrendered—it split open.
Pain engulfed him instantly. Not physical pain. A profound searing that dissolved him inwardly.
The training that followed was far from instruction—it was deliberate deconstruction. Yren buried him beneath snow in deep pits, forcing him to suffocate and then use Thread Echo to reverse the process repeatedly. Each rewind cost him breath, then memory. The sigil gradually erased the sensation of breathing itself.
She carved Veresh words into his flesh with rusted needles, each syllable burning like acid as it seared into his skin—a pain distant and immediate all at once.
Frequent hallucinations followed. A child-Vaern appeared at the edges of his vision—throat slit, ribs shattered, small body broken in grotesque ways, each death accompanied by the whisper "You are dying backward." All the while, Serah's ribbon in his pocket frayed further—threads snapping one after another, unraveling identity in small increments.
And always, the book with bone covers lay in his lap at night. Warm. Restless. Veresh script on its pages shifted continually, producing new patterns, new revelations, new nightmares. With courage, Vaern traced a line one night with a bleeding finger and watched the words carve themselves permanently into his memory:
"Those without Thread are not broken. They are the unravelers."
Memory unravelled in response. First his father's face. Then the sound of Serah's laughter. Then the taste of honey-cakes in Drav'nari temples. Each loss struck like blunt force, yet left behind only numb emptiness where pain should have been.
Yren observed him with an unreadable expression, her fingers brushing the bleeding script on his arm. "I told you," she whispered, "Spiral always remembers."
On the tenth day, it returned.
A Weeper Priest emerged from the tree line. Its limbs elongated unnaturally, moving with an eerie grace across frozen terrain. It wore shredded robes fused to its pallid flesh—a grotesque cloak made of itself. The sigil on its chest pulsed sickly—an imperfect mirror of Yren's Kas-Nur mark, its edges dissolving like wet ink.
Yren stiffened. "That is not just a Priest," she said coldly. "That is a failed Weaver. Do not let it speak."
The confrontation was inevitable.
This creature moved with impossible velocity; its fingers carved through air, not in swipes, but as if reality itself bent to its will. Vaern used Threadburst to evade strikes—but each repetition drained something from him: his curiosity vanished first, followed swiftly by his memory of his very first kill. Still, he pressed the blade into the creature's core.
It shrieked. Not with sound, but resonance. Then the core detonated. A wave of corroding flesh and black ichor exploded outward, dissolving bone and spirit in a single moment.
Vaern reappeared in a ruined temple. Not the one in Shiverwake. Another. He stood apart, behind a veil of smoke, watching.
A figure—a woman in a Spiral mask—stood beside him. Her voice permeated his mind directly:
"The last Thread weaves without a hand."
Silence followed.
That night, beside a meager fire, Vaern studied the Ghost Sigil on his arm. It had transformed. Spines now protruded from its spiral pattern—thin, thorn-like extensions that pulsed with faint pain when touched.
Under his skin, new inscriptions glowed:
Unmake to become.
The Spiral hungers.
Yren watched him silently.
"Tomorrow," she said, voice grave, "we hunt a Bone Speaker alive."
Vaern nodded. In his pocket, Serah's ribbon rested. Almost gone. The last strands fell away to ash when he touched it.
He inhaled the bitter air. The wind carried distant echoes—whispered words. In the ruins beneath their feet, the book murmured anew.
The Spiral listened.