The sky wasn't meant for light. Not here. Not in this place that had forgotten warmth. The cold didn't just bite—it had fucking teeth, it had purpose, and it carried the ghosts of every fool who ever thought they could stand up to it. You didn't feel it in your skin here. You felt it deep. In your bones. In the empty spaces between them. As if winter itself had nailed its fingers between your ribs and staked a claim on your marrow.
Above, the sky stretched like a bruise that had spent a week turning, that ugly yellow‑purple you get when something bruises wrong and starts aching when you move it. Sunlight didn't shine here. It bled. Through those broken clouds in weak grey streaks. As if even the sun had given up trying. Whatever made it through illuminated without a single ounce of warmth. It revealed. It didn't care.
The boy stood by the pit's edge. His breath came out in shallow puffs that hovered like ghosts—like unfinished words he couldn't bring himself to say. This wasn't a grave dug with intention. It was a gash ripped into the earth by hands so numb they'd forgotten why they bled. Nails scratched and tore at frozen dirt until they fell away. The hole's edge was jagged and crooked. The bottom soaked dark—maybe old blood, maybe the earth itself weeping fresh tears.
Skullwood trees ringed the edge like dead sentries. Their trunks were bone‑white and peeling in broad strips, like skin sloughing off a corpse. Their roots didn't go deep. They clawed upward—gnarled fingers trying to reach a sky that stopped answering long ago. The wind tasted of rusted metal and decayed flesh. Of old memories festering instead of fading.
And standing at the center of it all was Yren.
She wasn't tall. She wasn't broad. But presence has nothing to do with size. It's about occupying space without apology. Yren's space felt like a blade's edge—sharp certainty. Her cloak was stitched from pelts ripped off things that tried to end her. It hung heavy with old blood stains. The greatsword across her back wasn't a tool. It was the exclamation point at the end of everything her body said without words. Her face gave nothing. As unreadable as the ancient standing stones dotting this cursed land.
"Again," she said.
Not a suggestion. Not a command. Just the next inevitable beat in the dance they'd rehearsed until it crushed him inside.
The boy—he was still just a boy, despite the hollows under his eyes and the scars across his hands—stepped forward. The bone knife in his hand felt alien. Older than the pit. Older than the trees. Maybe older than the Spiral. Yren gave it to him one morning like she was returning something he lost before he even knew it belonged to him.
He moved.
She shattered him.
It wasn't fair. It wasn't even close. Her parry came before he'd fully committed. A twist of her wrist flipped his whole body against him. The flat of her blade slammed into his shoulder with a crack that echoed off the skullwood like a gunshot. Pain exploded, bright and raw, radiating down his arm. He didn't scream. Pain was a language now. One he was learning fluently.
Yren dipped her chin once. "Better. Still too polite."
That's how she trained him. Not drills, not posture. She carved instincts into his flesh with blunt trauma. She threw him into trees to teach balance. Made him fight blindfolded until he could hear a footstep in the snow. Fed him moss so bitter it nearly choked him. It kept him standing long after others would have fallen.
She wasn't forging a soldier.
She was forging a wound.
A constant ache where a boy once believed things mattered. Where memories once landed softly, now every moment throbbed in empty spaces he couldn't fill.
One night, the fire guttered low and blue—kasveth bark burning with an eerie glow—smoke twisting into grotesque shapes. Shapes that might have been dancing. Or might have been writhing in pain.
"Fight with memory," Yren said, tossing a ragged stick in. Flames surged. In the flicker he thought he saw a face. His face, younger—softer. "Not with form. Find the thing that hurts. Swing with it."
Ash floated down into his eyes. "That's how you fight?"
She didn't speak. Her words came in scars.
She rolled up her sleeve and showed him Kas‑Nur—The Ash That Remembers—burned into her forearm. Then she plunged her hand into the fire itself.
Not above. Into it.
The flames didn't sear her. They wrapped around her fingers, gentle, like affectionate cats licking at skin instead of claws. And in that moment he saw her. The real her. Not the hardened survivor. A girl, soot‑stained and trembling, screaming into smoke where a corpse slumped at her feet—too small to need a name.
She withdrew her hand. The vision vanished.
"That's how I fight."
After that, days bled into each other. Mornings were bruises and blinding. Afternoons were pain made solid. Evenings were firelight and truth sharpened to a point. Nights were spiral‑dreams. Mirrors breaking. A voice whispering his name through ice and ruin. Sometimes it sounded like Serah. Sometimes like something much older.
He didn't know if Serah was alive anymore. But he knew what haunted him wasn't her absence.
It was his.
The boy who once believed in kindness. In names. In silence as comfort rather than a cell.
Yren spoke more. Not kindly. Not sweetly. But honest. In a world that prized silence over sincerity, honesty was a rare gift.
"You're still in Drav'nar," she said one afternoon beneath trees weeping icicles. "Just not the version they put on maps."
Around them half‑buried monuments carved in Veresh script peeked from snow. One—an unbroken spiral cleaved in half. Another—a smooth, eyeless face, buried up to the brow, as if drowning in earth.
"This is the Sundered Crownlands," Yren said, kicking aside drift to expose more of the eyeless face. "Where the Orders buried what they couldn't kill."
"The Seers don't come here?" he asked.
She burst out laughing. Harsh and cruel. "They don't have to. This land already gave up."
Her boot struck a broken granite slab. Snow sheared away, rough stone revealed. "That was the first Sermon site. Before the Compact. Before the Spiral bent to obedience."
That night he opened the book again.
Blank pages lay heavy in his lap until his fingers brushed the bone‑leather spiral on its cover. Then the ink shimmered. Words rose through the parchment as if drawn from the deep.
Memory is not what was. It is what survives.
He whispered it.
The Ghost Sigil flared—pale gold, spiraled like an unanswered question beneath his skin.
Across the fire, Yren snapped the book shut.
"Stop."
"But—"
"Some pages aren't for now."
The fire waned, sinking to a lazy glow that agreed.
Morning brought a new lesson.
Yren carved a sigil into the snow with her knife tip. A twisted glyph pulsed faint red even in daylight.
Kelor‑Seth. The Binding Hunger. A sigil from Ravarneth, where they said people ate memories themselves just to stay sane.
The snow blackened. It hissed.
"This is power," she said. "But every sigil is a scar. A kingdom's sorry for still breathing."
He stared at the burning snow. "Drav'nar silences emotion because it's strong, yeah?"
"No," Yren said, quieter than the sigil glow. "Because once, emotion couldn't stop bleeding."
"And me?"
She stared, firelight flickering across her eyes.
"You're not a land," she finally said. "You're the infection they ignored."
That night she summoned a simulacra from old sigils and older guilt. It shimmered, hollow-eyed and bone-laced, shifting in smoky mirages.
"Defeat it," she said. "Without killing it."
He fought. Not to win. To prove he still fucking existed. That exile hadn't unmade him.
He didn't stab the creature. He pressed the knife hilt into its chest instead of blade. Not mercy. Not pity. Control.
It collapsed into a pile of snow and shadow.
No praise from her. But she handed him a cloak—fur-lined, just his size. No words needed.
Later, by firelight, the book resting on his lap, new cloak around his shoulders, he whispered into dark:
"Serah."
What he missed wasn't her. Not really.
It was the boy who knew her. The one who believed in kindness. In names. In silence as freedom.
He stared at the spiral on his arm—faded gold against skin sharpened thin—and spoke a word no one owned:
"Vaern."
Somewhere beneath the ice, in a place that remembered more than it forgave, something answered.
"Drav'nar took my name."
Yren's voice came from the shadows, softer than the fire crackling:
"But the Spiral hasn't."