The wind at the cliff's edge did not roar.
It whispered.
It slipped cold fingers beneath Elric Veyne's collar, tracing the line of his spine as he stood at the boundary stone with his toes over the drop. The mountain fell away beneath him in a sheer grey plunge, vanishing into a throat of cloud that moved like slow, patient breath. Far below, unseen water thundered against rock, but up here the sound was only a distant murmur, like a memory half-remembered.
"Step back, Elric," Marek said behind him. "You're too close."
Elric did not move. "You brought me here to step forward, didn't you?"
Silence answered first. Then the faint scuff of boots on gravel as the other two shifted their weight. Old instincts told him exactly where they stood without turning: Marek slightly left, Lena just behind his right shoulder, Gesh hovering farther back as if the mere sight of the drop made him sick. Their presence pressed against his skin in more than sound; their Threads hummed faintly in the air, those invisible bonds to their Domains vibrating with unease.
Marek's Thread tugged like steady gravity, a constant pull toward fixed points—north, home, duty. Direction Domain. Reliable, unshakeable. Once, that certainty had comforted Elric. Now it felt like a shackle.
"You're making this harder than it has to be," Marek said.
Elric smiled without humor and finally turned to face them, the gorge now yawning at his back. The sky above looked washed thin, as if the Loom that held all Threads had drawn itself tight and pale to watch.
"How easy did you expect it to be?" he asked.
Marek, broad-shouldered and tired, scar curving from ear to throat. Lena, small and wiry, fingers always half-raised toward sounds only she could catch, her Echo making the air around her taste metallic. Gesh, uneasy as ever, rust and oil clinging to him, his Rust Domain never fully silent.
Four climbed the mountain. Elric understood now that only three planned to walk down.
"You tampered with the records," Lena said. Her voice was soft, but the words were sharp. "The king's memory of the border accords. The council's recollection of the famine relief. That is treason, Elric."
He tilted his head. Names mattered. Hearing his own spoken so flatly made something twist in his chest.
"I corrected them," he said.
"Don't," Marek snapped. "Don't wrap it in better words. You went into their minds."
"And they signed for it," Elric replied. "Consent logged. Protocols followed. You witnessed half those sessions, Marek."
"I witnessed you going beyond what was written."
His Thread stirred at the accusation, running like a taut wire from the base of his skull down his spine and out into the world, connecting him to the memories he had touched. Memory Domain. When he focused, he could feel each mind he'd altered as a faint warmth in the distance, like pinpricks of light in fog.
"You think I don't remember what I signed?" Elric asked quietly.
"That's the problem," Lena said. "You remember everything. And you decided that means you know better than everyone else."
Her Echo shivered through the air: half-heard voices, fragments of old conversations. Somewhere in that haze, Elric heard his own voice from years ago—We follow you. Whatever it costs—spoken by Marek at a campfire. The memory cut more sharply than the mountain wind.
Elric swallowed. "Six years ago, the eastern ridge starved," he said. "In the council archive, it's called 'seasonal crop failure.' A clean phrase. Do you remember what it really was?"
Marek's jaw tightened. "This isn't—"
"Do you?" Elric insisted.
Gesh shifted, the smell of old metal thickening around him. His Domain ate slowly at whatever it touched: hinges, blades, supports. He kept his hands away from weapons for that reason, as if afraid his mere grip might doom them to fail.
"Of course we remember," Gesh muttered. "We were there."
"You saw fields burning from a distance," Elric said. "You heard numbers, lists of dead. I saw the inside of the granaries. I saw how long a child's eyes take to go from hope to empty. I remember the taste of dust in that village well. They asked me to take those images out of the king's mind. To make it easier for him to sleep."
He could still hear the king's request. Make it bearable, Veyne. Make it neat.
"I refused," Elric said. "I gave him every scream, every empty bowl, every body count. I anchored them so he could never forget."
Lena's expression twisted. "You turned him into a living monument to suffering without his understanding," she said. "You didn't give him truth. You flooded him."
"He ordered a war after that," Marek added. "A holy purge of the east. Half those towns don't exist anymore. The refugees you thought you were protecting burned with the rest."
Elric's hands curled into fists. Nails bit into his palms until the sting steadied him.
"I gave him what he had earned the right to see," he said. "I did not choose how he answered it."
"Maybe not," Marek said. "But you pushed. You decided some minds don't deserve forgetting. That your pain makes you the judge of theirs."
The words hurt because they were close to a truth.
He had once whispered to himself in the dark: Someone has to remember or nothing changes. His Thread had hummed approvingly then, as if the Loom itself agreed. Now, on this mountain, that same Thread felt like the rope coiled around his neck.
"You sentenced me before we left the city," Elric said. "Why the climb? Why the sanctified stone, the rites?"
Lena glanced at Marek. Elric caught the flicker instantly. He always saw the smallest movements. His life was built on noticing the moment before a lie, the breath before a confession, the tremor before a breakdown.
Marek looked away toward the horizon. "Because here, the Tangle-Seers say, the Loom is… thinner," he said. "A Thread cut here might be re-tied somewhere else. Or it might unravel entirely. We don't know. The council calls it exile, not execution."
Elric laughed once, short. "Exile is just execution with paperwork."
"Call it what you like," Marek replied. "The vote left few options. Null exile. Mind-splitting. Or this."
"The binding would have severed your Domain from you," Lena said. "You refused it."
"You asked me," Elric said, "to let someone cut away my Memory and leave me hollow. That is not mercy."
"We asked you to stop using people as vessels for your righteousness," Lena shot back. Her voice cracked. "We begged you."
He looked at each of them in turn.
Marek: resolute, but his eyes betrayed old affection. Lena: torn, her Echo catching the tremble in her own words, repeating it back to her a heartbeat later. Gesh: staring at the ground, as if afraid that looking at Elric would make all of this real.
"Do you know what I remember about you?" Elric asked.
"Don't," Gesh whispered.
"You, Marek," Elric said. "Kneeling in the mud outside a burned farmhouse, holding a dead child because no one else could bring themselves to touch her. You would not put her down until we buried her. You, Lena, singing for soldiers who woke screaming, giving them a better night to relive instead of the one they drowned in. You, Gesh, scraping rust off a recruit's sword by hand, long after dark, because you were afraid he'd slip and gut himself before he ever saw battle."
He did not reach to change anything. He let his Thread brush lightly, coaxing their own memories to the surface, sharpening them. Marek flinched as the weight of the dead child returned to his arms. Lena's breath hitched around a ghost of her own lullaby. Gesh's fingers flexed, feeling again the roughness of corroded steel.
"These," Elric said softly, "are the memories I fought to keep. These are the threads I wouldn't let fray. If that is treason, then yes—Elric Veyne is guilty."
Marek swallowed. "You're not on this mountain because of those moments," he said. "You're here because you decided a king's mind, a council's will, the memory of a nation, are yours to carve. You think the Loom made you its knife."
The mountain air thickened. The temple bells halfway down the slope chimed on the breeze—low, distant notes from pilgrims confessing their smaller sins.
Elric stepped back until his heels met empty air. Pebbles tumbled, skittering over the edge before dropping out of sight.
Lena reached out reflexively. "Elric—"
He looked at her hand, then at her face. "You ask me to forget that I remember," he said.
"I ask you to stop hurting people in the name of healing them," she replied. Tears lined her eyelashes, on the verge of falling. "If the Loom wants you somewhere else, it can thread you again. But we can't keep you here. Not like this."
"And if I refuse?" Elric asked.
Marek's gaze hardened. "Then you fall anyway. Bound or unbound, the sentence stands. At least like this, you go as yourself."
Elric exhaled slowly. The body clung to life; his heart hammered against his ribs, sweat dampening the back of his neck. Beneath the fear, a thin seam of calm opened.
"For once," he murmured, mostly to himself, "I will choose not to remember what comes next."
He reached inward.
His Thread thrummed in response, bright and taut, extending from him into countless points below: the king's haunted gaze, a starving woman's last breath, a refugee's whispered thanks, Marek's oath, Lena's song, Gesh's curses. Lives he had touched, histories he had locked into place.
He could try to take it all back—draw every anchor into himself and burn out in a single, searing instant. Instead, Elric loosened his grip.
He let his Thread go.
Not in a clean slice, but in a surrender. Tension snapped outward. Bonds tore free of their anchors in a cascade of breaking sensations. Pain ripped up his spine as memories burst, scattering like embers flung into a night sky.
Marek staggered as old guilt flooded him. Lena cried out, clutching her head as echoes she had long suppressed screamed through her. Gesh fell to his knees, hands over his ears, as though the sound of rust itself had become unbearable.
The mountain seemed to tilt.
Elric's heel found nothing. His weight tipped backward.
For a suspended instant, he hung between sky and stone, arms spreading on instinct. Time stretched. He saw everything with unbearable clarity: the pale scar at Marek's throat, the way Lena's hand closed on empty air, a single fleck of rust drifting from Gesh's cuff, the dark line of the boundary stone against cloud.
Then gravity claimed him.
The cliff face blurred past. The wind tore at his coat, turning his breath into a voiceless gasp. He did not scream. There was no one left he wished to beg.
As he fell, his Thread continued to tear, unraveling into the invisible depths. Each snapped connection sent another jolt of agony through nerves that were already burning. Yet beneath the pain, something else unfurled: silence, where other minds had always crowded. Absence, where constant noise had been.
He had expected darkness.
Instead, a different light opened around him.
Lines of pale radiance stretched in impossible patterns, intersecting and looping, forming a vast lattice that seemed both inside and outside him at once. Threads upon Threads, each humming with its own low vibration. The Loom.
He drifted through it like a speck of ash caught in a web.
One strand brightened ahead of him: thicker, darker at the core, as if dust and cinders had been woven through its brightness. It hung loose, unclaimed, vibrating faintly.
It reached toward the ragged end of what remained of Elric Veyne.
Choice, he thought, or imagined he did. End, or… something else.
He could let himself come apart entirely, his frayed Thread dissolving into the Loom until there was no "Elric" left, only pattern. No memories. No burdens. No names.
The waiting strand pulsed. Not Memory. It thrummed with a different hunger—a sense of emptiness, of the gravity of absence. A Domain tied not to what people remembered, but to what was missing and could be taken.
His broken Thread brushed it.
Light exploded through him, white and searing. For one impossible heartbeat he saw everything at once: the famine's smoke, the council chamber's polished floor, the king's tears, the mountain's edge, his own falling body. Elric Veyne, from start to finish, collapsing into a single compressed moment.
The new Thread coiled around the torn end and knotted.
What he had been did not mend. It burned down to ash. The new Domain wrapped that ash, binding itself to the hollow left behind.
The mountain vanished.
The fall ended without impact. There was no crunch of bone, no final shudder of flesh on stone. The rushing wind cut out as though a door had closed.
When sensation returned, it was to rough, wet stone beneath a cheek that throbbed with a dull ache, and air that smelled of rain on metal, smoke, and unfamiliar spices. Distant voices blurred together above him, the cadence strange, the words almost—but not quite—like those he knew.
He groaned, the sound scraping his dry throat, and opened his eyes.
The sky overhead was not the pale, thin bowl of the mountain. It was a heavy lid of cloud streaked with sickly yellow light, pierced by the black ribs of tall, foreign buildings. Lanterns glowed at their bases in colors he did not recognize. Somewhere, a bell tolled in a pattern he had never heard.
For a moment, he grasped at himself.
Elric, he thought. Elric Vey—
The name fractured like glass dropped on stone. The syllables slipped away, absorbed by the ash-smell coiled in his chest. In the hollow where Memory had once hummed, the new Thread lay waiting, taut and cold, humming with the ache of things missing.
A shadow fell across him.
"Hey," a rough voice said in that almost-familiar tongue. "You alive?"
He turned his head. A young man loomed above him, narrow face, oil-streaked hands, a badge of some unknown guild pinned crookedly to his coat. Suspicion flickered in the stranger's eyes, followed by something like calculation.
The man frowned. "Name?" he asked.
The question hung there, sharp as a blade.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing. No answer rose from the well of who he had been. Elric Veyne was a shape without weight, a sound without owner, a life already falling away into the distance.
The new Thread stirred, whispering of absence and disguise, of what could be taken and what could stay buried. A different syllable surfaced, dark and simple, like a stone breaking the surface of water.
"Zayn," he heard himself say, the word tasting strange and new on his tongue.
The stranger's brow creased. "Zayn… what?"
He hesitated. Somewhere far above, on a mountain that no longer existed for him, a name was carved into stone: Elric Veyne. Traitor. Memory.
Here, the air waited.
"Morel," he said. "Zayn Morel."
The man grunted. "Well, Zayn Morel, you picked a bad place to sleep. Come on, before someone decides you're worth selling."
A hand reached down. The new Domain thrummed, tasting the emptiness around his borrowed name, the lack of history clinging to it. For the first time in a long time, he did not feel the weight of other people's memories pressing on his skin.
Zayn Morel took the offered hand and let himself be pulled to his feet.
Behind his ribs, in the ashes of Elric Veyne's Thread, something cold and merciless began to wake.