The midwives say all children are born with threads—
one for laughter,
one for tears,
one for the name they'll grow into.
They lie.
Threads are noosed before birth. The Spiral tightens them yearly until even breath obeys.
Except his.
His were severed in the womb by something older than Drav'nar.
This is why the Mirror recoils.
This is why frost bites his shadow.
This is why the Spiral, which tolerates no defiance, has not yet dared kill him.
In Drav'nar, even the wind had been broken.
It didn't howl through alleys or scream between copper towers. It slid—muzzled—between stone ribs, like the sky itself had been whipped into obedience.
Laughter wasn't banned.
Just forgotten.
Grief came with a script. Joy? That was the gravest heresy.
Drav'nar Solmir Thren wasn't dead.
It was… cauterized.
Once, it had bled music and art. Now, it burned inward. Fire wasn't warmth anymore—it was discipline. Every home kept an Ember of Restraint: a flickering orange flame mounted above a cradle, glowing soft and cruel like an eye that never blinked.
Thirty days after birth began the Quieting.
Moss ripped from the Hollow's living walls gave a soundless scream. Gatherers' hands left the stone bloodless but shaking, knuckles white as sun‑bleached bone. The moss pulsed when severed, eager for mouths to plug.
Swaddled infants wore the damp shroud. Whimpers were swallowed whole. Spiral bruises faded from most skins by dusk.
His didn't.
The marks blackened like frostbitten fruit, and when the caretakers peeled the fibers away, they found his flesh had grown tiny rootlets through the weave. The roots bled ink—the color of a sky just before lightning. The attendants recoiled; one whispered drowning, another smothering. The High Seer only said, "The Spiral wants him to see what comes next."
Another infant stayed mute—not disciplined, merely dead. Moss had suffocated her. The mother's sentence: wear the child's moss as a scarf for a year, its slow heartbeat brushing her throat.
Stone dormitories echoed with breath but never voice. A Ration Ledger tallied every reported infraction. Children tattled for crumbs; points became supper. The boy owned no points. Watchers' eyes slid over him like he was the gap between letters in a censored scroll.
Lessons began with Thread Discipline. Tutors anointed tongues with single drops of vein‑milk; whispers became shrieks, a training in pain. The milk beaded on his tongue and rolled away like mercury.
The spoon‑clatter rule was absolute. When Jaren's utensil rang, silence froze the hall. The Watcher pointed—half rations gone. The boy rose, crossed the dining floor, and set his spoon into the gruel without a sound. The Watcher's eyes slid across him as if he were mist. Neither child ate. But something new lodged in the stillness: some silences can cut.
Serah walked three paces behind her archivist father, sleeves masking crescents cut into her own wrists—tiny spirals carved to feel. She hoarded condemned scrolls—illicit festivals, long‑dead dances.
She noticed the boy, the one the world's gaze slipped from. In the bathhouse steam she glimpsed the moss‑roots scarring his arms. Her lips parted slightly. He tilted his head, a question. That night he left a pumice stone at her bedside. Not to erase her scars—to deepen them, if she chose.
She stole seconds for him, pressing crusts of bread between her palms so warmth lingered. The Watchers missed the exchange. The Spiral noted it. In the Archives that night, a single scroll combusted—its ashes spelled Serah for three breaths before dissolving.
The night before Frostwell, he woke to the hallway's hush. At the threshold, only a single lilac petal remained—already crumbling to ash. The petal dissolved into his palm, leaving a stain like a bruise. It smelled of lilacs—and beneath that, iron.
At twelve they descended to the Spiral Mirror.
Children were submerged in glowing vein‑milk baths. Those who thrashed were held until the fluid "calmed" them—one drowned; the Seers called it a mercy.
Vein‑milk clung to skin and sang of potential. On him it curdled, clotting grey and slithering off his body in revulsion.
Zarien received Clarity—silver eyes, escorted away to scribe light.
Dreia bore Weight. The glyph crushed his voicebox; he crawled, sent to transcribe screams.
Serah bloomed lilac petals over her heart; a Seer's stare pinned her.
When his turn came, the Mirror's surface rippled. Light bent away. The youngest Seer reached out; her hand sank through his sternum into a freezing void. She wept without sound.
The Mirror's hunger wasn't passive. It licked at the air when he stepped close, its surface forming shapes—a hand, a mouth, a spiral with a slash through it.
"No thread," the lead Seer declared.
The Mirror rippled again—not rejection. Hunger. Something waiting. Something cut.
Before exile came cleansing: pumice, chanting, "Unmarked, Unmade." Their hands bled; his skin refused. It was the stone that unraveled, powdering beneath their grit.
Frostwell was built over the shard of a shattered sigil‑stone—the wound of a forgotten rebellion. Its walls devoured echoes.
Hours—or days—into the dark, he whispered, "Serah." The stone remembered that name.
A fissure broke open. Black not‑liquid seeped—threads, severed and writhing. They tasted his blood and rearranged into a single Veresh word: KASIR.
The threads didn't just writhe—they sang. A sound like a blade dragged across glass.
Salt crusted his lips. Not sweat—memory. The Spiral hadn't erased it all.
Drav'nar owned no seas. But distant waves rolled in his ribs and the Spiral screamed.
Frostwell was not a prison.
It was a wound.
And wounds remember.
The Mirror didn't just reject him—it watched as he left, its surface trembling like a hound straining its leash.
At dawn Watchers escorted him beyond the gates. One averted his eyes as if granting permission.
No trial. No flame. Only silence—and the distant, salt-tinged whisper of something even the Spiral couldn't erase.
Not punishment.
A beginning.
He didn't cry when born.
But the silence left scars—
Not on him.
On the world.
And worlds, once scarred,
learn to scream back.