Cherreads

Chapter 2 - A Smile Left Behind

"They said she smiled. I remember her silence louder than that."— Anonymous exile log, carved into the ribs of the Maw-Beast, Frost Veil. Year 784, Post-Spiral Collapse.

The cold wasn't cruel.

It was honest. Unforgiving in a way the Hollow never could be, because the Hollow lied with ceremony. But the cold—no, the cold didn't beg for understanding or permission. It simply existed, unmoved, unfolding in silence, in stillness, in truths that wrapped around him like a memory etched into marrow.

They didn't speak when they left him. Didn't mark the moment with a verdict, didn't cast him from the city like a spectacle. They walked him to the Wastes, past the last walls of Virelen Hollow, where the snow was already knee-deep and whispering.

No guards. No chains. Just exile by absence.

The Spiral mark on his scroll had not been scratched or stamped void.

It had been burned through. So deeply that the fiber curled like flesh recoiling from a brand. As if the Spiral itself refused to remember him. As if the paper screamed.

He walked.

Barefoot.

Through snow that didn't care what name he used to have—because he no longer had one. No sigil. No tether. Just the sound of frost chewing his ankles and wind slicing across cracked lips.

The Hollow still burned behind his eyes, its memory more persistent than flame, more insidious than grief. Even severed, it clung. And inside that burn, inside the wound that exile carved into his breath—

Serah.

Not her voice. She'd never given that freely. Not even her smile. That was something the other children whispered about, as if it had happened once.

He didn't remember a smile.

He remembered the way she'd sat beside him in the Thread Recital chamber, her fingers brushing his once, gently, without panic or shame. The way her knees had aligned with his like magnets pulled not by affection, but necessity. A proximity that said, I see what you aren't allowed to be.

She didn't speak.

She didn't have to.

Her silence wasn't fear.

It was a sanctuary. Like she was carrying something sacred inside her—something that would unravel if given voice.

They said she smiled.

He remembered her stillness.

And the day they took her—oh, gods, the day they took her—there had been no blood, no noise, no defiance. Just her eyes, flicking once toward the snow, not in panic but in goodbye. A choice wrapped in resignation. Like she had seen the thread unraveling long before he did.

And maybe she had.

She'd traced his palm once—he remembered now. Her nail had dragged a faint spiral across the skin, not playful, not romantic. Intentional. Like she was drawing a map she knew he would one day need.

That was the worst part.

Not the cold.

Not the exile.

The knowledge that she'd known. And said nothing.

He didn't stop walking until his feet turned red and raw, until his heel split and bled into the snow, until the skin between his toes broke open like old bark and the wind began to whisper in words his ears didn't know.

When he blinked, his lashes froze together.

Not from snow.

From tears.

He found the Frost Veil just before nightfall.

Or maybe the Veil found him.

A land uncharted by maps, but described in footnotes and buried Veresh sermons—where memory went to die, and thoughts too dangerous to say were swallowed by ice and silence.

He sought shelter beneath the ribs of a long-dead war-beast. The bones arched like the husk of a cathedral collapsed in prayer, spires reaching upward in refusal of heaven. The wind didn't howl here. It hummed. Low, guttural. Like breath from the throat of something dreaming of its own extinction.

Above him, the auroras danced—not in color, but in wounds. They shimmered in hues that didn't exist in the Hollow. Colors that felt like grief and tasted like iron. Like forgotten names made visible again.

He stared until his vision blurred.

And in the snow, with fingers stiff and trembling, he traced a name.

Once. Then again.

Serah.

Until the frost bit back. Until the pain reminded him that he still had skin.

That night, he didn't dream of home.

He didn't dream of warmth.

He dreamt of something old.

Emotion—but not his. A scream without a throat. A face made of static. A feeling shaped like a blade pressed flat against the soul. Something ancient. Something broken. Something hungry.

In the dream, a voice whispered.

Not in the Hollow tongue.

In Veresh.

"Velk-Eln Thir."

The mind that remembers hollow.

His back itched.

Not a rash. Not pain. Something deeper. Beneath the skin. Behind the spine.

Like his body was a lock.

And something was fumbling for the key.

But when he woke—

No sigil.

Just blood on his heel.

Just wind.

And something else.

Around his wrist—a ribbon.

Grey. Frayed. Tied in a careful knot. Weather-worn and quiet in its presence.

The same kind Serah had worn in her hair since before he knew how to speak.

He didn't remember tying it.

But she had.

Before the silence. Before exile. Before the frost.

He held it in his hand like a breath he wasn't ready to let go.

The Frost Veil wasn't empty.

Shadows moved beyond the hills.

Not always men. Not always beasts.

Some were echoes—fractured things, warped by the truths they tried to forget. Others were worse.

That night, beneath the ribs of the beast-cathedral, he saw one.

A figure.

Neither tall nor short. Neither there nor absent. It glided—not walking, not floating. Just… movement. As if the world made space for it by folding in.

Its robe was ash. Its threads glowed faintly, like bone struck by moonlight. Its face—a mirror.

But cracked.

And when he looked at it, he saw himself. Bent wrong. Not distorted—wounded. His own reflection blinked back in silence, mouth open, bleeding without source.

He didn't run. Didn't scream.

Didn't breathe.

The cold around the figure shifted—dense, mournful, like grief that had found its shape.

When it passed, the snow beneath it smoldered.

And left behind… a Spiral.

Cracked through the center.

Like something had broken truth, and left the pieces behind on purpose.

It spoke.

Once.

Two lines, like scripture:

"For the one outside the thread.""Not unchosen. Unrevealed."

And then it vanished.

He stared into the empty space it left behind, long after the auroras above had twisted into warning sigils, long after the warmth had retreated from his limbs again, long after even memory seemed reluctant to stay.

The Hollow had taken his voice.

His name.

His sigil.

His warmth.

But not everything.

Not yet.

And somewhere in the back of his skull, under the aurora-lit dark, a whisper returned—coiling in his spine like a promise that could not be erased:

"The thread doesn't end. It frays."

And he?

He was already unraveling.

More Chapters