The wind came down from the high cliffs like a dying breath—slow, bitter, and warm when it should not have been. It scraped across the valley's narrow bones, through withered fields and rot-skinned root beds, and finally reached the half-buried village of Dredhen Hollow, where the air always smelled of ash and the prayers went unanswered.
Inside a hut that leaned like it had been pushed by some god's careless hand, a woman screamed.
Her name was Alaeth, and she was too small for the child inside her.
The hut was low and lightless, built from scavenged stone and sagging marrowwood. An iron bowl of burning herbs cast shadows that danced like teeth across the walls. The village midwife, old Cressa, crouched between Alaeth's legs, hands slick with blood and fear. She muttered charms under her breath—not to any god that would claim them, but to the old things that lived in the ground and never forgot the dead.
The child came out slowly, wrapped in cord and red and silence. It did not cry.
"Turn him over," Cressa whispered. Her voice was hollow, as if she had already guessed something and didn't want it named.
Alaeth wept. Not from pain anymore. Something else. Something deep, like an old grief rising too soon.
The baby opened his eyes.
They were the wrong color.
Newborns should have clouded eyes, washed in gray. This child's were black—not like pitch, but like glass, deep enough to fall into.
And across his spine, from shoulder to hip, ran a scar. Pale as bone, puckered like an old burn. It pulsed once, faintly, under the hearthlight.
Cressa hissed and wrapped the boy in a sun-bleached shroud before Alaeth could see. She whispered a verse she hadn't said since the war: a rhyme to keep old things sleeping.
"Give him to me," Alaeth rasped, reaching. "Let me see him."
Cressa hesitated.
Then, without a word, she laid the child on the woman's chest. Alaeth gasped at his warmth, his stillness. He did not cry. He only stared, as if already listening.
"What's his name?" Cressa asked.
Alaeth touched her son's face. Her fingers trembled like dry leaves.
"Caelen," she said. "It means silence, where I was born."
Dredhen Hollow did not mark birthdays.
Children were counted by winters survived, not years lived. Caelen's first was marked by sickness—the Red Lung came that season, curling through the valley like smoke. Nine died. His mother did not. But she never fully recovered.
By age three, he wandered.
By four, he stopped speaking in his sleep.
By five, the others stopped calling him by name.
They said he had no father.
Alaeth never spoke of him. The only story she told, when she drank too much bonewine, was that a man in black robes had come from the mountains—no face, no shadow. He left her a coin shaped like an eye and a belly full of dreams.
Most villagers believed he was an escaped Fleshbound, one of the old war-mages who had sewn divine relics into their bodies. Others said he was a devil.
Caelen learned early not to ask.
But he did wander. Always near the same place: the godscar.
The godscar was a hollow in the land, carved into the base of the eastern cliffs. Once, a war-shrine stood there, dedicated to Ethren-Ka, god of blood rites and sacred decay. He fell in the last age, devoured by his own priests or torn apart by rival gods—no one agreed. But his shrine remained.
Only the bones of it now.
Black stone, cracked and folded like the earth had flinched. Thorned statues, weathered faceless. A single archway that led into the mountain's heart, half-buried by time.
The villagers warned their children to stay away.
Caelen never listened.
He was drawn to it. Not out of rebellion, but because it felt quiet. Like the wind didn't reach there. Like the world forgot to press so hard against his skin.
He didn't understand what the feeling meant. Only that he felt it most strongly when he placed his palm against the archway's stone.
It was warm.
Once, he stayed too long. Came back with a nosebleed. Another time, he whispered something in his sleep: a name no one knew, in a tongue Alaeth hadn't heard since the old days.
She began to pray again after that. Soft, cracked prayers to gods who had no temples left.
Caelen turned six in silence.
The village gave him no offerings. No firelight circle. Cressa left a marrow-root on the steps of his home—a small mercy. Alaeth baked bread and cut her hand on the crust. She said it was a sign.
That night, Caelen wandered again.
The moon was low and red, like an open wound.
He walked barefoot through the frost-blighted field, past the well, past the sleeping goats with their milky blind eyes, and down the path behind the village.
The godscar loomed ahead, cloaked in mist.
Something was waiting there.
Not someone. Something.
The path to the godscar twisted through ashgrass and bramble, half-swallowed by the creeping wilds. Once, a line of stone markers had bordered the trail, carved with protective glyphs. Now they stood broken—weathered to nubs or blackened by old fire. One still bore a name, barely legible: Orsell the Bound-Eye, Saint of Sacrificial Silence.
Caelen touched it as he passed.
The moss felt warm.
The moonlight did not reach the mouth of the shrine. Only the red fungus did—dimly bioluminescent, clinging to cracks in the black stone, pulsing faintly like heartbeats.
Caelen stopped just outside the archway. The mist coiled around his ankles.
It felt like the edge of a thought.
Like something trying to remember him.
He knelt.
The stone beneath him was too smooth. It pulsed gently with his breath.
His hand reached forward, instinct before understanding. He laid it against the broken arch.
The warmth was there again. But stronger. Intentional.
And then—
A sound.
Not in his ears. In his ribs.
A vibration. A wordless hum, older than the tongue his mother spoke. Older than any name carved into stone.
Caelen shivered.
He did not understand, but he felt it. Like a door unlocking behind his eyes.
He pulled his hand away and whispered, "I hear you."
He didn't know why he said it.
He only knew he was no longer alone.
Back in the village, Alaeth sat awake beside a guttering hearth, twisting her hands into the fraying edge of her shawl. She had not slept. Not since the scar pulsed again.
She had felt it in her own spine, like ice under skin.
He had gone to the shrine. She knew it.
And worse—it had answered.
There were stories, older than the Empire, about children like this. Born during withering seasons. Touched by the breath of buried gods. Destined to speak things no one else remembered.
Most were taken. Or killed. Or both.
She would not let them take her son.
Alaeth opened the drawer beneath the hearth and pulled out the relic.
It was small. Wrapped in cloth, oiled daily to prevent rot. A piece of something long dead: a vertebra, smooth and darkened by time. A relic of Ethren-Ka, stolen before the shrine fell.
She had sworn never to use it. Only to keep it safe.
But tonight, her hands unwrapped it.
The bone whispered against her palm like silk drawn over glass.
"Keep him hidden," she murmured. "Keep him quiet. Let him be a child a little longer."
The relic did not speak. But it listened. She felt that much.
Caelen returned before dawn, barefoot and shivering.
He did not speak as he crawled into the bed beside her. He only clutched at her hand—grasping it not like a child seeking comfort, but like someone who had seen something vast and needed an anchor.
Alaeth said nothing.
She only watched the scar across his back pulse once before it went still again.
The days that followed were colder.
Frost crept down from the cliffs early that year. Goats birthed still-kids. The root harvest bled black sap.
No one blamed Caelen.
But they stopped speaking when he passed.
Old Harun, who'd once taught him to carve horn-needles, crossed himself now and spat in the dirt after saying Caelen's name. Mira, who used to braid his hair, wouldn't meet his eyes.
Even Cressa, who had midwifed his birth, stopped waving when she passed their hut. She left no more marrow-root.
And Caelen—who once wandered freely—began to sit in the dark beside the hearth, quietly drawing shapes in the ash with a broken bit of charcoal.
He drew the arch.
He drew the red light.
He drew eyes.
Always three.
One open. One closed. One weeping
One morning, a rider came to Dredhen Hollow.
He wore the black and brass of the Ashmouth Concord—a herald's mask of polished bone, his cloak heavy with the stink of road and ritual. His steed was lean, fire-eyed, half-starved.
He spoke little.
Only left a scroll with the headman. Sealed with wax shaped like a broken sun.
A census. And a warning.
The Concord was sending surveyors into the valley. Old shrines were being reclaimed. Unauthorized relics would be confiscated. Those sheltering forbidden bloodlines would be cleansed.
Alaeth read the scroll twice. Then she burned it.
She packed a satchel. Rootbread. Saltwater. A skin of fermented goatmilk. A rusted blade.
"Where are we going?" Caelen asked.
She paused.
Then smiled—softly, falsely.
"To the cliffs. For stories."
They left before moonrise.
Behind them, the village grew smaller—until it looked like a wound in the earth.
They climbed the old goat path, skirting the edge of the eastern cliffs. No trail markers guided them here—only weather-beaten stone and roots that twisted like fingers through the frost-choked soil. Alaeth moved slow, wrapped in two cloaks, her breath sharp in the cold. Caelen stayed close, quiet.
Below them, the village grew smaller, swallowed by mist. No one followed. No one would.
By the time the sun bled into the mountains, they reached the narrow shelf of rock that overlooked the godscar.
Here, the cliffs hollowed inward, forming a dark pocket in the mountain's side. The broken shrine loomed beneath them—archway crumbled, altar buried beneath root and stone. Black fungus clung to the walls, its glow just faint enough to draw the eye, like a whisper in the corner of vision.
Caelen sat on the edge and looked down.
"You used to come here," Alaeth said. Her voice was softer than wind. "Before you could speak. Before you could understand."
He nodded. "It's not scary."
"No," she said. "It isn't. That's the danger."
She sat beside him, pulled the satchel into her lap. For a long time, she didn't speak. The wind hissed against the cliffside, stirring loose grains of dust and memory.
"When I was a girl," she said at last, "they used to say Ethren-Ka never died. That he folded his flesh into the earth, into the stone, into the bones of the faithful."
She unwrapped the relic. The vertebra sat in her palm like a question.
"After the purge, the gods were supposed to be gone. But I could still feel him. I think part of me still believes he's… watching."
Caelen looked at the bone. Then at her.
"Is it him?" he asked.
"I don't know. But it listens."
She turned it slowly in her hand, eyes distant.
"When you were born, the stone near the hearth cracked. The fire went out. And something in the afterbirth wasn't… human."
Caelen didn't flinch.
"What did you do with it?"
"I burned it. I buried the ashes. But the mark stayed on you."
He touched the scar on his back, silent.
"I tried to hide you," Alaeth whispered. "Tried to pray it away. But some things don't want to be hidden."
The relic pulsed—soft, like a heartbeat—but neither of them reacted. They simply watched the shrine below as dusk deepened into blood-colored twilight.
Then Caelen turned his head.
"There's something down there."
She stiffened. "You've been?"
He nodded. "It talks without words. It listens when I sleep."
Alaeth's hand gripped the relic tighter.
"I wanted to give you a chance," she said. "To grow up without this. To just be my son."
"I am," he said. His voice was calm.
"No," she said. "You're something else too."
Below, in the bones of the ruined shrine, something shifted.
A shadow passed behind the archway. Not fast. Not sudden. Just there, where nothing had been a moment before.
Alaeth froze. The relic in her hand grew cold.
Caelen stood.
He took three slow steps toward the edge, his silhouette thin against the fire-washed sky.
The thing below turned its head—though it had no eyes, no face. Only a long, flensed body, and the memory of hands.
It did not move.
Neither did Caelen.
Then—quiet as a breath—the scar across his back split open.
Not blood. Not pain.
Just light. Faint and golden, like something forgotten waking beneath skin.
The thing below bowed.
Caelen blinked once, slowly.
"I know your name," he whispered.
Behind him, Alaeth sobbed once into her hand. Quiet. Raw.
"Caelen," she said.
He did not turn.
"I don't think that's my name anymore."