The wind had changed.
It no longer whispered along the cliffs like breath—it rasped. Sharp, granular, like stone grinding against bone. Caelen felt it in the hollow of his chest, like the beat of a heart that didn't belong to him.
He and Alaeth made their way down the slope, picking carefully along the fractured ridgeline. The earth beneath their feet was loose and pale, stained with rust where iron veins ran close to the surface. It felt old—not ancient in time, but in use. Worn down, like even the wind had forgotten how to shape it.
Neither of them spoke.
The shrine behind them had gone quiet again. No more shapes in the dark. No light beneath Caelen's skin. But the scar still tingled, low and rhythmic, like a breath trying to sync with his own.
Alaeth glanced at him more than once as they walked.
Not like a mother watching her child.
Like a woman watching the edge of a blade.
They stopped at midday to drink water from a cracked horn flask. The valley below them was vast and blighted—bruised hills, frost-choked ravines, old growth forests turned skeletal by plague or flame. What crops remained grew in gnarled clutches around shallow basins, and the only movement came from distant flocks of ashbirds, scavengers that followed the Concord's marches.
Caelen sat on a jagged outcrop overlooking it all. His legs dangled over nothing. Alaeth sat behind him, cross-legged, hands trembling slightly as she unwrapped a piece of flatbread and offered half.
He didn't eat. He only asked, "Where does the red wind come from?"
Alaeth blinked, startled. "What do you mean?"
"I hear it. In the trees." He pointed to the forest far below. "It sounds like… singing. But wrong."
She hesitated. "It's not wind."
"What is it?"
"A place you don't go."
That was all she said.
But her hand moved—unconscious—and pressed the relic beneath her cloak.
They descended through the broken woods by dusk. The trees here were twisted and wrong, bark stretched too tight like the skin of something dead. Amber sap beaded from the knots and dried into brittle flakes that hummed faintly when crushed underfoot.
Caelen watched them as they passed. He felt them watching back.
They walked until the light failed entirely, and the stars came out sharp and unfamiliar. They were different here—no longer framed by the smoke-halo that forever hung over Dredhen Hollow. The sky looked clean. Hungry.
Alaeth stumbled once.
Caelen caught her.
Her skin felt too hot.
"I'm fine," she said, but her breath shook. "Just tired."
There was a shadow in her eyes that hadn't been there before.
By nightfall, they found a place to rest: a collapsed watchpost half-devoured by vines and blackroot. The outer wall had crumbled into rubble, but the inner vault still stood—a circular chamber with a sunken floor and rusted hooks embedded in the stone.
Old military, once Concord maybe. But older symbols had been etched beneath—gods-markings, long scrubbed, but not erased.
Caelen traced one with his finger. A spiral. Centered around a single eye.
"It's watching," he said.
Alaeth turned sharply. "What?"
"The stone. It's not dead."
She stared at him for a long time. Then she sat against the far wall, legs curled beneath her, and didn't answer.
Caelen lay down, but didn't sleep.
There were voices—not outside. Not even in his ears.
Inside.
Below thought.
Whispers layered like old skin peeling:
"He will open it—"
"One of three, one of none—"
"Born in the scar, borne to the hunger."
He closed his eyes.
And saw a door.
Not wood. Not iron. Not stone.
Flesh.
Bound with thornwire, stitched with gold thread. A door pulsing with warmth, sealed by something deeper than lock or key.
He reached for it—
And woke with blood in his mouth.
Alaeth was already standing.
Someone was outside.
Boots in the brush. A low murmur of breath.
Caelen stayed down. Listened.
The figure stepped into the vault's mouth. The firelight caught a face—or what was left of one. A man, yes, but ruined. Half his skull covered in waxed wrappings. One eye weeping dark pus. His hair was long, matted, bound with bones. He wore a cloak of graythorn, sewn with thin slivers of ivory and… skin. Human, by the stretch of it. Tanned, dried, marked with ink.
Alaeth moved between him and Caelen.
"We're passing through," she said, steady.
The man's voice came slow. Deliberate.
"Passing where no path runs."
"We're looking for the old road to Kareth."
"You've already stepped off the road."
Caelen felt the man looking at him.
Not with malice.
With recognition.
"What is he?" the man asked.
Alaeth didn't answer.
The man stepped closer. In one hand he held a staff tipped with brass; in the other, a charm of dried tongues bound with thread.
He spoke again. Lower this time.
"I was of the Mourning Weave, once. We kept the Names. Sewed the bloodlines. Tended the sleeping ones."
He knelt, laid his staff flat before him.
"I dreamed this boy's face. Long ago. In a tower of teeth, under a sky made of mouths. He stood before the Veil and did not blink."
Alaeth stepped back. Her voice cracked. "Leave."
But the man's eyes weren't on her.
Caelen rose.
He didn't speak.
The man reached into his cloak, drew out a charcoal nub and a flat rock. He scribbled something—fast, furious—and turned it to show them.
A symbol. Three eyes. One open, one closed, one weeping.
The same he had drawn in ash for weeks.
Caelen's breath caught.
The man smiled. "He remembers."
The Mourning Weave man crouched in the ruin's half-light, drawing symbols with shaking hands. The rock in his lap glowed faintly, though no fire touched it.
Alaeth stepped closer, shielding Caelen behind her. "Where did you see that mark?"
The man didn't look up. "In the White Sleep. The Old Dream. Where flesh remembers itself."
Caelen watched the charcoal flake and curl as he drew. The same three-eyed sigil again and again—one open, one closed, one weeping. It wasn't perfect. His hand shook too much. But the shape felt true. Like something beneath Caelen's skin responded to it.
"I dreamed of your son before I lost my voice," the man murmured. "Before I bound my tongue in wax to keep the Veil from listening."
Alaeth's mouth hardened. "You bound yourself?"
He looked up at last.
His left eye was gone—burned out. The socket was filled with coiled wire and wax. "To stop myself from saying his name."
Alaeth flinched.
The man turned to Caelen. "Do you dream of the Door?"
Caelen nodded.
"What lies beyond it?"
"I don't know."
The man smiled. "You will."
Alaeth moved between them again. "We need shelter. Not riddles."
"There's no shelter," the man said. "Not from what follows you. Not from what grows in him."
He touched his staff. Not in threat—ritual.
"I can bless him. Delay it. Burn the edge off the hunger."
"No," Alaeth said, stepping back.
"He'll need a mark," the man said. "If he's to survive the Ashmouth. If he's to pass through the Dead Well."
That stopped her.
She looked like someone hit from inside.
"You know that name," the man said, voice gentler. "You were meant to take him there."
Caelen watched his mother's knuckles whiten. Her face went still.
"You were meant to bind him to the Weeping Gate."
Silence fell.
Only the fire cracked, low and wet. Outside, the wind passed through the trees like breath held too long.
Alaeth lowered her voice. "You said you were Weave once. What are you now?"
The man smiled, faint and dry.
"Unmade."
Later, they slept in opposite corners of the ruin. The man lit a bone lamp filled with amber-gel that gave off pale green light. Caelen couldn't sleep. He sat staring at the carvings on the stone floor.
They looked like a map. A spiral of old roads and paths that crossed where three eyes were carved into the center. He traced the lines again and again with his finger, unsure why they made him feel full.
Then, behind him, the man spoke.
"Your mother carries a bone of Ethren-Ka."
Caelen turned.
"She doesn't think I know," he said.
"You knew the moment you touched the shrine."
Caelen didn't speak.
The man leaned against the wall, watching him.
"She's right to be afraid. But she's wrong to think you're only a vessel."
"What am I, then?"
The man tapped his chest.
"You're the hunger that came after the god's death. What he couldn't kill inside himself."
Caelen blinked.
"I don't want to hurt anyone."
"You will," the man said. "That's not prophecy. That's math."
At dawn, Alaeth packed their things. The man did not try to stop them.
But before they left, he gave Caelen a mark.
Drawn in ash, across the underside of his forearm. A single symbol: not the three eyes this time, but a narrow slit flanked by two broken lines.
"A door," he said. "So you can close it, if you need to."
He leaned close.
"When you reach the Dead Well, do not drink."
They walked without speaking for most of the day.
Alaeth's pace was slower now. Her breathing shallow.
"Is it real?" Caelen asked, after a long silence. "The Dead Well?"
She looked ahead, jaw set. "Yes."
"Why are we going there?"
She paused at the edge of the forest, looking down the slope into the open valley beyond.
Because the Weeping Gate lies beneath it, she didn't say. Because it's the last place the Concord forgot.
Instead, she just said:
"Because there's something waiting for you there."
That night, they found shelter beneath a stone overhang where root-fingers spilled from the cliff wall like veins.
Alaeth slept early.
Caelen sat near the embers, staring at the mark on his arm.
The ash was fading—but the shape burned in his memory.
He reached out to the dirt. Took a piece of charred wood.
Drew the shape again.
And again.
Until he wasn't just copying it. He was writing it. Faster. Cleaner. In different angles. Overlapping strokes. He didn't think. He just moved.
When he stopped, the ground before him was covered in the glyph—layered, nested, breathing.
And something pulsed beneath it.
A low sound.
Like stone cracking in a distant cave.
Caelen blinked.
The mark began to glow.
Not bright. But real.
Alaeth stirred.
He brushed the dirt over it just before she sat up.
But he saw the look in her eyes.
She had seen.
And she was afraid.
The valley narrowed as they traveled south.
The sky grew heavier with each step, dulled by low clouds and red-tinged mist that rolled along the ground in lazy, unnatural drifts. The trees here bent eastward, always east, as if bowing to something no longer there.
Alaeth no longer guided Caelen by the hand. She walked ahead now, silent, her fingers clenched around the bone-wrapped hilt of her satchel knife. Her gait had changed—more rigid, like something inside her was pulling taut.
Caelen didn't ask what was wrong.
He felt it, too. In the soil. In the birds that didn't sing. In the way the wind paused between breaths.
Something ahead of them was remembering its shape.
They found the ruin by accident.
It wasn't marked on any path or map. It simply rose from the dirt like a bone working its way out of the body. A collapsed obelisk, half-swallowed by lichen and dust. The stone was black, veined with rust-colored seams. Old glyphs crawled its surface in a spiraling pattern, impossible to read—unless you'd already seen them in dreams.
Caelen stopped at the base.
Alaeth turned back, saw the look on his face.
"No," she said, immediately. "We keep moving."
"It's calling," he whispered.
"That's not a call," she said. "It's bait."
But she didn't stop him as he stepped forward. She didn't follow, either. She just stood, watching, her breath shallow, her hand on the relic beneath her cloak.
The stone was warm.
Not like sun-baked rock. Warm like flesh. Like the inside of a body.
Caelen laid his palm flat against it and felt something stir—not inside the stone, but inside him. A whisper. A map unfolding behind his eyes. He saw lines. Veins. Roads carved in blood. All of them leading to a mouth made of gates.
And for the first time, he didn't flinch.
He spoke a word.
He didn't know what it meant.
It was just there—in his throat, in the back of his teeth. Waiting.
"Lhaerin."
The glyph beneath his hand lit.
Red. Then gold. Then something colorless and cold that cut through the stone like glass cracking.
A line split down the obelisk. Thin. Deliberate.
And something began to rise.
Alaeth shouted.
Caelen stepped back as the split widened. The light faded—but not entirely. It stayed in the seam. Like an eye half-lidded, peering through.
Then came the sound.
A voice.
Not words. Not speech.
Tone. Presence. Memory.
A feeling that pushed into the lungs, the spine, the marrow.
Alaeth dropped to her knees.
Caelen did not.
He reached out again.
Touched the glyph once more.
And closed it.
The light vanished.
The stone went still.
Silence returned.
Alaeth stared at him as if she didn't recognize his face.
"Where did you learn that name?" she whispered.
"I didn't," Caelen said. "It was just… there."
She didn't respond. Just stood, slowly, with effort. Her mouth moved like she wanted to speak—but nothing came.
They didn't talk for the rest of the day.
That night, they camped in the shadow of an ancient archway once used by traders and war bands long forgotten. Only three columns remained—each etched with carvings so worn they looked like raised veins rather than art.
Caelen slept, but not deeply.
The dreams returned.
But this time, there was no door.
There was a throne.
Carved of obsidian and living root. Shaped like the remains of a ribcage turned outward. It pulsed as he approached. Empty. Waiting.
He reached for it.
But before his hand touched the armrest, he saw something else.
A figure.
Not himself.
Not a god.
A woman.
Bound in red cloth. Bleeding from the eyes. Singing in three voices.
He woke gasping.
The glyph on his arm burned again—fresh.
Alaeth was watching him from across the fire, eyes rimmed with shadow.
She said only one thing before turning away:
"We need to reach the Dead Well before you open anything else."