Ashgrove breathed in fog and exhaled silence.
In the ruins of District Seven, Shattered Hollow—Fall's End—the gas lamps flickered with amber gloom, casting long, skeletal shadows over cobblestone veins. The air was thick with a damp stillness, like the city had drowned long ago but refused to rot. What remained here were bones of lives once lived, layered in ash, memory, and forgotten names.
Kyren moved through the mist like a ghost retracing old footsteps. His coat, patched at the seams, fluttered in the cold draft threading between collapsed buildings and leaning iron posts. Each step echoed too loud, like the ground itself was hollow.
His eyes, sharp and distant, scanned every alley, every door that stood slightly too open, ever
y shard of broken signage that seemed to change when you looked away. Kyren had learned to see the city in a way others could not. He had learned to see the shadows between the bricks, the way the fog curled around certain corners, as though hiding something beneath its murk. He had learned to hear the silence—the way it pressed against the chest, warning of things not quite visible.
There were places in Fall's End where memory did not hold.
He passed one now—an alley where the mist thickened unnaturally, and if you stared too long, you could swear it breathed back. The fog didn't shift like it normally did. It lingered, alive in a way that felt wrong. He didn't stop. Not tonight.
The city had rifts, yes. But some said Fall's End had wounds.
Kyren's home was three floors up in a crooked tenement overlooking the husk of what had once been a park. Now it was a crater of cracked marble and withered roots. Trees tried to grow there, but their bark wept black sap, and their leaves curled like burnt paper. The warding stones around it had long since gone dim.
The building creaked like it resented being inhabited. Inside, the walls were lined with peeling sigils that no longer worked, remnants of an age when protective glyphs still meant something. The scent was a mix of mildew, ink, and faint copper. The floorboards groaned beneath his weight, as if warning him that nothing in Ashgrove stood with stability for long. Not even memory.
His room was spare. A narrow bed with no sheets. A battered wooden desk covered in scattered papers. A lantern on the sill, burning oil that smelled faintly of herbs. A cracked mirror leaned against the wall beside a coat hook, but Kyren had turned it to face the wall. He had grown tired of seeing things that weren't there.
He dropped his satchel and moved straight to the desk, lighting a second, dimmer lamp for study. His fingers brushed aside the clutter of pages, revealing the one he always returned to—thin parchment marked with strange, inked geometry.
A triangle encased a spiral. Three smaller spirals radiated from its corners like blooming rot.
The Pattern speaks through fracture, it read—in a language not taught, but remembered.
He didn't know why he kept coming back to that line.
He pulled out the coin.
It had no weight, no origin. One side bore the spiral sigil—the same as on the parchment—but the other side was always shifting. Sometimes it showed an eye. Sometimes a thread. Sometimes it showed nothing at all.
Kyren didn't remember where he had found it. That fact bothered him more than the coin itself.
He held it between his fingers, studied it beneath the lamp's dull glow. The surface shimmered, not with light, but with presence. Like the coin wasn't being seen so much as revealing itself, moment by moment.
He turned it over.
The spiral had grown deeper, somehow. It hadn't been etched that way—he would've noticed. But now, it seemed bottomless, as if a hole had been bored into the metal's soul.
A whisper scratched the edge of his hearing.
Not a voice.
Not a word.
A pull.
He snapped the coin back onto the desk and sat upright, breath sharp. The air had shifted again. That sense of being watched—not by a person, but by something older than attention—crept up his spine like cold water.
There were stories about objects left behind by the rifts. Artifacts that remembered things. That waited.
Kyren had never believed them. He still wasn't sure if he did. But the coin—it felt like it was waiting for him to remember something. Something important.
And something dangerous.
The lantern flickered.
Kyren didn't move. He watched as the flame dimmed, not from lack of oil, but as though the light itself were hesitating.
And then—there it was again.
The sound.
Like silk tearing underwater. A sound too layered, too slow, to be natural.
It came from the hallway beyond his door.
Kyren stood, silently. His boots made no noise as he moved toward the handle. His instincts had been honed not by battle, but by absence—he knew how to feel when the world stepped sideways. And right now, it had.
He opened the door just a crack.
The hallway was empty. Dim. The glyphs carved above the doorways had dulled into obscurity. Shadows hung heavier than they should've.
But the sound lingered—just at the edge.
He stepped out.
Down the hall, a window had frosted over from the inside. That was impossible. It hadn't snowed in Ashgrove in years, and the temperature tonight wasn't near freezing. But the frost didn't come from cold.
It came from something else. Something rift-born.
He approached slowly.
As he neared, he saw it—etched in the glass, barely visible: a thread spiraling outward in a pattern identical to the coin.
The frost shifted slightly, as though touched by invisible breath.
And then it blinked.
Not the window. Not the frost.
The pattern.
Kyren stepped back.
The frost pattern had vanished.
Not melted—vanished. As if it had never been there.
Kyren stood still, heart measured, gaze sharp. He didn't panic. Panic was a scream too loud for the things in the dark. But he didn't ignore it either. Something had seen him. Not as a passerby. As a marked.
He returned to his room with slow precision, locking the door behind him, tracing a faded glyph above the frame with his thumb—an old habit. The mark didn't glow anymore, but it still gave him comfort.
The coin still sat on the desk, motionless.
Yet it felt closer now.
Kyren sat.
He didn't pick it up this time. Instead, he studied its surface without touching it. The spiral had spread beyond its boundary, hairline cracks extending outward like fractures in glass. A hum pulsed through the wood beneath it—a vibration too low to hear but present in the bones.
The Threaded Path.
That name had surfaced in scattered writings he'd uncovered in Veilmarket—District Seven's buried twin, the district of masks and mirrors. An ancient idea. A theory. A curse.
Those who walked it were never seen the same way again.
Some said the rifts didn't open randomly—that they chose. That certain minds, certain souls, were like keys or wounds. That the rifts weren't entrances, but reflections.
Kyren didn't know yet what he believed.
But he knew one thing.
The coin had found him for a reason.
And the threads were beginning to pull.