The ridge narrowed into a path carved from gray slate, scored with old wheel ruts and frost fractures. On either side, the forest broke into weathered stone formations—some stacked naturally, others clearly shaped by human hands long ago. Here, the moss clung tighter. The glyph-stones lining the trail weren't decorative. They were ward markers. Ancient ones.
Alaeth slowed, one hand sliding beneath her cloak. Her fingers brushed the grip of her knife with a casual grace, but her eyes had gone hard.
Caelen followed her gaze.
Three figures waited at the trail's mouth ahead.
They wore half-cloaks and piecemeal armor—the dull steel of working soldiers, not ceremonial elites. Their tabards were painted with the Concord's purge sigil: an open eye bound in seven chain links. The Eye and Chain. The division tasked with clearing relic sites, killing god-touched beasts, and executing anyone carrying unlawful script.
They weren't elite, but they were dangerous. Scorch-marks across their vambraces. Field-stitched wounds not yet scarred. Their boots were muddy with dried blood. One of them—broad-chested, his face partly hidden behind a burn-scarred veil—carried a bandolier lined with glyph-burn brands. That meant he was an activator, capable of triggering glyphs on command.
"Stop there," the youngest one called, stepping forward.
Alaeth did, resting easily on her back foot, shoulders squared like she was half-asleep. The Mirefang ghosted to the side of the trail, low to the ground, black and white fur catching the wind like ash.
Caelen said nothing. He looked at the scouts, then at the old glyph-stones—dead markers from a forgotten age. Faint lines were still visible across their surfaces, etched in the same spiral patterns he'd seen in the Well. They had no glow left in them. No heat. But the sight of them made the back of his skull itch.
"You're walking restricted ground," the scout continued, gesturing toward the ridge. "Relic sites were flagged three days back. No civilians without purge escort."
"We're not stopping at any sites," Alaeth said. "Just passing through."
The older scout stepped in. His armor was cleaner, but the lines around his mouth and the ritual scar running from jaw to temple spoke of command. "You're not marked. No papers, no badge. That's a Concord offense."
He gestured toward Caelen. "That your son?"
"No offense recorded unless you detain."
"We're not detaining," the younger one said. "Just checking." He glanced back at the Mirefang.
"What in the Hollow is that?"
"A stray," Alaeth replied. "Follows us, eats vermin. You'll live."
"Looks bonded."
"Looks aren't laws."
The older scout turned to the third—taller, face obscured by a narrow helmet stitched with Concord glyphs. He nodded once, moved to flank left. Pinning formation.
Caelen shifted his weight.
The Mirefang didn't move, but its jaw flexed—slow and deliberate. A low thrum built in its chest.
"We're under orders to collect any relics," the lead scout said. "Voluntary surrender's simpler for everyone."
"No relics here," Alaeth said.
"We'll check that."
The youngest drew a wand-like glyph-rod from his belt. It shimmered faintly with residual magic—enough to detect blood-glyph resonance. He stepped forward.
Alaeth didn't move.
Then the older scout spoke. "Strip her cloak."
The younger hesitated.
"I said strip it."
He stepped toward Alaeth. She locked eyes with him, unmoving. Her hand dropped slightly to the side of her cloak, where her knife lay hidden.
Caelen's pulse tightened.
"Don't," he said.
The scout looked at him and grinned.
"She's carrying relic material. You can't stop—"
He hit her.
A flat blow across the face.
Alaeth staggered half a step back, blood trailing from her cheekbone. Her cloak opened slightly at the shoulder, revealing the edge of the bone-wrapped relic at her ribs.
The Mirefang stood up.
It made no noise.
No growl.
But the hum in its chest deepened to something felt, not heard.
Caelen stepped forward.
The older scout raised his hand.
"You move again, boy, and I break your—"
The glyph in Caelen's chest ignited.
It wasn't like before.
This wasn't a dream. It wasn't memory or instinct.
It was answer.
The glyph-stones on the trail flared—one after another—as if waking from deep sleep. Their spiral markings lit in burning gold, lines crackling like bone set on fire.
The younger scout stumbled back.
The Mirefang snarled—low and guttural.
Caelen didn't think.
He just spoke the name he'd heard in the Well.
"Lhaerin."
The air collapsed around him.
Sound dulled.
Color bled at the edges of the world.
The glyph rose from his chest—projected outward, like flame without heat, like gold drawn from his bones.
And the tall scout, the one with the stitched helm, dropped to his knees.
His eyes rolled back.
He screamed—loud, wrong, high-pitched like a blade across glass—and blood sprayed from his ears.
Then he fell sideways. Still.
The forest didn't make a sound.
The other two scouts stood frozen.
Even Alaeth didn't move.
Caelen stood with his breath in his throat, one hand raised, the glyph still burning faintly between his collarbones.
The older scout took a slow step back.
"What… what did you do?"
The Mirefang stepped forward. It moved without a sound and placed its body between Caelen and the surviving soldiers.
It opened its mouth.
And the thrum it released was not an animal's noise.
It was a tone. A glyph-tone—shaped like sound through stone, vibrating across the bones of the trail.
The remaining scout took one look.
Dropped his weapon.
And ran.
The scout's body lay still, steam curling from the glyph still burning across his chest. The mark Caelen had projected hadn't faded—it had branded him. Scored through armor, through skin, into the bone beneath.
The light from the glyph-stones faded slowly, leaving a coppery afterglow in the air.
The Mirefang crouched over the corpse—not feeding, not attacking. Just… watching. Its stitched eye twitched once. Then it lifted a single claw and drew something in the dirt beside the body. A glyph. Different from the ones Caelen knew.
Three slashes. One downward curve. A line split like a tongue.
Alaeth approached, boots soft on the stone. Her face was cut, dried blood along one cheek, but her expression wasn't pain. It was calculation.
She didn't look at the scout first.
She looked at Caelen.
"You spoke a name."
He nodded. "Lhaerin."
She closed her eyes, just once. "Say it again, and it might burn you too."
He looked down at the body. The glyph was still visible, seared like molten gold into the scout's armor. The man's eyes were open, but unseeing.
"What is it?" Caelen asked. "The glyph."
She crouched. Not near the body—next to the glyph the Mirefang had drawn. She didn't touch it, but her mouth flattened into a line.
"That's a claim mark."
"From them?"
She shook her head slowly. "From you."
They moved the body off the trail. Alaeth refused to bury it—not because she lacked the will, but because glyph-burned corpses had a tendency to attract things that shouldn't remember the shape of a man. Instead, she wrapped the body in his own cloak and dragged it under the roots of a leaning tree. The Mirefang circled the clearing twice and sat at the path's edge, humming faintly in its throat.
Caelen sat on a flat stone, the bone-blade across his lap, still untouched.
The glyph on his chest had faded.
But the memory hadn't.
"What did I do?" he asked quietly.
Alaeth sat beside him. Her breath came shallow. Her hands were steady.
"You triggered a Blood Script glyph."
He frowned. "I didn't draw anything."
"You didn't need to," she said. "It was already carved into you."
She gestured toward his chest. "The Well didn't just mark you—it wrote you."
She began tracing in the dirt.
Seven glyphs. Each one simple, but layered. Some spiraled inward. Others forked. A few looked almost like letters, broken and rearranged.
"These are the Tiers," she said. "Or they were, back when the world still let people remember them."
Caelen leaned closer.
"The first is Initiate. Ward-marks, bone-charms. Stuff even traders use. Harmless."
She tapped the second.
"Hunter Tier. Combat glyphs. Most of what the Concord lets their low ranks use. Bindings, barriers, blood-snares."
The third: "Pact Tier. Glyphs that draw from something else. A relic, a dead thing, a god-shard. Takes more from you than it gives."
Then she touched the fourth.
And didn't speak right away.
"This is what you used. Blood Script."
"It didn't feel like a choice."
"It never is," she said. "Blood glyphs aren't cast. They're remembered. Written in bone, burned in breath. They're older than speech."
He swallowed. The memory of the scream, of the scout's face twisting, flashed again behind his eyes.
Alaeth continued.
"The fifth is Divine Tier. Not seen in a hundred years. Used to take cities apart. Some say whole orders died learning how to cast them."
She drew the sixth. It looked wrong. Bent. Inverted.
"God-Script. Not just glyphs—words that make the world obey. No one speaks them anymore. No one survives them."
She drew the last.
Just a flat, black line.
"Null Tier," she whispered. "The anti-glyphs. They don't create. They don't destroy. They just erase. Truth. Memory. Identity. Everything."
Caelen stared at the marks.
His hand drifted to his chest.
"I used the fourth tier?"
"No," she said. "You survived it. That's the part that matters."
They sat in silence. The Mirefang padded closer and lay beside Caelen's legs, eyes still fixed on the dark beyond the ridge. Alaeth stared at the glyphs in the dirt, then wiped two of them away.
"Most people can only use Initiate and Hunter," she said. "Pact, if they're desperate and stupid. You jumped straight to Blood."
He shook his head. "I didn't know what I was doing."
"That's not the problem."
"Then what is?"
She looked at him, and for the first time in days, there was no fear in her eyes. Only a kind of grim respect.
"You didn't burn out. Blood glyphs eat the unmarked. Tear them open from the inside out."
He thought of the scout's body again. The scream.
"I didn't feel anything."
"That's the part that scares me."
She stood, brushing dust from her hands.
"There are other systems," she said, not quite meeting his gaze. "The glyphs are only one part. One branch of the old faith."
"Like what?"
She hesitated.
"There were the Flesh Rites. People who carved glyphs into their bodies—opened paths in their own blood to channel power. Killed for it, mostly. Or worse."
"You've seen them?"
She nodded. "Once. In the Third War. A priest lit a hundred soldiers on fire with a word. But he bled out of his mouth after, and forgot his name."
Caelen frowned. "And the others?"
"There's Name-Binding. Dangerous. You steal the name of something powerful. A spirit. A god. A ghost. Bind it to yourself. Take its strength. Its traits."
"And the cost?"
"You forget your own. Or worse—you remember too much."
She looked away.
"I've seen people stare at the sun and call it mother. You don't want what they saw."
The Mirefang rose again.
Its body stiffened.
It turned its head eastward.
Alaeth tensed.
"They'll come looking," she said. "You don't kill a scout and vanish."
"What do we do?"
She didn't answer right away.
Then: "We run. Hide. And when we can't, we fight."
Caelen looked at the glyphs still glowing faintly on the trail.
"I don't want to be feared," he said.
"You don't get to choose," she replied. "But you can choose who should be afraid."
Drevmor rose out of the bone-colored hills like a corpse that had forgotten how to lie still.
It did not shimmer. It sprawled—imperfect, leaning, groaning beneath its own weight. The walls had long since collapsed in half a dozen places. Great seams of old stone and rusted steel bent inward, broken by sieges no one remembered or poison storms the Concord refused to name. Between the ruins, black banners fluttered—stitched not with national sigils, but glyphs. Faction signs. Cult marks. House-etched warnings. Circles of flame. Severed hands. Spirals with eyes burned into them.
There was no Concord presence here.
Just territory.
Just power.
Just memory.
They approached on foot from the ash-ridge, the Mirefang padding ahead like it had walked this path before. Alaeth kept her cloak drawn close, eyes scanning every rooftop and ruin shadow. Caelen followed just behind her, trying not to look like a boy who had never seen a city before. He failed.
The air smelled of old incense and clay, of dried blood and salt smoke. A bell tolled in the distance—not a timekeeper, but a warning.
The gate—such as it was—stood open. The portcullis had long since rusted and collapsed, and two leaning watchtowers framed the breach like a mouth about to speak. Three guards slouched in folding chairs beneath the arch, their armor pieced together from scavenged steel and shattered Concord gear.
As the Mirefang passed between them, all three sat up straight.
The first reached for a blade. The second gripped a baton laced with rune-thread. The third just blinked—and looked away.
The beast didn't growl. It didn't lunge. It moved with calm certainty, stitched eye twitching, the other reflecting firelight like a blade held flat.
None of the guards moved.
Caelen followed it in.
The streets inside were too narrow for carts. Buildings rose sharp and uneven, their stones mismatched, their wood beams split and patched. Glyphs marked every doorway, every corner, every visible arch—some in chalk, others in carved bone or fresh blood.
Noise rolled through the air: shouting, laughter, prayers, moaning, steel-on-stone. A child cried from a rooftop. A vendor cursed a thief. A woman offered to sell her memories—good ones—for two sips of clean water.
Alaeth didn't speak.
She didn't slow.
But Caelen felt her pulse quicken.
She led them through a winding set of alleys until the street opened into a cratered square. A half-collapsed temple jutted from the ground's edge, leaning like a dying god. Market stalls circled its base, each hung with relics, potion chains, or fragments of etched weapons. A few sold animals—hissing, furred, scaled, or twitching in half-buried cages.
"Stay here," Alaeth said. Her voice was low, but tight. "I need to speak to someone. Old blood."
"Who?"
"Someone who won't kill us for walking in."
She didn't wait for his reply.
The Mirefang circled once, then crouched beside Caelen as he watched her pass through the stone-arched entryway of a shadow-draped structure flanked by fire basins and glyph threads that moved like breathless cloth.
He stood for a few minutes with the Mirefang keeping sentry at his feet.
The city moved around them. A fight broke out near one of the larger stalls—two men, one with fire-glyphs running along his jawline, the other with smoke trailing from his teeth. They screamed in a dialect Caelen didn't know, and no one interfered.
Above, children chased one another along a shattered walkway, their skin painted in prayer ash, each chanting glyph-phrases they couldn't possibly understand.
Then someone brushed past him.
Quick hands. Cold fingers.
By the time Caelen turned, she was already a dozen paces away, slipping between two market tents like a shadow with purpose.
She had his blade.
The bone-handled weapon Alaeth had given him.
He caught a glimpse of it as it disappeared into her belt sash.
The Mirefang tensed beside him—muscles coiling beneath skin.
Caelen ran.
She was quick.
She didn't run flat-out, not at first. She weaved through the crowd like she belonged there, letting the market noise cover her tracks. But the Mirefang tracked her without hesitation, slipping between people and leaping a cart like a wraith. Caelen followed close, ducking a swinging pot and nearly colliding with a spice vendor.
She vanished into an alley.
They followed.
The alley was tight, its walls pressed in like two hands about to crush.
At the far end, she slowed.
She turned.
Realized the Mirefang stood between her and the way out.
She stopped.
Caelen arrived a few seconds later, breathing hard but ready. He stood between her and the street.
Cornered.
But she didn't panic.
She smiled.
He got a better look at her now.
She was lean, older than him by a year or two, with a wiry strength in her stance. Her dark hair was streaked with clay, tied back in a crooked band. Her clothes were stitched together from what looked like salvaged robes, leather cords, and cloth painted with smudged glyphs.
She held his bone-blade in her hand—comfortably. Like she'd used one before.
"Didn't think you'd notice so fast," she said.
Caelen held out his hand. "It's not yours."
"You sure?" she asked, inspecting the blade's edge. "Doesn't look worn. Doesn't even look blooded."
"It was a gift."
"That explains it." She rolled her eyes. "Let me guess. Some old tutor, dying in a hut, said you were special before handing it over."
"She's not dying."
"Yet."
She twirled the blade and tossed it once in her hand. "People don't usually walk this district with a relic beast and a clean blade."
She glanced past him—at the Mirefang.
It hadn't moved.
She narrowed her eyes.
"Where'd you find it?"
Caelen didn't answer.
"Did you steal it? Or just feed it better than the last owner?"
He stepped forward. "You don't want to test it."
She didn't flinch. But she didn't press, either.
Then, without warning, she tossed the blade underhand.
Caelen caught it, eyes still locked on her.
She grinned. "Nice catch."
"You going to tell me your name?"
"Why?" she asked, stepping backward into the deeper alley. "So you can forget it the next time someone better offers you a coin?"
"I won't forget."
She raised one eyebrow.
"Lira," she said at last. "That's all you get for free."
Then she turned and vanished down a sloped side path cut into the rock, boots scraping stone.
The Mirefang exhaled once.
Caelen looked down at the blade in his hand.
It was cold.
When Alaeth returned, her eyes narrowed immediately.
"You ran."
"She stole my knife."
Alaeth's gaze shifted to the alley. "And?"
"I got it back."
The Mirefang sat beside him, silent.
Alaeth grunted. "How?"
"She gave it back."
"That doesn't sound like Drevmor."
Caelen looked at her. "She said her name was Lira."
Alaeth stiffened just slightly. "That sounds more like Drevmor."
He didn't ask what she meant.
They walked together toward the sunken temple where shelter waited, the Mirefang shadowing their steps. And though the city still roared and breathed and pressed in on all sides, Caelen felt a strange sort of clarity.
Like something had shifted inside him.
He had crossed a threshold.
And someone else had seen it.