The sky wasn't made for light.
Not here. Not in the underbrush of Drav'nar's forgotten edge — where the cold had bones, and the trees curved like fingers around secrets they weren't allowed to speak.
The wind didn't scream. It exhaled.
Low. Heavy. Like something ancient breathing through frostbitten lungs.
He stood at the edge of a pit. A training hollow.
Not a real one — not state-sanctioned, not blessed by the Seers — but a place scraped into the world by blade and pain and repetition.
The roots of Skullwood trees coiled around the clearing, twisted like ossified serpents. Their bark was black-veined and damp, their leaves long fallen. Snow clung to them in patches, like old blood refusing to dry.
Yren stood at the centre of it all. Cloaked in fur and indifference.
"Again," she said.
The boy — 15 and starved — lunged with the bone-forged blade she'd given him.
She parried without effort, spun, and brought the flat of her weapon against his shoulder. Not hard enough to break. Just hard enough to make him drop.
He winced but didn't cry out.
"Better," she said. "But too polite."
There were no soft lessons here.
Every strike was real. Every dodge, survival.
Yren didn't teach him sword forms.
She taught him when to bleed, and when to make others do it.
"You don't fight with honour," she said one evening, tossing salted bark into the fire. "You fight with memory. Find something that hurts, and swing with it."
He asked — for the first time in days — "Is that how you fight?"
She didn't answer with words.
She pulled back her sleeve, revealing her sigil: Kas-Nur, the Ash That Remembers.
Then she placed her hand on the fire.
The flames flared — not in pain, but in recognition.
And for one breathless moment, he saw something in her eyes. A flicker of a child. A memory relived.
Then it was gone.
"That's how I fight."
The days bled into each other.
Morning: blades.
Afternoon: exercise
Evenings: questions.
Nights: dreams of spirals and snow, of eyes that watched from the frost.
Yren began to talk more.
Not kindly. Not warmly. Just more.
"You're still in Drav'nar," she told him. "But not the one from the maps. This place — the Sundered Crownlands — it's where they bury the unwanted history."
He blinked.
"The Seers don't control this part?"
"They control everything — except what's already dead," she said, kicking snow off a broken monument. "This was the first Sermon site. Before the Orders. Before the Spiral Compact."
She stared out at a distant ruin.
"Before they decided emotion was a threat."
He looked down at his ribbon.
Serah.
Warmth in the shape of a knot.
He didn't know if she was alive.
He didn't even know if he could still feel that warmth… or if the cold was starting to win.
That night, he opened the book again.
The bone-bound one Yren had stolen — or perhaps killed for.
Its pages were mostly blank. Until he touched them.
Words bled onto the parchment-like they'd been waiting:
"Memory is not what was. It is what survives."
He read the next page aloud.
The mark on his palm flared.
Yren heard it from across the fire.
"Stop," she said, sharply. "Some pages aren't for now."
He paused.
"But I—"
"I said stop." Her tone cut like a blade across the bone.
He did.
At dawn, she carved a sigil into the frost.
Not his. Not hers.
One of the Fourteen: Kelor-Seth — The Binding Hunger — native to the Kingdom of Hollowed Gluttons, Ravarneth.
"This one?" she said, tracing its lines. "It belongs to a land where people don't eat to live — they eat to fill a hole left by guilt."
He tilted his head.
"There's more than hunger," she continued. "Each land's sigil reflects its wound. Do you think your people suppress emotions because they're strong? No. It's because they couldn't stop bleeding once."
He stepped forward. "What about you?"
"My land's wound is memory," she said.
"And mine?"
Yren looked at him.
"You? You're not a land."
He waited.
"You're the infection they ignored."
That evening, she gave him a new test.
A simulacra beast — carved of bone and sigil-bound clay, animated by her Kas-Nur mark.
"Defeat it without killing it," she ordered.
He fought. Harder than he ever had.
Not for pride.
For proof — that he belonged somewhere other than frost and exile.
The beast clawed at him, struck his ribs, and knocked him to the dirt.
He stood. Again. And again.
He found the weak point. Beneath the rib. Pressed the hilt of his dagger — not the blade.
The construct collapsed.
Yren said nothing.
But that night, she handed him a cloak.
His size. Lined with real fur.
No words. Just… respect.
Later, in the quiet, he sat by the fire. The cloak wrapped around him. The book is in his hands.
He traced the ribbon on his wrist.
He missed her.
But more than that…
He missed himself.
The version of him that could still believe he wasn't broken.
He looked at the spiral on his palm. Whispered:
"Vaern."
And the world — far beneath, deeper than even the Seers dared dig — listened.
"Drav'nar cut my name.
But the Spiral hasn't."
And that... will have to do for now