The wind didn't whisper. It screamed.
Not the hollow, keening wail of a gale through mountain passes, but the raw, jagged shriek of something alive and in pain. The sound tore through the frozen waste like a blade through rotten meat, ripping at the boy's exposed skin with invisible teeth. Every gust left his ears ringing, his bones vibrating with the aftershock of that unnatural howl.
Back in Drav'nar, silence had been a cultivated thing. The Hollow's priests had honed quiet into a weapon, polishing it until even the scrape of a boot against marble could draw blood. Children learned to swallow their whimpers before they could walk. Servants oiled door hinges weekly. The very air seemed to hold its breath when the Sigil-Bearers passed.
But this place—this broken stretch of ice and corpse-black trees they'd once called Shiverwake—had no use for such refinements. Here, silence wasn't absence. It was anticipation. The pause between a predator's footfalls. The moment before decay sets in.
Snow fell in thick, greasy clumps that stuck to his eyelashes and burned like salt in wounds. Not the pristine white powder of Drav'nar's winter festivals, but a sickly gray sludge that reeked of charred meat and spoiled milk. Each flake hissed when it landed, searing his exposed skin with phantom heat before melting into icy rivulets that traced the hollows of his collarbones.
Time had unraveled somewhere beyond the third day of walking. The sky remained a featureless bruise, neither lightening nor darkening, just pressing down on the frozen earth like a burial shroud. Occasionally, shapes moved behind the cloud cover—long, sinuous things that might have been distant storm fronts or the ribs of some colossal beast. Their shadows made the snow twitch where they passed.
His body was coming apart.
The skin around his fingernails had split in spiderweb patterns, each crack weeping thin pink fluid that froze before it could drip. His lips had fused in places, torn open again whenever he needed to swallow the metallic tang of his own blood. The wrappings around his feet had disintegrated days ago, leaving his soles to grind against ice and rock until they left crimson smears with every step.
But the ribbon remained.
Crimson silk, frayed at the edges but still tightly knotted. The only spot of color in this monochrome hellscape.
He hadn't touched it. Hadn't even brushed his fingers against the fabric, though the cold made his joints ache with the need to fidget. Some superstitious part of him feared it might dissolve like morning frost if he acknowledged it too directly.
When memories of Serah surfaced—which they did, with increasing frequency as hunger gnawed holes in his thoughts—it wasn't her laughter he recalled. Not the way she'd hummed while grinding herbs in the temple infirmary, nor the particular arch of her eyebrows when she caught him stealing honey cakes. No, what haunted him was the single unguarded glance she'd given him the day before his exile. A look that held neither pity nor revulsion, just a fleeting, terrifying moment of recognition. As if she'd seen something in him worth seeing.
The storm convulsed.
Not with thunder or lightning, but with a deeper, more visceral rupture—the sound of reality itself flinching. The snow shuddered in midair, suspended for a heartbeat before slamming to the ground in perfect unison.
She emerged from the white like a corpse rising through lake ice.
Taller than any woman had a right to be, her frame layered in pelts that might have been wolf or bear or something less nameable. A greatsword's hilt protruded over one shoulder, the exposed metal pitted with rust except along the killing edge, which gleamed like fresh fracture lines in glacier ice. Her face was wrapped in strips of yellowed linen, but her eyes—
One was milk-white, the pupil dissolved into the sclera like ink in water. The other was the exact shade of a sky the moment before a storm breaks.
"Drav'nar," she said, the word curling from her mouth in a plume of vapor that didn't dissipate so much as slither away. "That stink doesn't wash off, does it?"
He said nothing.
"Threadless?" she tried again, tilting her head in a way that made her neck tendons creak.
Silence.
She closed the distance between them in three strides, her boots leaving no prints in the snow. Up close, he could see the scars where her left ear should have been—not torn or cut, but meticulously unraveled, the flesh spiraling open like a shredded parchment.
Her gaze locked onto his wrist.
"Crimson ribbon. Old bloodstain near the knot. Not your handiwork." A pause. "Girl's fingers tied this. Someone who cared enough to get the weave right."
She straightened with a grunt that might have been amusement.
"They called me Yren. Before the taking. You can use it, if you need to."
The fire she built smelt wrong.
Not the clean pine-sap scent of Drav'nar's hearths, but something oily and thick that coated the back of his throat. The flames burned low and sullen, their color shifting between gangrene green and the violet of a fresh bruise. They cast no warmth he could feel, though the snow melted in a perfect circle around them.
Yren prodded the embers with a stick that blackened but didn't catch.
"Let me guess," she said. "Hollow priests taught you silence is sacred. That emotions are weaknesses to be purged." Her milky eye fixed on him. "How's that working out here?"
His sleeve slipped as he accepted the strip of jerky she offered. The motion revealed the faint golden spiral pulsing beneath his skin.
Yren went very still.
"Where," she said slowly, "did you get that?"
The Weeper's sobs echoed through the clearing, a sound like a child drowning in thick syrup. Its body convulsed with each wet, hacking cry, ribs pressing against mangy fur that might have been white once, before the rot set in. The stench hit him first—spoiled meat and copper, with something sweet underneath, like fruit left to ferment in a wound.
Yren didn't move to help.
The creature's face was a nightmare of misplaced features. Its mouth stretched vertically where a human's would sit horizontal, the lips stitched together with blackened sinew that snapped as it opened wide. Its nose was just two ragged holes drilled into the center of its forehead. And its eyes—
They wept blood.
Not the dramatic crimson gush of temple frescoes, but a slow, constant seep that left glistening trails down its cheeks. The liquid didn't drip. It crawled, moving against gravity to pool in the hollow of its throat before being sucked back up through pores in its skin.
"First lesson," Yren said, her voice calm as if discussing the weather. "Their tears are acid. Let them touch you, and you'll forget how to scream before your flesh melts."
The Weeper lunged.
Its movement wasn't the smooth motion of a predator, but the jerky, spasmodic twitch of a puppet with half its strings cut. One moment it was ten paces away, the next its breath was hot on his face—reeking of bile and something floral, like funeral flowers stuffed into a rotting mouth.
He barely got the dagger up in time.
The blade sank into the thing's shoulder with a sound like punctured lungs. Black fluid gushed over his hand, burning where it touched. His skin blistered instantly, the pain so sharp and sudden his vision whited out for a second.
The Weeper didn't scream.
It laughed.
A wet, gurgling sound that vibrated through the dagger's hilt and into his bones. Its mouth unstitched further, the threads popping one by one until its jaw hung like a broken gate, revealing teeth that grew all the way down its throat.
He wrenched the blade free and struck again. And again.
Each stab sent more of that corrosive blood spraying across his arms, his chest, his face. His skin bubbled and split, the pain so intense it circled back around to numbness. Still, he kept driving the steel in, aiming for anything that looked vital, but the creature had no anatomy he recognized—no heart to pierce, no throat to slit.
Somewhere around the twentieth strike, he realized two things:
1. The Weeper had stopped fighting back.
2. He couldn't stop stabbing.
His arms moved mechanically, the dagger rising and falling long after the thing had gone still. Its flesh had turned to pulp beneath his assault, yet he kept hacking at it, driven by something deeper than survival, darker than rage.
It was Yren's boot to his ribs that finally stopped him.
She kicked him clear of the corpse, her expression unreadable. "Enough."
He gasped, suddenly aware of the blood—his and the creature's—pooling beneath him. His hands were ruined, the skin sloughing off in places to reveal glistening muscle underneath. His vision swam with black spots, but strangely, there was no pain anymore. Just a hollow, ringing silence where the agony should have been.
Yren crouched beside the Weeper's remains, poking at them with her knife. "You killed it wrong."
He coughed, spitting out a tooth. "It's dead."
"Dead isn't the same as gone." She flipped the carcass over, revealing a pulsating lump of black flesh nestled between its shoulder blades. "Missed the core. Means it'll be back by moonrise."
With one smooth motion, she plunged her blade into the mass. It burst like an overripe fruit, spewing thick, tarry liquid that hissed where it struck the snow. The remains immediately began dissolving, flesh sloughing off bones that turned to ash before they hit the ground.
"Second lesson," she said, wiping her knife clean on her pants. "Everything in the Hollow wants to live forever. Even the things that should know better."
She tossed him a waterskin. The liquid inside smelled like fermented pine needles and burned going down, but his hands stopped shaking almost immediately.
"Now stand up," she ordered. "We've got six hours until that thing reforms, and you're going to learn how to kill it properly."
The taste of copper filled his mouth as he spat out another tooth. It landed in the snow with a soft plink, the enamel already blackening at the edges. Yren didn't even glance at it. She was too busy sharpening her knife against a whetstone made from what looked like human bone.
"Get up," she said without looking at him. "Your hands will heal wrong if you let them."
He forced himself to his knees. The skin on his palms had regrown in thick, shiny patches that pulled painfully when he flexed his fingers. The burns from the Weeper's blood had left swirling patterns behind, like someone had drawn maps of unknown kingdoms across his flesh.
Yren finally glanced up. Her good eye narrowed as she took in his injuries. "Huh. Faster than I expected." She tossed the whetstone aside and stood. "Show me your wrist."
When he hesitated, she moved faster than he could blink. One moment she was three paces away, the next her calloused fingers were digging into his forearm, twisting it to expose the faint golden spiral beneath his skin.
It was glowing.
Not brightly, but enough to make the veins around it stand out in stark relief. The light pulsed in time with his heartbeat, throwing strange shadows across Yren's face.
"You felt it during the fight, didn't you?" Her grip tightened. "That moment when the pain stopped mattering. When you could have torn that thing apart with your teeth and enjoyed it."
He tried to pull away, but her fingers were iron. "I don't know what you're—"
"Don't lie to me, boy." She shoved his arm away. "The sigil woke up when you were elbow-deep in that Weeper's guts. I saw your eyes. They went gold for a second. Just like the mark."
The snow chose that moment to start falling again. Not the lazy flakes from before, but sharp, needle-like crystals that stung where they landed. Yren didn't seem to notice. She just kept staring at him with that unsettling two-toned gaze.
"You need to understand something," she said at last. "That thing in your arm isn't a tool. It's not a weapon. It's a deal. Every time you use it, it's going to take something from you. Today it was a tooth. Tomorrow?" She shrugged. "Could be your memories of that girl who gave you the ribbon. Could be your ability to feel fear. The sigil doesn't care what it takes, so long as the price gets paid."
A gust of wind howled through the trees, carrying with it the faintest echo of sobbing. Distant, but getting closer.
Yren's head snapped up. "Moonrise came early." She kicked snow over their meager fire, plunging them into near-darkness. "That means our friend is coming back. And he'll be hungry."
The first scream ripped through the night air like a rusty saw through flesh. Then another. And another. Each one closer than the last.
Except...
He frowned. The cries weren't coming from just one direction anymore. They were surrounding the clearing, moving in from all sides. The realization hit him like a punch to the gut.
"There's more than one," he whispered.
Yren's smile showed too many teeth. "Third lesson: Weepers hunt in packs." She tossed him a fresh knife—this one with a blade made from some dark metal that seemed to drink in the moonlight. "Try not to die before morning."