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The silence after the scream was worse than the scream itself.
Raen's breath fogged in the cold. Not because the air was cold—but because something had left him. A thread. A piece. A truth.
He stood at the shattered boundary of the last realm, black glass beneath his feet bleeding fog. The girl—no, the thing wearing her face—had vanished the moment she whispered his true name.
That name.
He hadn't heard it since the fire. Since before the gods took notice of him. Since before the name Raen had ever meant anything at all.
And now it clawed through his mind like a buried nail.
He fell to his knees.
Ash rained from nowhere.
Behind him, the body of the beast he'd slain—the "Threnody Jackal"—began to twitch. Not in death throes. In rebirth.
The Threadrift wasn't done with him. This wasn't the end of the test. It was the beginning.
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