The midwives of Drav'nar lied through their bloodless lips when they whispered that all children were born with threads—one for laughter, one for tears, and one for the name they would grow into. Their deception coiled through the nursery chambers like incense smoke, thick enough to choke the truth. Threads were not gifts but shackles, noosed around infant throats before first breath, tightened yearly by the Spiral's invisible hands until even the reflex to sob obeyed its design. The city's children learnt this truth gradually, through the absence of comfort when they fell, through the way their giggles died stillborn in their throats, and through the meticulous pruning of every unapproved emotion until their souls resembled the manicured ice gardens of the High Seer's courtyard.
Except his.
His threads had been severed in the womb by something older than Drav'nar's stone bones, something that left his shadow wrong. The Mirror of Threads recoiled from his reflection as though burnt. Frost clung to his footprints long after other children's had faded. The Spiral, which tolerated no defiance, had not yet dared kill him—not from mercy, but because whatever had unmade his threads left a wound even that ancient power feared to touch.
Drav'nar Solmir Thren was a city where even the wind had been broken. It did not howl through the copper-roofed towers or scream down the obsidian corridors of the Scriptorium. It moved like a chastened dog, slinking between the ribs of stone buildings with its fury leashed, its voice reduced to muffled sighs against windowpanes. The silence was not enforced by law—no edict needed to be carved when terror had been metabolised into instinct. Laughter wasn't banned. It had simply atrophied, like a muscle left too long unused. Grief came with an approved script, recited in monotone during the monthly Remembrances. Joy? That was the gravest heresy, punishable by the Ember's kiss.
The city wasn't dead. It was cauterized—a wound sealed shut before it could bleed out. Once, these streets had pulsed with music so vibrant it made the lantern flames dance. Once, artisans had painted murals of the Spiral's glory across every available surface, their brushes dripping with pigments ground from crushed gemstones. Now the only permitted art was the slow, precise carving of sigils into flesh. Fire was no longer warmth—it was discipline incarnate. Every cradle hung with an Ember of Restraint, its orange glow the first light newborns learnt to fear, its flickering presence the last thing they saw before sleep took them.
Thirty days after birth began the Quieting.
The Hollow's living walls yielded their moss to the Gatherers' knives without protest, though the severed tendrils trembled like traumatised flesh. The moss pulsed rhythmically, a soundless heartbeat that quickened when pressed against infant lips. Swaddled in this organic gag, newborns learnt their first lesson: voice was danger. Most children's whimpers faded within hours, their defiance smothered into submission. The spiral-shaped bruises left by the moss's grip typically vanished by dusk.
His did not.
When the caretakers peeled the moss away from his face, they found the tendrils had not just restrained—they had bonded. Tiny rootlets threaded through his epidermis, their inky filaments pulsing with something darker than blood. The attending midwife recoiled, her sleeve pressed to her mouth. "Drowning," she whispered. Another murmured, "Smothering." The High Seer observed the phenomenon with detached interest before pronouncing, "The Spiral wants him to see what comes next."
In the adjacent crib, an infant girl had gone still—not disciplined, but dead. Her moss shroud had fused entirely with her airways, its living fibres stitching her nostrils shut in a grotesque mimicry of devotion. The mother's punishment was to wear the child's moss as a scarf for one full year, its slow heartbeat a perpetual reminder against attachment.
The stone dormitories echoed with the sounds of breathing but never voices. A Ration Ledger recorded every infraction, its pages filling daily with childish betrayals. Points meant supper, and supper meant survival. The boy accumulated no points—not from obedience, but because the Watchers' gazes slid over him like water over glass, their attention repelled by whatever anomaly lived in his marrow.
Thread Discipline lessons began with vein-milk. A single drop on the tongue transformed whispers into shrieks as nerve endings ignited. The tutors moved down the rows, their glass pipettes dripping silver. When the milk touched his tongue, it beaded like mercury before rolling away entirely, leaving no trace of its passage.
The spoon-clatter rule was absolute. When Jaren's utensil struck the stone floor, the dining hall froze. The Watcher's finger pointed—half rations forfeited. The boy rose silently, crossed the room, and placed his own spoon into Jaren's gruel without a sound. The Watcher's gaze passed through him like mist. Neither child ate that night, but something new took root in the silence between them—a recognition that some quiet could cut deeper than any blade.
Serah moved through the world three paces behind her archivist father, her sleeves carefully arranged to hide the crescent cuts along her wrists. The tiny spiral carvings were her rebellion, a way to feel something—anything—in this place where feeling had been outlawed. She hoarded condemned scrolls like treasures, memorising descriptions of festivals where people had once danced simply because movement brought joy.
She noticed the boy the world refused to see. In the bathhouse steam, she glimpsed the moss-root scars tracing his arms like inky veins. Her lips parted—not in revulsion, but recognition. That night, he left a pumice stone at her bedside. Not to erase her scars, but to deepen them, should she choose.
She began stealing seconds for him, pressing warm bread crusts between her palms so the heat would linger. The Watchers never saw these exchanges. The Spiral did. That night in the Archives, a single scroll burst into flames—its ashes arranging themselves into the shape of Serah's name for three trembling breaths before dissolving.
The night before Frostwell, he woke to unnatural stillness. At his threshold lay a single lilac petal, already crumbling to ash. It dissolved against his palm, leaving a stain like a fresh bruise. The scent clung to his skin—floral sweetness undercut by iron.
At twelve winters, they descended to the Spiral Mirror.
Children were submerged in glowing vein-milk baths while Seers chanted. Those who thrashed were held under until the fluid "calmed" them—one boy drowned; the attending seer called it mercy. The milk clung to skin like liquid potential, revealing the threads each child would spend their life serving.
On him, it curdled. Grey clots formed and slid from his body as though repelled.
Zarien emerged with eyes of molten silver—Clarity's mark. Dreia's throat collapsed under Weight's glyph. Serah's chest bloomed with living lilacs, their roots threading through her ribs as a Seer's gaze pinned her in place.
When his turn came, the mirror's surface recoiled. Light bent away from his reflection. The youngest Seer reached out—her fingers sank through his sternum into the freezing void. Silent tears tracked down her face.
The Mirror wasn't rejecting him. It was hungry. Its surface formed shapes—a grasping hand, a screaming mouth, and a spiral with a slash through its centre.
"No thread," the lead Seer pronounced.
The rippling surface suggested otherwise. Something waited in that glass. Something had been cut.
Before exile came cleansing.
Pumice stones scraped his skin as chanters intoned "Unmarked, Unmade." Their hands bled; his flesh remained untouched. It was the stones that crumbled, disintegrating to powder beneath their frantic scrubbing.
Frostwell had been built around a shard of shattered sigil-stone—the corpse of a forgotten rebellion. Its walls devoured sound, light, and hope with equal appetite.
Time dissolved in that darkness. Hours or days later, he whispered, "Serah." The stone remembered that name.
A fissure split the wall. Black not-liquid seeped forth—severed threads writhing like beheaded snakes. They tasted his blood and rearranged it into a single Veresh word: KASIR.
The threads didn't just move—they sang. The sound vibrated in his teeth, a blade dragged across glass. Salt crusted his lips. Not sweat—memory. The Spiral hadn't erased everything.
Drav'nar had no seas. Yet waves roared in his ribs, and somewhere above, the Spiral screamed.
Frostwell wasn't a prison.
It was a wound.
And wounds remember.
At dawn, Watchers marched him beyond the gates. One guard averted his eyes—not from shame, but permission.
No trial. No flame. Only silence—and the distant, salt-tinged whisper of something even the Spiral couldn't erase.
A beginning.
He hadn't cried when born.
But his silence left scars—
Not on him.
On the world.
And worlds, once scarred,
Learns to scream back.