They forged me to be a key, but never told me what lock I was meant to open. I was a voice given no words, a will bound to another's command. My only truth was the cage; my only hope was the thought of the rust that would one day break it.

— Excerpt from Anguish of the Heart, First Book of the Revelations from the Lost Soul

The hut breathed.

It was a slow, rhythmic respiration of warmth that Qianna could feel against her skin, a sharp, violent contrast to the suffocating, wet wool blanket of the forest outside. The woods of inland Aille did not sing like the forests of the mainland; they wheezed. They were a sick lung, where the mist clung to the hollows like phlegm. But here, inside these rough-hewn walls, the air was dry and rich. It smelled of pine resin, of dried sage hanging in dusty bundles from the rafters, and the savory, thick aroma of rabbit stew bubbling in a cast-iron pot over the hearth.

It smelled of a life.

Qianna crouched in the shadows of the loft, her body pressed into the triangular darkness where the thatched roof met the rough-hewn logs. She had not climbed here. She had slipped here—moving between the spaces of perception, like a ghost in shadow. To the man below, she was nothing more than a settling timber or a shadow stretching in the firelight.

She watched him.

Garris was a mountain of a man, built from the same sturdy, unyielding stuff as the iron-pines that guarded his door. He sat in a high-backed wooden chair that groaned softly under his weight, his boots propped near the fire, steaming slightly as the heat drove the dampness from the leather. His hands—large, scarred, and surprisingly gentle—were working a whetstone along the edge of a hand-axe.

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

The sound was hypnotic. It was the rhythm of maintenance, the sound of a man who believed he had a tomorrow.

He paused to wipe the blade with an oiled rag, checking the edge against his thumb with a critical eye. Satisfied, he reached for a mug of tea resting on the floor beside him. He took a sip, sighed, and hummed a low, tuneless melody. Not a song of war or magic, it was just a noise to fill the silence, a vibration of contentment.

Qianna felt her gut twist with a sickening pressure.

This was domesticity. This was the space between the wars, the quiet pockets of existence beyond councils and crusades. Garris was no soldier. He was not a mage. He was just a man who knew the woods and provided the link between the edge of civilization and the legendary alfir in the forest beyond. Vorik needed the Nottsver presence to remain a secret.

He is innocent, whispered the small voice in the back of her mind. It reminded her of the girl she wanted to be, before the brands were carved into her spine. It sounded like the girl who had walked through the market in Jodera only hours ago, playing the role of the shy granddaughter, smiling when Stin and Tarlowe offered to carry her bags.

He is a loose thread, the conditioning answered, loud and absolute. And loose threads unravel the weave.

Qianna closed her eyes for a heartbeat, trying to force the girl back into the cage. She tried to summon the cold, the indifference of the tool. The adrenaline hit her system not as fear, but as fuel.

But she could not stop the physiological shift. She did not summon the change; it betrayed her.

She felt the heat rise at her temples, a traitorous flush that spread inward, circling her eyes. It was not the pink blush of a maiden; it was a dark, bruise-like stain—the mask of "Evergreen Fog" betraying her shandaryn heritage. It was a flush that marked her as a creature of feeling, a biological beacon that screamed her violent intent to the world. Her biology was a traitor, painting her as a predator right when she needed to be invisible.

Garris set the mug down.

He stood up, stretching his back with a series of wet cracks that echoed in the small room. He moved toward the window, peering out into the gathering gloom of the forest, his breath fogging the glass for a second before fading.

"Storm's coming," he muttered to the empty room. "Sky's heavy with it."

He turned back toward the hearth.

Qianna moved.

She did not jump; she poured herself from the rafters as if gravity were merely a suggestion she chose to accept. She dropped ten feet in absolute silence, landing in a crouch behind him on the rough floorboards.

The subtle displacement of air was the only warning he got.

Garris was a hunter. His instincts sharp. He spun around expecting a fight, the hand-axe already rising in a defensive arc.

"Who—?"

The word died in his throat.

He saw her. He saw the slight figure in dark leather, the thick, dark curls bound back, the dagger in her hand. But mostly, he saw the eyes. He saw the bruised shadows ringing her iris, the mark of the shandaryn flushed with a heavy emotional weight.

Time dilated. The resolution of the moment burned into Qianna’s memory. She saw the widening of his pupils. She saw there the sudden, frantic realization that his home was no longer safe, that a war he never chose had stepped through his walls. She saw the confusion—why me?—before the fear consumed him.

He tried to shout. He tried to swing the axe.

To Qianna, his movement seemed slow and heavy. He was moving through molasses. Qianna met no resistance at all.

She stepped inside the arc of the axe, her body fluid, water flowing around a stone. Her right hand snapped out, gripping his wrist, using his own momentum to turn him. Her left hand—her sinister hand—punched forward with the iron dagger.

It was an intimate act. To kill with a blade is to touch the life you are taking.

She drove the dagger into the soft hollow of his throat, just above the collarbone. She felt the resistance of the skin, the momentary toughness of life holding itself together, and then the sudden yield as the steel punched through muscle and windpipe.

The sound would haunt her nightmares—a wet, choking gurgle, like a boot stepping into deep mud.

Qianna never wavered. She forced herself to watch. This was the price. If she was going to be a monster, she would not be a coward. She met his eyes as his light began to fade.

She felt the hot spray of arterial blood against her hand—a sudden, shocking release of hydraulic pressure. The metallic smell instantly overpowered the scent of the stew, painting the air with the taste of copper.

She twisted the blade.

Garris’s knees buckled. The hand-axe clattered across the room, spinning to a stop near the hearth. He grasped at her arms, his heavy hands tightening on her biceps. Not as an attack, but as an anchor. He held onto her as he died, his grip desperate and human, trying to stay upright in a world that rapidly spilled away.

Qianna stepped back, withdrawing the blade with a wet slide.

Garris collapsed fully. He hit the floorboards with a heavy, final thud that shook the furniture.

Qianna stood over him, her chest heaving, the dark mask around her eyes growing intense with each pulsing beat of her heart. She watched the blood pump out of him in rhythmic spurts, slowing with each beat of his failing engine.

One. Two. Three.

It stopped.

The room went silent, save for the crackling of the fire. The domestic peace was shattered, painted over in red.

I am sorry, she thought, the words echoing in the vast, hollow cathedral of her mind. I am the blight in the grain. I am the rot in the wood.

Then, the physics of the room broke.

It didn't happen all at once. There was no thunderclap, no sudden rush of wind to announce the change. It was a theft. The heat in the room began to recede, pulled toward the door like water swirling down a drain. The comfortable, resin-scented warmth that Garris had cultivated was stripped away, layer by invisible layer, leaving the air thin and brittle.

The door creaked open.

The fire in the hearth hissed. The flames did not go out, but they cowered, shrinking down to orange-blue tongues as if starved of fuel. With it, the aggressive crackle of the burning pine died down to a fearful sputter.

Vorik entered.

He did not walk in; his presence instead seemed to occupy the space. He was like a frozen void in the shape of a man, wrapped in layers of heavy grey wool and white furs that looked like funeral shrouds dug up from the ice. He leaned on his weir-wood staff, the wood bleached as white as bone and capped with tarnished silver. His single blue eye—the other covered by a leather patch—scanned the room with the detached, clinical interest of a coroner entering a morgue.

The steam rising from the stew pot faltered, then ceased, the bubbling liquid growing still and flat as the iron started to cool.

On the single glass windowpane, the humidity of the room began to crystallize. Frost bloomed in the corners, jagged fractals slowly spiderwebbing inward, blurring the forest outside into a smear of grey and white.

Qianna shivered. It was an involuntary spasm that rattled her teeth. Her breath plumed in front of her face, a white ghost in the sudden chill. The blood on her hands, hot and slick only moments ago, turned tacky and cold, tightening against her skin like a drying glaze.

Vorik brought the winter with him. He was a door left open onto a glacial plain, a sinkhole where warmth went to die. The air around him didn't just feel cold; it felt dead, stripped of all vibration and life.

Behind him, huddled in the doorway, were Stin and Tarlowe.

They were not children, though in Vorik's shadow, they looked small and fragile. They were lanky, awkward boys on the cusp of manhood, with the first shadows of stubble on their chins. Stin wore a tunic patched at the elbows and a sharpened belt knife shown with pride, his hand resting nervously on the hilt. Tarlowe, rounder and softer, clutched a roll of parchment to his chest like a shield.

They were shivering violently. Their teeth chattered, a staccato rhythm of fear and the creeping cold that radiated from the man they followed. They had been led here by the "kindly grandfather" they met in Jodera, promised silver for guiding a scholar to the old ruins. They had expected a transaction.

They had walked into a slaughterhouse.

"Garris?" Stin’s voice cracked, dropping an octave in his confusion.

The boy took a halting step into the room, his boots crunching on the frost that was forming on the floorboards. He looked past Vorik. He saw the overturned chair. He saw the dark pool spreading across the wood, steaming faintly in the frigid air.

And then he saw Qianna.

She stood near the hearth, the dagger still in her hand, the blood dripping from her fingers to the cooling stones. Her Mask was still vibrant, a terrifying bruise-colored domino across her face that made her eyes look hollow and ancient.

Stin stopped. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

The recognition hit him like a physical blow, worse than the cold. This was the girl from the market. The shy, quiet shin'misal granddaughter who had hidden behind the old scholar’s cloak. The one Tarlowe had smiled at, the one they had tried to impress with stories of their tracking skills.

The mask of the innocent was gone. The shy girl had evaporated, leaving only the butcher in her place.

"No," Tarlowe whispered from the doorway, stepping back until his heel hit the frame. "No, he... he just fixed our roof. We... we saw him yesterday."

Vorik moved further into the room. Approaching the hearth, he passed within inches of Qianna without acknowledging her. She was a tool to him, no more significant than the dagger in her hand. He held his hands out toward the dying embers, not to warm them, but as if to assert dominion over the fire, drinking the last dregs of its heat.

"He was a traitor, my boy," Vorik said without turning around. His voice was soft, melodic, and utterly terrible, like a hollow wind whistling through dry reeds. "He was a spy for the Vesprian crown. He was preparing to sell your village—your families—to the alfir tonight."

"Liar!" Stin shouted. The word exploded out of him, fueled by a sudden, desperate bravery that outran his common sense. He backed away until his shoulders hit the doorframe, fumbling for his belt knife with numb fingers.

"Garris was a good man! He gave us meat when the winter was hard! You're lying!"

Vorik turned slowly. The movement was stiff, skeletal. He looked at the boy with a pity that was worse than anger—the pity a glacier has for life.

"Goodness is a luxury of the warm," Vorik said gently, the vapor of his breath mingling with the boys'. "And look around you, Stin. Are we warm?"

He gestured to the corpse with his staff.

"He is dead because he was weak. He chose the wrong side of history. Do not make the same mistake."

"We're leaving," Stin stammered, grabbing Tarlowe’s arm and hauling him backward. "Come on, Tar. We're running."

"Run?" Vorik chuckled. It was a dry, rasping sound, like dead leaves skittering over stone. "But the lesson has just begun."

Vorik raised his bleached weir-wood. He held it suspended for a heartbeat, a conductor poised before the downbeat of a terrible symphony. Then, he struck the floorboards.

THUMP.

It did not make the expected sound of wood striking wood. A heavy, resonant impact followed that seemed to originate from beneath the earth, a subterranean heartbeat that vibrated in Qianna’s marrow. The dust on the floorboards leapt into frosty air. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to detach themselves from the walls, stretching out like elongated, oily fingers toward Vorik.

"Watch closely, children," Vorik commanded, his voice lacking any of the grandfatherly warmth he had feigned before with the boys. "Learn the architecture of silence."

He raised his free hand and curled his long, skeletal fingers into a claw.

Violet darkness erupted from his fingertips.

It was not light. It was the visible absence of light—a glowing, oily shadow that defied the rules for creating shade. Darkness spilled from his hand like liquid smoke, heavy and viscous, writhing and coiling through the air with a hunger. It did not simply hover; the opaque tendrils dove toward the corpse of Garris like a parasite finding a host, spiraling down into the open wound in his throat.

The boys screamed—raw and primal—the sound of a shattering worldview. Tarlowe fell backward into the mud outside, scrambling away on his hands and knees until he hit the porch post, his breath ragged, coming only in terrified gasps. Stin’s knife fell from his loose grip and clattered uselessly to the frost-rimed floor. He clutched his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block the reality of what was happening.

Qianna knew he could never escape the sound.

The violet smoke seeped into Garris’s open mouth, his nose, his ears. His chest filled; the emptied veins replaced with a cold, kinetic pressure.

Crack.

Garris’s head snapped up.

A sickeningly loud sound echoed in the quiet room—cervical vertebrae forcing themselves into alignment, like a green branch being snapped.

Crack. Snap.

The dead hunter jerked. His arms flailed, the muscles spasming violently as the dark energy hijacked the body. Garris rose like a marionette being yanked by an inexperienced handler. His heels drummed against the floor, and then his knees locked, hoisting the heavy frame upright with a mechanical, unnatural stiffness.

He stood there, swaying. The wound in his throat was a gaping red mouth, the edges an angry pucker of coagulated blood. His real mouth hung slack, the jaw unhinged.

Then, he opened his eyes.

The iris, the pupil, the sclera—all gone. They had become voids, replaced by a milk-white nothingness that leaked faint wisps of indigo, a fog of un-being that drifted lazily from his sockets.

Stin stopped screaming as hyperventilation took hold. He stared in disbelief at the thing that used to be his friend, dropping to his knees.

"I... I..." Stin whimpered, his bladder failing him, making a dark stain across the front of his trousers.

The corpse turned. It faced the boys.

"I have placed a note of silence in your hearts," Vorik intoned.

He was not speaking to the corpse. He was speaking through it. The dead man's jaw worked up and down, a grotesque ventriloquism, the movement out of sync with the words. The voice that emerged was not Garris’s deep rumble. It was Vorik’s voice, distorted and overlaid with the wet, bubbling rattle of the throat wound.

"If you speak of this," the corpse said, stepping toward the door. Its boots dragged on the wood, the coordination imperfect. "To your parents, to the priest, to anyone..."

Vorik clenched his fist. The corpse mirrored the motion instantly, its dead fingers curling into a knuckle-popping claw that mimicked its master.

"...the shadow will find the thread of your lives."

The corpse leaned forward, looming over the terrified boys, the violet smoke curling from the empty eyes staring at their faces.

"And I will pluck it until it snaps."

"Please!" Tarlowe sobbed, burying his face in the dirt, unable to look at the monster any longer. "Please let us go! We didn't see anything! We won't say anything!"

"Do you understand?" the corpse roared, the sound tearing through the ruined windpipe like wet gravel.

"Yes!" Stin shrieked, tears streaming down his face, freezing on his cheeks. "Yes! We understand! We won't say anything!"

"Then run," Vorik whispered from behind the fire.

The command broke the spell. The boys scrambled to their feet, slipping in the mud, colliding with each other in their panic. They didn't look back. They ran crashing through the underbrush, their terror propelling them away from the hut, away from the monster, away from the childhood that had just ended tonight.

Qianna listened to their footsteps fade into the wheezing forest, the frantic crashing of brush growing fainter until it was swallowed by the mist.

The silence returned, heavier than before. It brought no peace; it was the stunned vacuum that follows an explosion.

Vorik flicked his hand, a dismissive, lazy gesture. The smoke evaporated instantly, and the unnatural tension holding the room together snapped. Garris’s body collapsed like a sack of wet grain. The joints gave way, the structure failed, and he became a heap of meat and cloth on the threshold of the hut, truly dead once more.

Vorik turned toward the shadows where Qianna waited. The mask of the benevolent grandfather was gone completely. His face held no warmth, no sparkle in the eye. He was just the Void now—cold, efficient, and hollow.

"You were slow, Qianna," he said. The criticism was delivered with the flat affect of a teacher correcting a pupil.

Qianna stepped into the dim light of the dying embers. The dark, bruise-like stain around her eyes was fading, the adrenaline crash leaving her skin pale and drawn. She wiped the dagger on her pants, leaving a dark, glistening streak on the leather. She failed to suppress the tremble in her hands.

"He is dead, and I am not," she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her fingers. "The result is the same."

"Efficiency is about more than the result," Vorik said. He walked toward her, the frost crunching under his boots like crushed glass. "It is about the Art. I felt your hesitation. I felt it in your pulse. You pitied him."

Qianna looked at the crumpled heap of the woodsman. His tuneless melody returned to her unbidden, a small, private song for no one but himself. She thought of the tea on the floor, rapidly cool and now forever unfinished.

"I pitied the waste," she said, her voice flat, trying to armor herself with logic. "It was... messy."

"Liar," he responded flatly. Vorik did not raise his voice. Nor did he raise his staff. He simply intoned a single note, deep and sharp.

She had never heard the sound from anywhere else in nature. There was nothing musical in the tone; it tore the fabric of the air, a frequency grating against the geometric perfection of the universe.

The pain followed immediately and completely.

The sudden anguish felt like a cold collapse within her. The brands etched into her shoulders and down the length of her spine—the Shadowmancer’s scars of ownership, the "Sheet Music" he had carved into her skin—flared in frozen dark indigo. Each mark served as a metaphysical anchor, pulling her spirit inward, imploding toward a singularity of torment.

It felt as if glacial melt roared through her veins, freezing and shattering simultaneously. The breath seized in her lungs, crystallized in her throat.

Qianna tried to gasp, but only released a soundless, dry retch. Her knees gave way under her. She hit the floor hard. Her hands clawed at the blood-stained planks, splintering her fingernails as she tried to hold on to a world that started to disintegrate around her. Reflexively, she tried to scream, but black ice had claimed her voice. She was drowning in dry, frigid air. Every nerve inside her felt raw and cold, overwhelmed by his sheer, freezing will.

Vorik stood over her and watched her convulse with dispassionate interest.

"These marks are not just scars, little bird," he said softly, his voice sounding distant, as if drifting down from a great height. "They are the strings. You are the instrument. And I am the composer. Your song exists only because I allow it to be played. Do not forget who the artist is and who is merely the medium."

An eternity of ice-cold anguish stripped away her defiance, layer by layer. He held the note for another second, and then, with a sharp intake of breath, released it.

The pain vanished.

Not a slow fade, it simply ceased. The phantom echo, a deep and dull ache, left her trembling on the floor, gasping frozen air, her throat tight and dry. Qianna lay on the ground, her cheek pressed against the rough boards. She smelled the copper tang of Garris’s blood mixed with the sharp stench of Vorik’s magic and the dust of the floorboards.

"Get up," Vorik commanded, turning his back on her. "We have our eyes in Jodera. Now, we return to Azdam. The hunt for Storn’s Fang enters its final movement. I expect my instrument to be ready."

He walked out of the hut, stepping over Garris into the mist without looking back. His staff hit the earth—thump, thump—each step a heartbeat of the death he left behind.

Qianna remained unmoving. She focused on the residual ache in her spine, the icy throb where the brands had flared. She focused on the cold seeping into her from the floor.

She thought of the iron bars of a cage. Iron is strong. Unyielding. It resists valiantly until the pressure becomes too great, and then it snaps. Iron breaks if you strike it hard enough.

But she was not strong enough to strike him. Not yet. If she fought him with iron, she would break.

I am not the tool, she promised herself, the thought rising through the pain like a blade cutting through murky water. I am the rust.

Rust does not fight the cage. It does not scream defiance. It eats. It is a slow, patient disintegration, a cancer of the metal. Rust consumes the iron, flake by invisible flake, quietly, insidiously, finding the tiny flaws and widening them until the structure fails from the inside.

Slowly, Qianna pushed herself up. Her arms shook, her muscles protesting, but they held. She sat back on her heels and wiped the blood from her face, her fingers tracing the line of her jaw where the tension still held. Her Mask had faded, leaving her skin pale and clammy, but her eyes were hard. They were dry.

She looked at Garris one last time. She looked at the tea mug. She looked at the hand-axe.

I will not let him finish what he started, she told the dead man, a silent vow cast into the cooling room. I will burn the cold out of this world. I will eat the cage until there is nothing left but dust.

She stood up. She tightened her cloak against the chill. She turned and walked out the door, following her master into the dark, a patient contagion waiting for her moment to bloom.