Eelgrave's tribunal wall bled rust and old judgments. Scratched messages stacked over centuries of ash, each painted with spit and crushed charcoal. Warnings. Names. Spells. Prayers. Most unreadable. Some whispered aloud by passersby like charms or curses. The wall had no shape—only layers. Like the city's memory, it forgot nothing, only buried it.
The smell of the wall was always the same—mildew, iron, and a bitterness like rotting cloves. The wind pushed the scent down low, thick and clinging. Ivar stood before it now. Not to read. Not to pray. Just to be seen.
"They're watchin' him," muttered a bone-seller, carving teeth from eel skulls two stalls down. Her fingers, stained from marrow and soot, didn't stop moving.
"Course they are," said the ragpicker behind her. She squatted amid piles of threadbare linen, plucking lice from old tunics. "Boy walks clean through the pits and don't even limp? Saw Murn twitchin' like a fried roach."
"Still ain't screamed. Not once."
"Means he's got it."
The tribunal walls weren't for trial—they were for tally. Public opinion etched in piss and chalk. Eelgrave didn't hand down justice from courts. It bled it from consensus. When whispers turned to scratches, and scratches turned to bloodmarks, the Wardens moved in.
And someone had already started scratching:
EMPTYFANG
Three hands wide, drawn in black soot. A snout with no teeth. A maw forever open but silent. A beast with no growl.
The soot was still fresh. It had smudged under the morning rain, trailing down like tears.
Ivar glanced once, then turned away.
Behind him, near the pipe vents that hissed into the gutter, children argued in low voices.
"He's a dormant, innit?"
"Could be irregular."
"He's too cold."
"No—he's too clean. That's worse."
"They say he sleeps with both eyes open."
"They say he don't sleep at all."
Their voices were thin. Not afraid—just reverent. Like they were speaking of a ghost not yet dead.
A Warden leaned against the far post, arms crossed. Her armor was piecemeal—chipped iron over leather, black cloth soaked in alley-oil. Her gaze didn't wander.
"Seen boys like him before," she muttered to the lowborn priest beside her. "One of mine twisted out in sleep. Tore his own ribs out before the beast took. Killed four in the next breath."
The priest nodded. "Instinct you can smell. Control? Control's a mask. And masks crack."
They watched Ivar leave the tribunal square without a word. No backward glance. No nod.
Just motion.
He passed the graffiti-wall next, where the city's illiterate carved truths deeper than parchment ever could.
Words like:
"Cull the quiet."
"Still things break loudest."
"All beasts wear skin."
And below it all, in a child's looping hand:
"He walks like memory."
A finger brushed one of the carvings as he walked, drawing a faint line through grime. The stone was warm to the touch, as if it remembered.
Ivar moved through the slums with the same absent grace as always, but inside, that cold presence remained. Not angry. Not hungry.
Just there. Heavy. A discomfort he couldn't name. A cold weight, like a stone settling in his gut.
He tried not to name it. Names gave shape, and shapes gave fear.
Instead, his mind slipped—
—to a memory.
A girl in the dormitory who slept with her hands curled like claws. She never smiled. She never twitched. Then one night, she changed. Her eyes never opened. She just broke. The boys next to her didn't even have time to scream. Just red. So much red.
And after, silence again.
They'd called her a dreamborn. Said she transformed while asleep. The beast came from nowhere. Left nothing behind.
He hadn't flinched.
Didn't that scare them more?
He remembered the blood pooling under the straw mats, remembered the walls shaking with guttural sounds no throat should make. The way her spine arched like it had snapped backward before the beast came through. The stink of bile and piss, and the way the air had gone still afterward, like even the building was holding its breath.
He hadn't screamed. He had watched it all, not from bravery—but from something colder. Something that hadn't thawed since.
He rounded a corner into Dogveil Lane, where wind wove itself through gutted shrines and over bonemelt carvings pressed into blackened clay. Faces of no one, stacked in rows, each one smoothed by soot and time. He paused before a crumbling effigy—an infant's skull with wire for teeth. Around it, someone had scrawled in fire-red pigment:
STILLNESS ISN'T PEACE. IT'S A WARNING.
Further up the lane, where the boneshapers made hollow charms from teeth, he passed under a burned-out lintel marked with soot-black string. Eyes followed. Voices didn't rise above whispers.
A boy to his left muttered, "Saw him in the pit. Didn't flinch when Kobb turned. Just… watched."
"And broke his leg in three spots," another added. "Didn't even raise his voice."
"He's not awake," the first whispered. "He's waiting."
A girl stood in the shadow of the charm booth, watching him. She didn't speak, but as he passed, she raised a stone and etched another line on the wall.
"Ivar."
He turned.
A girl. No older than him. Cropped hair. One eye covered in soot. The other—bright. Quick.
She held a broken mirror in one hand. Her other hand? Empty.
"I watched you," she said.
He didn't reply.
"From the scaffold. From the roofs. I see patterns. That's my gift. Yours is…"
She tilted her head.
"…scarier."
He stepped once toward her.
"You think I'm a danger."
"No."
Pause.
"I think you're a map."
The cold inside stirred. Not lurching. Just… folding tighter. Like paper creasing in the dark.
"They think calm means control," he murmured. "But clarity…"
She blinked. "What?"
He looked past her. Toward the darkening shapes beyond the shrine.
"…clarity cuts deeper than instinct."
She watched him for a long moment. Then said, soft:
"Maybe the map don't even know what it's pointing to."
The silence between them was not peace.
It was breath held in a dead city.
And Eelgrave watched. Still. Hungry. Waiting.
He moved again. Passed a gang of chalklings who fell silent as he walked by, eyes wide, breath hitched. One of them whispered to another:
"Emptyfangs never even twitch before they bite."
He turned down a narrower path, one he hadn't walked before. The walls here had names carved in layers so thick they blurred into texture—every stone a remembered death.
He paused beneath an arch. The arch bore a message written in blood-dark resin:
"Some silence ends in screams."
A shimmer flickered in the curve of the resin. A glimpse of a face—Lysa's—reflected from above, where her mirror caught the light. It vanished before it fully registered.
He stared at the arch. Not praying. Not mourning. Just… registering.
A breeze stirred.
From above, a crumbling roof shed dust like ash. The sun—what little broke through—caught his profile just long enough for someone to etch it in memory.
Lysa.
She crouched on the far ledge, mirror lowered.
She didn't speak.
She didn't smile.
But her eyes followed every step.
He passed beneath her shadow.
And still the city whispered:
"He walks like memory."
A Warden sat sharpening her blade above the lane.
"You see that boy again," she muttered to her companion, "you watch him harder."
"Why?"
She didn't answer at first. Just watched the fog eat his outline.
Then, with a flick of steel against stone, she breathed:
"Because Emptyfangs never even twitch before they bite."