The poster wasn't pasted.
It had no glue-stain edges, no tack holes, no brushstroke gloss. Ivar stepped closer, letting the slow rhythm of the street wash past him. The crowd barely parted around him, as though the city had already accepted his stillness as part of its function.
It wasn't a poster at all.
It was grown.
The face on the wall was his. Not sketched or printed, but etched — skinless and patient, formed from spirals of char-black that deepened toward the left eye, coiled tighter and tighter into a white knot like frost caught mid-bloom. The eye in the image wasn't bloodshot. It wasn't human. Peeled wide with surgical stillness, the pupil locked into a tiny, desperate coil. Not rage. Not pleading. A precision terror.
Above the image, thick block-letter ink, still wet-looking as if it bled from somewhere internal:
BEASTBOUND IRREGULAR.
Below it, a smear of something darker. Not paint. Not ink. Brown-black and cracked like dried meat, the texture of an old wound scabbed too long beneath a shirt. Some of it had flaked off. The scent of it—copper, skin, rust—cut through the wet morning haze.
Children gathered first. They always did.
They hovered near the corners of streets, the mouths of alleys, the rotting woodsteps where gutter mold bloomed thick as fur. They lived where shadows pooled longest. A boy in scrap-bagged boots approached the image and studied it with a solemnity Ivar recognized too well. The boy's lips moved as he traced the spiral with his thumb, reverent, almost like prayer. He turned to his younger sister, a girl with one eye clouded over, and without smiling, drew the spiral onto his own eyelid.
She giggled.
Then she spit.
Not at the wall. Not at the image. But at the shadow Ivar cast.
The glob of spit landed just shy of his foot. Milky, flecked with grit. She didn't look at him after. Children didn't need to stare to understand danger. They just knew.
Ivar didn't move. Didn't speak. Didn't flinch. He watched as more came.
Not crowds. Not yet.
Trickles.
Thin men with knuckle-burned fingers. A pair of railworkers still in grimejackets. One woman with a rope-tied child across her back whose eyes stayed open despite sleep. They didn't react with horror. They didn't step back. Some stared with squinting interest. Others just drifted past, lips pressed thin, as if tasting something bitter in their thoughts.
No one tore the mark down.
"They aren't afraid of you," said a voice behind him.
He didn't startle. Just turned, slow, neck taut.
Merel stood near the alley's mouth, coat drawn close, scarf damp from the drizzle that never quite ended in Eelgrave. Her boots were gray with dust that clung to old cobblestone like breath that never faded. She looked tired in the way of people who knew what sleep could no longer fix.
"They should be," she added.
"They're waiting," Ivar replied, his voice like a stone lowered into water. "To see what I'll do next."
Merel didn't answer. Her eyes stayed on the spiral for a breath longer, then shifted—not to Ivar, but to the wall just above the image.
There: a cracked seam running crooked through the bricks. Rust bloomed along it like a slow infection. Something pulsed faintly behind the break. Not light. A pressure. Like something shifting inside old bone.
Then came the shudder.
It wasn't thunder. Not the kind that broke across the sky.
This sound came from beneath. A deep, wrong breath. A hollow exhale.
The cobblestones trembled. Only slightly. But Ivar felt it—through his boots, through the arches of his feet, through the old fractures in his heelbones that hadn't ever healed right. A sudden sense of weightlessness, just long enough to matter.
A groan followed. Metal shearing against stone.
Above them: scaffolding—a rusted frame left half-erect by city painters months ago—shuddered like something waking. Rivets popped. Bolts sheared loose. A timber beam cracked with the dry, brittle sound of bone splitting in a shallow grave.
"Move," Merel said, low.
But he already had.
Ivar stepped out from under it just as the frame gave way.
Collapse. Noise. Shrieks as bystanders jumped back. The painter's tarp that had clung above unfurled like peeled skin and slapped down across the wet ground, curling over itself in bloody folds of red and gray.
From the dust and ruin, five children exploded outward.
Not workers.
Not orphans.
Not beggars.
They moved like they knew the city better than the city knew itself. Darting in opposite directions, lean limbs flicking with practiced economy. Faces smudged but eyes alert. Not a single one cried out. Each slipped into spaces too tight for adults—under rusted carts, through twisted grates, down into hollows where rainwater pooled and memory rotted.
They weren't running in panic.
They were escaping before they were noticed.
And they would have. Clean. Gone. Forgotten.
Except someone was watching.
Further back, at the edge of a shattered column where moss grew like scabs, a figure leaned into view.
Coat patched from too many seams. Shoulders slumped where she'd rested too long against Eelgrave's bones. Her eyes didn't blink.
But they tracked.
Every child. Every breath. Every break in their pattern.
Lysa.
She moved without sound. Drifted like old smoke.
Ivar didn't turn to her. He didn't need to. Her presence changed the air.
"If you sharpen that much," she murmured, soft as breath against an open wound, "you'll start slicing things without knowing."
He said nothing. Her words weren't reproach. They weren't warning. Just weather. Something passing through him.
He looked again at the spiral. The image seemed deeper now. Hungrier. Not drawn but grown. It had texture. The edges curled slightly outward, not like damp parchment but like skin under pressure.
He reached out.
Touched it.
The surface met him.
Not paper. Not cloth. Scarred. Raised like keloid flesh. It throbbed faintly beneath his palm.
He pulled back. Stared at his fingers.
The spiral lingered. Not traced. Impressed. Warm, faintly damp, like skin not yet cooled.
"It's not paint," he muttered.
Merel, close now, frowned. "What is it, then?"
"The wound."
Her eyes narrowed. She stepped nearer, studying the wall with the focus of someone trying not to believe what they already knew.
"The mark isn't a warning," he said. "It's a path."
Then he saw it.
Another spiral.
Across the alley, faintly etched into soot-streaked stone. The soot hadn't obscured it—it had settled into the grooves, making it clearer. Not fresh. Not weathered. Just patient.
He moved.
Another. On the corner of a bent drainpipe. Chalked and nearly washed away, but still there.
Another. Scratched into brick with something thin. Bone, maybe. Or nail.
All twisted the same way. All pointed not up. Not out.
Down.
Lysa followed. Not beside him. Never beside.
She tracked his angles like prey might track a storm—just out of reach but inevitable.
"You're not the only one it marked," she said.
He didn't ask how she knew.
But he asked, "What is it?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she reached into her coat. Drew something small.
A tooth. Hollow. Pitted. It clicked softly against her palm.
She dropped it.
It struck stone, rolled.
And spiraled.
Perfect curve. Tight arc. Then stopped.
Pointing.
Toward a manhole lid half-eaten by rust.
Ivar approached. Slow. No noise.
The lid wasn't flush. Shifted recently. Smears at the edge. Not just fingerprints.
Clawmarks.
A draft slid up through the seams. Cold. Touched the underside of his jaw like an unwanted hand.
Then the sound. Not breath. Not quite.
Inhalation without lungs.
He lowered his palm.
Metal met skin.
And beneath it, the spiral pulsed.
Alive.
Calling.