The woman's body hadn't bled.
It simply lay there, motionless—her limbs arranged like symbols on a forgotten altar. Her eyes were wide open, glassy, reflecting the stars above… or something beyond them.
Rin didn't look away. He never did.
Around him, the alley was dead silent. Even the rats stayed away from the bloodless mess. A dog whined somewhere in the distance, then stopped, as if reminded that it too could be undone.
He tilted his head.
"Second this month," he muttered.
He wiped the blade she had dropped—an obsidian dagger etched with foreign scripture. Not of the city. Not of this world, maybe. The glyphs writhed faintly as if trying to escape his grasp, but Rin didn't blink. He traced them with his fingertip, and they froze.
That was happening more often now.
Objects reacting. Symbols recognizing him.
"You remember me," he whispered to the blade. It hissed, then cracked down the center."Good. I'll remember you, too."
Back in the Slums — "Deadman's District"
Rin walked through the streets unnoticed—not because he was invisible, but because people refused to see him.
Children stopped playing when he passed. Dogs tucked tails. Shopkeepers suddenly "forgot" how to speak. No one robbed him. No one even dared lock eyes.
He wasn't feared like a king.He was avoided like a curse.
"That's the Wordborn," one whisperer muttered behind closed shutters."He's not real.""He's the reason Velhallow never sees spring.""I heard he can kill with a glance.""They say he doesn't have a soul."
None of them were wrong.None of them were right either.
Inside the Den of Broken Saints
The room was dark, lined with prayer bells that hadn't rung in decades.
Rin met with the Cult of the Unsaying—a group of mute fanatics who believed the world was built by words, and would end when the Final Word was spoken.
They thought Rin might be the Echo of that Final Word.
He never confirmed it.
"My enemies make mistakes," he told their leader, a one-eyed monk. "Your kind listens too well. That's your strength. And your weakness."
He offered them a single gift: the dagger from the assassin.
"A message," he said. "One they'll understand."
They bowed so low their foreheads bled against the stone floor.
Later That Night
Rin sat in the remains of an old bell tower, alone. A storm was coming, but he didn't move. He rarely did.
In his left palm, the glyphs beneath his skin glowed—just faintly, like candlelight behind bone.
They had started moving again.
Not writhing. Spelling.
A single word appeared across his skin—collapsed, jagged, not in any tongue he knew.
"Velhallow," he whispered, eyes narrowing.
The script pulsed—faster now. Urgent.
"You want me to destroy it?""Or… you're warning me?"
He laughed quietly, cold and sharp.
"Either way… I listen now."
Meanwhile… In a Tower of Gold
A council of Arch-Scribes debated in panic. Pages turned without hands. Ink boiled in wells.
One of them—an old man with copper eyes—spoke the forbidden.
"The Law of Collapse has stirred," he said. "A name we buried is walking again."
"Kael'Zar?"
"No," the man said softly. "Not yet. For now… it's just Rin. But the gods will feel him soon enough."