She walked alone.
Through forests that breathed like dying animals. Across soil too dark to be natural. Her footsteps carved not a path, but a wound — a long, slow cut through the skin of the world. No sun shone above her. No stars broke the clouds. Only the weight of her silence kept her company.
And the threads.
They curled and uncurled around her wrists, braided not by spell or ritual, but instinct — raw and red, drawn from pain deeper than memory.
They didn't obey like they used to.
They followed her mood now — not discipline, not design. Grief gave them rhythm. Wrath gave them edge.
She had tried to be patient. Had practiced the stillness drilled into her in the empire's rites. Had bowed her head, swallowed her grief, repeated the chants until they tasted like chalk and bone.
But silence had become suffocation.
And stillness had become a snare.
The Empire had taken her loyalty and used it to bury her past.
But what past? Whose?
She slowed, just for a moment — not from doubt, but recognition.
The question was not new. But now it felt heavy. Personal.
The chants, the edicts, the manuals — all spoke of witches as traitors, seducers of Threads, breakers of laws older than stone. They were the reason, she had been told, that the Empire needed to keep the Vault sealed and the noble bloodlines pure.
Witches had been the rot that nearly unraveled the world.
She'd swallowed those words once.
Believed them like breath.
Obedience had once felt like clarity.
Like safety.
Like the only way to survive.
But if that was true… why had they kept her alive?
Why let a child with witch-blood swear the imperial oath?
Why train her?
Why not burn her at the root like the rest?
The Empire had killed whole covens for less.
Yet she had been raised in the shadow of the Tower, taught their rites, beaten into loyalty until she could no longer remember when she stopped asking questions.
Maybe that was the answer.
Maybe she had lived because she'd been useful.
A witch's fire, tamed and chained, was still fire.
But now the bindings were gone.
And the questions she wasn't supposed to ask had grown fangs.
⸻
Who were the witches, truly?
Not the monsters of imperial sermons — but before.
What had they been? What had they guarded?
Were they the keepers of memory?
Or something older — something the Empire still feared?
The burned book whispered of circles and covenants. Of "bones worn like ornaments."
Was that arrogance?
Or was it remembrance?
And why, with every step she took, did it feel like the world itself was urging her to remember?
The Empire had taught her silence.
But her blood carried a voice older than obedience.
Now, the only thing she trusted was motion.
And the wrath she no longer had the strength to deny.
⸻
The threads around her wrists weren't delicate.
They weren't elegant.
They were vicious — raw and jagged, like exposed nerve.
Woven from soulstrain and scar-memory.
From the marrow of grief, not the marrow of discipline.
Every loop she cast left a mark on the world — binding trees to silence, flattening wind, turning leaves to brittle ash.
They didn't respond to words anymore.
They answered to blood.
And fury.
Reneta had always been quick to impulse, slow to reason — a trait her instructors tried to beat out of her.
But impulse was what kept her alive now.
That, and the one thing they had never taught her how to kill:
Instinct.
The burned book haunted her.
The journal of the Rootfire Circle — gone the second she opened it.
They wear our bones like ornaments…
The line had wedged behind her ribs, just beneath the heart.
She tried not to think about how easily she'd let it burn.
How badly she had wanted more.
How much of herself she'd recognized in the ashes.
The Empire had trained her not to want.
So now she needed.
Needed vengeance.
Needed clarity.
Needed the silence broken — even if she had to do it with a scream.
⸻
The first beast came from the trees.
A blur. A snarl. A shape without reason.
She didn't flinch.
Her Threads snapped outward — not from her hands, but from the sheath across her back. The sword-whip, half-drawn, half-threaded, unfurled in a blaze of ashfall — its edge traced with embers that didn't burn, but remembered.
Her aura followed, rolling out like pressure before a storm — not heat, but grief made visible.
A twist. A ripple. A cut.
She severed its spine.
The whip didn't slice.
It unmade — red-and-grey glyphlight shimmered behind it, fading into a curl of marrow-scented smoke.
The beast fell twitching.
Its mouth opened — not for a roar, but a whisper. Then dust.
The second creature lunged from the brush, its eyes burning too bright, limbs wrong-shaped, mouth stretching too wide.
It shrieked — one long, fractured note.
She flicked her wrist.
And the Thread didn't just strike.
It sang.
The whip split mid-air into a spiral of binding runes, glowing like wounds made holy. Each one pulsed with something ancestral — not anger, but command.
The forest flinched.
The sigils flared mid-swing, wrapping the creature's chest in jagged light.
Then pulled.
Bone cracked. Ribs split. Smoke bled from the breaks.
The noise wasn't a scream.
It was a confession.
⸻
The third beast watched her.
It did not leap.
It circled. Quiet. Cautious.
It recognized something even older than danger:
Conviction.
It could sense the dreadpulse riding her breath, the Thread-hunger coiling around her shoulders like a cloak.
Her Threads didn't just move anymore.
They declared.
She didn't give it a second chance.
One step. One twist of her weapon.
The carcass of the last beast swung from a tree limb, its eyes still open, etched with fading sigils that glowed like dying stars.
A warning.
I am not your prey.
I am what hunts silence.
⸻
Every movement wove a curse.
She didn't follow spells.
She remembered them — half-instinct, half-blood.
The names of forgotten rituals returned in the ache of her fingers. The way her breath changed in rhythm with the glyphs. She didn't need scrolls.
She needed pain.
A slit across her knuckle. A ritual scratch in the palm.
Pain was grounding.
Blood was memory made visible.
The Empire said pain was weakness.
But her Threads only listened when her hands trembled.
So let them tremble.
⸻
She passed stone shrines with faces turned away.
Passed trees with bark cracked from watching.
Passed roots carved with names she didn't know — but her blood did.
Still, she pressed on.
She didn't sleep.
Not fully.
Just curled beneath twisted boughs, one hand on her whipblade, Threads humming beneath her skin like buried sparks.
Sleep was for the loyal.
She was done kneeling.
But if she was done kneeling…
Why had she come here at all?
⸻
The pilgrimage had been a rite of stillness.
A test of silence.
A ritual correction, they called it — to purge "ancestral residue" from her magic. To prove she was obedient not just in action, but in memory.
And she'd accepted. Without protest.
But now, days deep, beyond the mapped trails…
She no longer knew what she was proving.
To remember?
To forget?
To kill something inside herself?
She had followed orders.
Burned relics.
Sealed tombs.
Buried names that once held hers.
So why send her to the edge of the Empire?
Alone. Unwatched.
Under skies that remembered more than they should.
Was this meant to break her?
Or reveal her?
What if they knew?
What if this wasn't punishment — but design?
What if the Empire wanted her to ask these questions?
To dig, to strain, to see what had been hidden.
And then, at the end, to kneel anyway?
Her jaw clenched.
But she didn't kneel.
She walked.
⸻
The clouds shifted.
Not with storm.
With presence.
The air tightened.
The forest leaned away.
Even the birds refused to speak.
Then — she saw it.
The twin-rooted tree.
It didn't just stand.
It loomed.
Its trunks spiraled upward, fused like old bones trying to forget their separation. Bark veined with ancient sigils glowed faintly beneath rot and moss.
No grass grew near it.
No animal stepped close.
The soil remembered.
So did she.
She pressed her palm to its bark.
It pulsed beneath her fingers — like blood, like a scream caught in stone.
And then it opened.
⸻
Between the roots, a passage yawned — carved into the dark.
Stone steps twisted down into the earth, lit by glyphs that flickered like memory refusing to die.
The scent of myrrh and rot rose — sacred and wrong, like a temple where something holy had starved.
She stepped forward.
And then — a voice.
Not in her ears.
In her chest.
So quick to tear the seal…
So slow to ask who placed it.
She froze.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
"I know that voice," she whispered.
It said nothing.
But the laughter returned. Low. Cold. Familiar.
Not cruel — amused.
Come see what your Empire feared, child.
Come see what it buried beneath the bones of witches.
You are not the first to walk in wrath.
Her grip on the whipblade tightened.
Her Threads flared — not just as weapons, but marks of inheritance. Sigils bloomed along her arms, crimson and ash-grey.
She didn't summon them.
They came.
She didn't need permission.
Only purpose.
⸻
She stepped beneath the tree's roots.
And the forest — ancient, wounded, watching —
Held its breath.