He did not remember the sound of his name.
Only the sound of chains. Groaning like old bones dragged over iron. The hiss of heat rising from slag pits, whispering through vents like breath from a dying god.
They had given him a number.
Branded into his skin. A rod, red at the tip, stinking of burning will, pressed into his chest until it marked him not as a man, not as a boy, but as property. Eighty-Eight.
It was never spoken as a name. Never sung or called with care. It was spat. Sharpened. Cast off like a curse, or worse: an afterthought. A symbol of forgetting. Of submission. Of erasure.
And she—the white-haired one—they called her Eighty-Nine.
They hadn't spoken, not really, since the wagons. But he always knew where she was. Always just beyond the edge of his sight. A shadow trailing the scent of snow and frost and silence.
The slag pits had no hours. No bells. Only the rhythm of suffering.
He shoveled ash until his hands cracked and peeled, skin flaking like brittle parchment. Hauled barrels until his shoulders felt like stone barely held together by meat. His breath turned to dust. His thoughts leaked away with every bead of sweat.
But the thing beneath his chest never stopped whispering.
Not light. Not fire. Not pain.
A hunger.
It stirred whenever he faltered. Whenever the guards jeered. Whenever the branding iron hissed.
It stirred that first night, curled up on the straw mat that smelled of rot and defeat, when she sat across the cell—still, unbroken, ivory-white and watching. Watching him. Not with pity, not with curiosity, but as if she had always known.
She never asked his name. Perhaps she already knew he could not remember it.
They communicated in silence. In the language of eyes and posture. The weight of endurance. Of survival.
He dreamed of other things.
Things he should not remember, yet could not forget.
Tokyo. A train platform, evening rain glossing tiles. A boy in a cheap suit, shoes slick. A Lawson store glowing, humming. Curry bread, golden, steaming, torn in half with bare fingers. Laughter—not his, but nearby. Female. Familiar.
Then pain.
Not from the dream. From the waking.
A guard's boot to the ribs. Orders shouted in a tongue he did not know. Chains rattling. He stood because they told him to, because he had no choice—but inside, something refused.
The third night, it happened.
He collapsed mid-shift beneath the burden of a slag barrel half-full of molten ash and stone. Vision swimming with heat. A crack opened in his mind. And the thing beneath his chest awakened.
A ripple.
Not seen. Not heard. Felt.
Like a still lake quivering before a storm.
The whip came down—but never landed.
The air bent. Twisted. Chain froze midair.
Not stopped. Not broken. Unmade.
Thread by thread, it unraveled. Reality seemed to forget how to hold itself together.
The guard staggered back, pale, eyes wide. He screamed—not at Eighty-Eight—but at the silence that had replaced the world.
And then… they came for him.
Not with rage. Not with violence. Fear. Pure, raw fear.
Six men to one body, dragging him from the pits as if he had doubled in weight.
He did not fight.
But the mark on his chest pulsed.
And somewhere—far above, far inside, far beyond a world of stone and ash—a voice laughed.
Not human. Not born.
"Still dreaming, Riftborn?"
The words did not echo. They crawled. Inside. Deep. Like fingers trailing across walls he no longer remembered owning.
They locked him in the lower cells. Alone.
Stone walls weeping heat. Iron too hot to touch. Straw coarse under his back. Shirt torn open, the sigil beneath his sternum glowing faint violet—like a star half-swallowed by dusk.
He did not scream. Did not weep. Only breath trembled.
He had dreamed of trains. Now he dreamed of fire. And in that fire… something waited.
Not salvation. Not deliverance.
A voice. Ancient. Cold. Hungry.
"You do not belong to them. You belong to the wound."
He clutched at his chest. No wound to grasp. Only heat. Only memory.
Above, footsteps. Doors opening. A voice, female, sharp.
"Why isolate him?"
"You saw it, didn't you?" Another voice, male, faintly trembling.
"That wasn't magic. That wasn't soulfire. That was… wrong."
"He didn't cast it."
"Exactly."
They argued. Silence followed.
Then the cell door opened. A plate of gruel. A bowl of water. No faces. Only hands—trembling, afraid.
And later, when shadows stretched long and corridors swallowed the sound of everything else…
She came.
Eighty-Nine.
No keys. No guards. Only eyes. Gold, like fire under snow, watching from beyond the bars.
"You're not from here," she said softly.
He did not answer.
"You're not one of us."
Still silence.
"That thing inside you… it eats your pain."
He looked up.
Her face. Not kind. Not cruel. Measured. Precision honed in every flicker of eye and curl of lip.
"You don't remember your name."
He shook his head.
"I don't think it matters anymore."
She studied him. The firelight painted shadows across her features.
"It does. To me."
He furrowed his brow.
"Why?"
"Because I need to know if you are the end of us…"
A pause.
"…or our last chance."
Then she vanished.
The mark pulsed once.
Far above, beyond pits and cells, beyond branded skin and broken names, Blackstone Keep watched.
A monolith of stone and shadow. A scar upon the horizon.
And something far older than the world stirred in its sleep.
The night stretched. The stars overhead were dim, swallowed by violet haze and distant fires. The heat from the lower cells radiated upward, a constant reminder of iron and ash. Rei sat alone, knees drawn to chest, jaw tight, eyes tracking every shadow along the stone. He could feel the pulse beneath his chest, faint at first, then louder, like a drum echoing in his ribcage.
It spoke in hunger. In rhythm. In something almost like understanding.
He had tried to ignore it. Tried to ground himself in memory, in fragments of Tokyo. But the memory came in shards, fractured and jagged, each one pulling him closer to the edge of something he did not yet understand.
The smell of curry bread. The hum of the train platform. The warmth of fluorescent lights. Faces. Voices. Laughter.
Gone.
Only ash and sweat and iron remained.
He exhaled slowly, forcing the panic to stay locked behind his ribs. The beastkin—Eighty-Nine—had left him no comfort. No answers. Only questions sharp enough to cut through the haze of fatigue and despair.
And yet, in that silence, in the cold of stone and chains, a seed of clarity began to form.
The thing inside him was not mere hunger. Not mere power. It was something else entirely. Something that remembered. Something that would not forgive. Something that demanded its place in the world—even if that world had long since forgotten him.
He flexed his fingers. Wrists raw, wrists bleeding. The chains sang their song, metal against metal. But the pulse beneath his chest answered to nothing else.
It was his.
He belonged to it, and it to him.
Blackstone Keep loomed beyond the horizon. Shadows moving in its towers. Fires breathing from within. A wound waiting to open.
And he—Eighty-Eight, Riftborn, lost boy from Tokyo—would awaken.
Not yet. Not fully. But soon.
He closed his eyes.
And let the dream wait.